Modern Language Association

LHS at the 124th Annual MLA Convention in 2008

 

Abstracts for the Langston Hughes Society Modern Language Association Panels
San Francisco, CA

PANEL I (Saturday, December 27, 2008, 3:30 - 4:45 p.m., Hilton, San Francisco)
Langston Hughes, American Intellectuals, and the Loss of Civil Liberties in
the McCarthy Era: National Repercussions

Program arranged by the Langston Hughes Society

Presiding: Dolan Hubbard, Morgan State Univ.

1. "Langston Hughes's 'Literary Sharecropping' during the Cold War," Sharynn Owens Etheridge, Claflin Univ.

2. "American Hysteria, Civil Liberties, and the Literary Left: Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry,"
Kara Fontenot, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

3. "Hughes's Scottsboro Literature: Toward Socialist Postraciality," Benjamin T. Foster, Southern Illinois Univ.

4. "Langston Hughes and the High Cost of Free Speech," Renita Lorden, Los Angeles, California

For copies of abstracts, visit www.langstonhughessociety.org.


PANEL II (Sunday, December 28, 2008, 3:30 - 4:45 p.m., Hilton San Francisco)
Langston Hughes, American Intellectuals, and the Loss of Civil Liberties in
the McCarthy Era: Global Dimensions

Program arranged by the Langston Hughes Society

Presiding: Leonard Slade, SUNY, Albany

1. "The Spanish Civil War, Race, and the McCarthy Era in the Poetry of Langston Hughes,"
Char Prieto, California State Univ., Chico

2. "'Spies and Spiders': Langston Hughes, Agnes Smedley, and the Cold War in Asia,"
Etsuko Taketani, Univ. of Tsukuba

3. "Standing Together to Face Giants: African Diaspora Culture and the Cold War,"
Cedric Tolliver, Univ. of Pennsylvania

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Langston Hughes’s “Literary Sharecropping” during the Cold War
Sharynn Owens Etheridge, Ph. D.

During the period of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes espoused racial pride and believed that assimilation would solve the race problem in America; however, after the 1929 Great Depression, he searched for an alternative ideology that would reconcile the socio-economic issues and bring racial harmony. As a result, Hughes wrote much of what the literature labels as radical poetry during the period from 1932 to 1938. While these works have received scant attention, my premise is that these poems and some prose outline how Hughes explores and outlines an alternative way to grapple with racial issues in America and beyond its borders. By moving from individual racial issues to the larger arena of collective action by the masses, Hughes believed that this stance would bring salvation to all peoples. While Hughes’s poetics changed, it should be mentioned that Hughes never became a member of the Communist Party as did contemporaries W. E. B. Du Bois and Claude McKay.

 

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American Hysteria, Civil Liberties and the Literary Left: Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry
Kara Fontenot

Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry are remembered not only as canonical black American writers but also as members of the 1950s Literary Left. Both were socialists and activists who advanced the campaign for civil rights and social justice during the era of McCarthyism despite intense artistic and political repression. The connection between two writers is obvious due to the Raisin in the Sun/“Harlem” connection (originally The Crystal Stair/“Mother to Son” connection). My paper will position Hughes as predecessor of Hansberry in a political tradition that combines civil rights activism, socialism and literary production to combat denial of civil liberties. I will examine and compare the writers’ journalistic and literary reactions to the denial of American civil liberties in the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare during the 1940s and 1950s.

Twenty-nine years older than Hansberry, Hughes has a history of radical activism that was well-established when Hansberry was still a child. Much of Hughes’s early poetry reflects socialist themes and was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper. In 1932, Hughes journeyed to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting racial inequality in the United States. While the film failed, it allowed Hughes to travel extensively in the USSR during the years Communism and socialism became increasingly popular with the American left. No evidence of Hughes’s membership in the CPUSA exists, but Hughes had close affiliation with Communist-led organizations such as John Reed clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. In 1940, Hughes joined the American Peace Mobilization to protest US involvement in WWII due to his greater concern for the struggle for civil rights in the US although he eventually acknowledged a link between US participation in WWII and the advancement of African-Americans and began to support US involvement. In 1953, during the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Hughes was called before the HUAC committee to answer to charges of Communism as a result of his political activism. It was also in the early 1950s that Hansberry, for whom Hughes’s civil rights activism, socialism and literary production had been an inspiration, assumed an increasingly radical political activism as a reaction to protest denial of civil liberties.

Hansberry grew up in black family heavily invested in civil rights activism. During her early childhood, her family relocated into a hostile white Chicago neighborhood to protest restrictive housing covenants, which became illegal in 1940 when her father and the NAACP legal team won the U.S. Supreme Court decision (Hansberry v. Lee). However, Hansberry’s history as a member of the Literary Left began during her college years at University of Wisconsin in the late 1940s. She was a member of a socialist youth organization, the Labor Youth League (LYL) and became co-editor of the League’s magazine, New Challenge. In 1950, during the height of McCarthyism, she moved to New York City and became the youngest member of the staff at Paul Robeson’s Freedom magazine. Within a year she was promoted from staff writer to associate editor. In 1952, she attended an international peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay in lieu of Robeson, whose passport had been revoked by the U.S. State Dept in retribution for his own leftist activism. In 1953, Hansberry resigned from full-time writing at Freedom to concentrate on her literary work and completed Raisin in the Sun in 1957. Hansberry remained an active member of the Literary Left until her early death of cancer at 34 years of age in 1965.

Although Hughes outlived Hansberry by two years, he was her predecessor in a socialist and activist literary tradition in which both writers continued throughout the 1950s, resisting the artistic and political repression of McCarthyism. I will construct Hughes’s presence on the Literary Left through readings of his poetry and prose, such as the pieces collected by Faith Berry in Good Morning Revolution (expanded 1992 version) and the Chicago Defender essays collected by Christopher C. De Santis (1995) as well as a close reading of the transcript of his 1953 HUAC hearing. I will construct Hansberry’s presence on the Literary Left through readings of her Freedom magazine articles (1951-55), readings of the activist writings, speeches and memoirs collected in To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969) by her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, and a reading of Raisin in the Sun (1957). I will discuss the importance of these writers to the Literary Left in the historical context of American intellectual activity in the 1940s and 1950s, using texts such as Richard H. Pells’s The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (1985) and Alan M. Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (2002).

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Call For Papers: LHS at the 124th Annual MLA Convention in 2008
Benjamin T Foster
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale
Department of English

Hughes’ Scottsboro Literature: Toward Socialist Post-Raciality
Through the 1930s Langston Hughes began to reformulate his understanding of race as a manifestation of the discomforts with difference, and he began to see the material problems of race as essentially socio-economic. Quite different from his 1920s work, Hughes’ writing in the 1930s grasps an understanding of race that may be best defined as socialist and post-race. His conceptions at the time were more specifically tied to his communist sympathies, which allowed him to take a more international and therefore a greater multicultural stance in his political and literary leanings. He believed it was therefore through economic justice that blacks and whites could begin to solve problems of race in America.

Hughes’ aesthetic shift in the 1930s was in line with a dramatic change in the Communist Party USA’s focus on African American rights in the late 1920s. T.H. Watkins’ The Great Depression: America in the 1930s offers a narrative of African American’s new found support. In the 1920s the NAACP began to “soften” their once radical stance toward civil rights in America. Meanwhile the CPUSA noticed the largely untapped political power of African Americans. The party leader, Earl Bowden commented, “‘we still have something less than 1,000 Negro members in our Party’” . The new League of Struggle for Negro Rights was therefore created by the CPUSA to draw in more African American members. For those who were disenfranchised by the NAACP’s new approach to racial inequality, they found a new ideological ally in the CPUSA.

While Hughes was uncomfortable with being identified as a communist, communism’s internationalist approach and democratic view of race appealed to Hughes’ intellectual transformation. He would later jettison his direct affiliation with the communist party, especially during the HUAC hearings in congress, but much of the lessons he learned during the time endured. He began to hold a more egalitarian view of all races and he paid more attention to the injustices forced upon all people even though his focus remained on African Americans.

This paper will address the above claims about Hughes’ shift to communism and post-racial thought by examining his stances on race and social justice in his Scottsboro works presented in his poems and play about the Scottsboro trials. As these items were used as the primary evidence in the HUAC hearings, this paper will provide background as to why McCarthy unjustly targeted Hughes.

Biographical Information: Benjamin T Foster is a PhD student in twentieth-century African-American Literature at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. His previous presentation at the African American Literature and Culture Symposium was entitled “Postmodern History and Race in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” He is currently researching conceptions of history and memory in the contemporary African American novel.

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The Spanish Civil War, Race and the McCarthy Era in the Poetry of Langston Hughes
Char Prieto

This paper is centered in a collection of poems about the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) written by Langston Hughes in Spain. “The Song of Spain”, “Dear Folks at Home,” “Love Letter From Spain,” and “Dear Brother at Home” are some of the works that Hughes wrote as an international Brigade in Spain. In these verses, the writer notes that in Franco, Germany and Italy’s side are the deluded Moors of North Africa, oppressed colonial soldiers of color being used by Fascism in Spain to help conquer Europe. Throughout his war journey, Hughes observed the presence of blacks, whether as entertainers in European cities or as soldiers on the battlefront in Spain. Hughes witnessed the ways in which “race” is manufactured for devastating nationalist ends. Franco and the Spanish fascists, for instance, mobilized African Moors under the banner of “Long Live Spain” In one of Hughes poems, “Letter from Spain” (1937), a poem Hughes wrote while visiting the war-torn country, he captures the tragic irony of a Moroccan soldier fighting for Spanish fascists when, in the voice of a black American International Brigade soldier, he writes: "We captured a wounded Moor today. / He was just as dark as me. / I said, Boy, what you been doin' here / Fighting against the free?" (201).
The poems of Langston Hughes will be studied through “race” or what Etienne Balibar calls that “fictive ethnicity around which [nationalism] is organized” (49). His works are coverage of the Spanish Civil War, a tragic report of the tragedy of conscripted North African Moors and the heroic efforts of the Lincoln Brigade fighting fascism, but also about race and the life of the Negroes in Europe and in the United States. These poems highlight the importance of race in the United States when he comes back from Spain. As a Negro communist writer, Hughes is subject to oppression under capitalism, segregation, racist violence, and super-exploitation, especially in the McCarthy era.

Char Prieto is a Professor of Spanish in California State University, Chico. PhD. in Spanish literature from Purdue University, Indiana. Born in Spain, educated in Paris, London and Barcelona she now lives in the USA. Professor Prieto's expertise and research interests are twentieth century Spanish women novel and historical new millennium narrative, Contemporary Hispanic Women Writers, Literature and Representations of Spanish Civil War, Transition and Historical Memory in Post Franco Spain and Democracy, Exile Literature, Narrative Constructions and Representations of Memory, Mass Graves in the Hispanic World and the International Brigades.

She has authored the following books:

-Four Decades Four Authors about Spanish life and literature of four Spanish women writers under the Franco’s dictatorship and Bahktinian theory.

-No More the Weaker Sex: Spanish Women Writers in the New Millennium. This book is a collection of essays and original interviews on six prominent contemporary Spanish women writers and their literary work.

-Entre dos mundos. Between Two Worlds. A book of personal poems, some in Spanish and others in English, about her own experiences between two continents, Europe and America.

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“Spies and Spiders”:
Langston Hughes, Agnes Smedley, and the Cold War in Asia
Etsuko Taketani

In this paper, I explore the implications of the writings of Langston Hughes and the radical writer Agnes Smedley on Asia, as well as of Hughes and Smedley’s friendship (or comradeship), in the transpacific context of the Cold War. As I aim to show, the second volume of Hughes’s autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander—in which Hughes relates how he was made out to be a Soviet spy in Japan, and how he was ensnared in the secret police net that prewar Japan had cast over Asia to contain communism—is more than a story of a wanderlust-inspired encounter with a colored fascist nation in Asia. While I Wonder As I Wander muted Hughes’s sympathies for communism in view of the McCarthy era and its civil-liberties abuses, the memoir significantly engages and commits to public memory Asia under the emergent fascism and communism of the 1930, an Asia that eerily shaped the Cold War world blueprint of the 1950s.

Published in 1956, three years after Hughes was summoned to testify before McCarthy’s subcommittee on subversive activities, I Wonder As I Wander includes his recollections of the year that he spent in the USSR and his brief subsequent sojourn in Japan. This memoir of Hughes’s radical past, with its troubled ending (which is at once a non-ending, with Hughes’s insistent declaration, “My world will not end”), features the reunion of two “fellow travelers,” as they might have been characterized, Hughes and his Japanese comrade Seki Sano who had arranged his trip to Japan. As described in I Wonder As I Wander, Hughes, fresh from Moscow, became a focus of fascist Japan’s anticommunist paranoia: the poet laureate of Harlem was shadowed around Tokyo and Shanghai, interrogated for six hours by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board on suspicion of being a Soviet spy, then ignominiously expelled from Japan. Two decades later, while writing his memoir of these very events, Hughes again suffered an ordeal of anticommunist fervor at the hands not only of McCarthy, but more portentously of General Douglas MacArthur and his chief of intelligence, Major Charles A. Willoughby (whom the general described as “my lovable fascist”), in American-occupied postwar Japan.

The memories of Hughes’s Moscow/Shanghai/Tokyo days described in I Wonder As I Wander resonated in the contemporary historical moment in which the memoir appeared, a time of fear and suspicion of Soviet espionage. This climate was fueled by MacArthur’s intelligence reports on the Soviet spymaster Richard Sorge and his ring, which had been active when Hughes visited Asia in the 1930s. The Sorge reports, based on prewar Japanese police records confiscated by the U.S. occupation authorities, shook the American nation, not least because they named Smedley, a radical writer and Hughes’s friend, as both a principal member of the ring and an American “traitor” who was undermining the war against communism in Asia and enabling communism to overrun China—a charge with repercussions that eventually extended to Hughes. After Smedley died in 1951, while under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Willoughby published a book of muckraking innuendo entitled Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring (1952), which implied that Hughes was implicated in the spy ring by quoting his poem “Goodbye Christ” to demonstrate his and Smedley’s shared communist sympathies. Hughes practically begged the publisher E. P. Dutton not to quote his poem in Willoughby’s book, but to no avail. A year later Hughes was summoned to appear before McCarthy’s subcommittee.

Based on archival work on the records of the Japanese police, the Shanghai Municipal Police, the US State Department, the CIA, and the FBI, I will retrace Hughes’s travel in Asia as described in I Wonder As I Wander and discuss how his memoir engages Asia that shaped the Cold War world blueprint of the 1950s.

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Cedric Tolliver, Ph.D. Candidate
Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania
ctollive@sas.upenn.edu

Application for 2008 MLA Convention (San Francisco)
Panel: Langston Hughes, American Intellectuals, and the Loss of Civil Liberties in the Mc¬Carthy Era.
Contact: Dellita Martin-Ogunsola (dellita@ uab .edu).

“Standing Together to Face Giants: African Diasporic Culture and the Cold War”
In my proposed paper, I will focus on the period immediately following World War II, and in particular on the McCarthy Era, as permanently altering the relationship between race and class in African diasporic cultural politics. While Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson being brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities are glaring examples, I want to suggest that Richard Wright’s tenuous exile in Paris, James Baldwin’s peregrinations through Europe and Asia, and Ralph Ellison’s distancing himself from his beginnings as a writer for Leftist periodicals, were all effects of the chill that the Cold War cast over African diasporic cultural life. Not concerned with American citizens alone, the McCarthy dragnet also ensnared the Trinidadian revolutionary C.L.R. James and thus altered the course of African diasporic cultural history.
This paper will attempt to read Hughes’ late writings, particularly his Simple stories, as part of a diasporic conversation taking place within and against the confined space of the United States during the height of Cold War hysteria. Alongside Hughes, I propose a reading of C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953) and Paul Robeson’s Here I Stand (1958), two texts that highlight the intense negotiation of boundaries and allegiances to race, class, and nation that beset African diasporic cultural producers during this period. Ultimately, I want to present these texts’ refusal of Cold War binaries and of the separation of race and class as forging an independent path for African diasporic culture, which would attain its full expression in the cataclysmic events of the sixties.

Biography
Cedric is completing his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly interests include Africana literary and intellectual history, Francophone studies and postcolonial literary theory. His dissertation is entitled "Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: Transnational and Diasporic?Cosmopolitan Culture in the African Americas, 1947-1961.” This work aims to put the life and work of writers such as Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, and Aimé Césaire in the context of the transnational, diasporic, and cosmopolitan culture that they built in the wake of World War II.