Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes During the Cold War1

College Literature, Spring 2006 by Scott, Jonathan

As Chuck D stresses, the opportunity to participate in the mass production of popular art has worked insidiously against its historic creators by "steering youth culture to focus goals on only that of being an athlete or entertainer." By saturating the U.S. media with affirmations of one-sided conceptions of blackness, the task of regulating all the imaginary social relations needed to continue racial oppression in U.S. society has been made doubly easy. According to the terms laid out by Chuck D, the pillars of the American national-popular are four white racist tropes, reinvented as the current conjuncture requires: 1) African American contentedness (singing); 2) fear of, and lust for, blackness (rapping); 3) loyal and patriotic ex-slaves (dancing); and 4) African American incompetence and buffoonery (telling jokes and acting). If DuBois' concept of Black America's "three gifts"-the gifts of story and song, of sweat and brawn, and of cheer (1969,275)-is kept in mind, the missing literary trope here is transparent: "sweat and brawn," or labor power. The creative path through which African American labor could be made into a new archetype, while at the same time undermining the reining four, would open up new creative methods for all American writers. As Ishmael Reed nicely put it in his Introduction to 19 Necromancers from Now,

the inability of some students to "understand" works written by AfroAmerican authors is traceable to an inability to understand the American experience as rooted in slang, dialect, vernacular, argot, and all of the other put-down terms the [English department] faculty uses for those who have the gall to deviate from the true and proper way of English. (Reed 1970, x)

Among those forms that Reed believes "deviate" from what is taught in the American academy are detective novels and dime-store westerns, a point that helps illuminate boldly the specific direction of Hughes s interventions in the 50s. In a phrase, the liberation of American literature, to borrow the tide of V. F. Calverton's work of literary history and criticism from the 1930s, must come through the popular in order for artistic autonomy to become possible in U.S. society. For Hughes, the path of the "popular" went directly through young people.

Hughes's Rhythm Writing Workshops: Dynamic Conformism

"There is no rhythm in the world without movement" is how Hughes opens The First Book of Rhythms, the second of six children's books he wrote for Franklin Watts during the 50s and 60s. The first, The First Book of Negroes, had been criticized by Negro intellectuals for leaving out any mention of DuBois or Paul Robeson. In 1965, however, he explained the circumstances that he had faced at the time:

It was at the height of the McCarthy Red baiting era, and publishers had to go out of their way to keep books, particularly children's books, from being attacked, as well as schools and libraries that might purchase books. . . . It was impossible at that time to get anything into children's books about either Dr. DuBois or Paul Robeson. (Rampersad 1988, 230-31)