| Journal of American Studies |
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| Langston Hughes: Fringe Modernism, Identity and Defying the Interrogator-Witch Hunter ... Two books published recently – Vera M. Kutzinski’s The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (2012) and David E. Chinitz’s Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes – probe deeper into the oeuvre of Hughes in two different, albeit complementary, approaches. The books make new hay in Hughes scholarship by investigating his position with regard to “fringe modernism” and analysing his testimony before the McCarthy subcommittee, thus filling in a critical gap in this scholarship. Kutzinski’s The Worlds of Langston Hughes is written from a critical standpoint informed by translation studies, modernism and the African diaspora, in which translation is a deeply imbricate practice. Kutzinski interrogates the cultural and political forces that shaped translations of and by Hughes, while simultaneously examining the challenges posed by him and his translators in producing these works. She demonstrates the crucial role played by such translations and juxtaposes Hughes’s poetry with other more celebrated modernist writers to show that his poems were, to a large extent, painted by the same brush. She lays much emphasis on cities that served as a backdrop to Hughes’s different encounters and contributed to his forging a modernist consciousness. Kutzinski finally extrapolates her interpretation of Hughes’s McCarthy hearings as an example of mistranslation. Chinitz’s Which Sin to Bear?, which was published one year after Kutzinski’s book, also examines the same hearings but from the perspective of ethical compromise or noncompromise. At stake in Which Sin to Bear? is the question whether Hughes was really able to stand his ground ethically or whether he yielded by deciding to ride the wave instead of standing up to the storm. Chinitz’s book is mainly concerned with Hughes’s battle with identity and art and focusses on problematic notions of authenticity and compromise in his career. This volume explores the long road that Hughes had to take amid a painful labyrinth of oppressing structures of race and class. Chinitz closely examines Hughes’s blues poetry and his innovative experimentation that always aimed at realizing his vision of his understanding of racial authenticity. He also dives into the notion of compromise and traces Hughes’s ambivalent critique of Booker T. Washington as an endeavour by which to better comprehend the former’s stance towards compromise. The arguments in both books attempt to attain a critical purchase on Hughes’s legacy by seeing him from different angles and by contextualizing his life and works in new topographies.... In Which Sin to Bear? Chinitz states from the beginning that his focus “is neither biographical nor psychological, but literary-critical and cultural,” a focus which he scrupulously realizes in his book (3). Over his long career, Hughes had to wrestle with scores of fetters arising from race, poverty, politics and culture, while striving to retain his art as the distinguished voice of the ordinary black man in America. Hughes’s measures of survival inevitably had to include identity issues, professional predicaments and compromising ethical stances of various kinds. The notion of authentic blackness had long been closely related to Hughes, but it was not an inherent gift, as Chinitz argues; it was something that he worked quite hard to achieve. Hughes helped in constituting and reconstituting black authenticity by shifting many of its grounds, and his scope of black life was never exclusionary. Chinitz acknowledges that Hughes had to make many compromises which remain difficult to judge. He undertakes the hard mission by averring that “how Hughes felt about the incursion of moral compromise into his life . . . can only be extracted, pieced together, from his writings on related subjects” (6). Hughes certainly left many porous boundaries for his scholars to outline, and Chinitz takes up the challenge. The first chapter, in order to come to grips with debates surrounding constructions of black authenticity, traces the diligent journey on which Hughes embarked in his early stages and which played a fundamental role in his forging of his identity and art, where authenticity “is not a matter of ontology but representation” (11). In Hughes’s case as an African American writer, authenticity is related to black folklore, the blues and Marxist ideologies. Chinitz argues that Hughes achieved authenticity according to his own definition. In addition to his blues poetry, Hughes authenticated himself and his constructions of blackness by aligning himself with his black subjects since he was never a member of the working class. He also learnt to master the South as he had always been a northerner who powerfully understood the extent to which an authentic blackness was “partly a matter of geography” (31). The second chapter examines his technical experimentation to mirror these constructions of black authenticity by looking at his use of “persona, blues poetry, and dialect” (45). Hughes’s authenticity was not limited by static folk roots; it embraced urban and modern aspects of black life. Chapter 3 focusses on Hughes’s blues poetry as a performance of authenticity. For Hughes, the blues spirit catches the authentic moment by providing a “compensatory expression of conflicting feelings” (69). By manipulating coherent structures and measured syntax, Hughes succeeds in avoiding poeticizing the blues and captures the musical performance in language. The fourth chapter shifts the focus to what Chinitz oxymoronically calls “the ethics of compromise.” Throughout his long career, Hughes had to concede to making ends meet by accepting white patronage, denying certain political inclinations, yielding to his publishers, writing commercial pieces or cooperating with the infamous McCarthy Senate subcommittee. Hughes’s actions remain ambivalent, for “Hughes was an intensely private person, and his autobiographies often encode his thoughts and feelings in seemingly innocuous anecdotes” (88). Chinitz relates this ambivalence to Hughes’s shift from radical socialism to left liberalism in the 1950s. The fifth chapter analyses Hughes’s testimony at the closed session before McCarthy’s subcommittee, which was first declassified in 2003. Hughes’s answers waver between straightforwardness and manoeuvring as, taking “refuge behind the intricacy of the literary work and the complex relation of author to creation, he | sought to conceal his own views” (117). Chinitz examines the notion of “cooperation” from different perspectives by delineating how it was seen as both heroic for people who tried to be prudent and unheroic for others who believed in confrontation, especially in relation to Hughes’s “cooperative” testimony. The last chapter takes compromise a step further by introducing Booker T. Washington. It draws on Hughes’s equally ambivalent judgement of Washington, who is usually positioned as emblematic of compromise in African American history. Various examples of Hughes’s ambivalent writings are provided and Washington eventually emerges from his body of work as “a ‘tragic’ figure because he was at once sympathetic and doomed” (175). Chinitz provides his readers with cogent close readings, nuanced analyses, and comprehensive notes. His book nails home its themes and perfectly fulfils its titular promise of depicting authenticity and compromise. The argument retains an obvious coherence. Chinitz adopts a transnational framework that challenges approaches that have typically restricted assessments of Hughes by focussing too narrowly on racial authenticity or his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” as his blueprint for the issue of racial authenticity. The argument is further enriched by examining the less-looked-at writings of Hughes, mainly his journalistic prose. Christopher De Santis’s “The Essayistic Vision of Langston Hughes” in Montage of A Dream draws attention to Hughes’s essays from the 1930s until his death. However, De Santis does not discuss Jesse B. Semple/Simple, which appeared in 1943 as a weekly column for the Chicago Defender. Chinitz fills in this gap and thoroughly investigates both characters featured in this column: Simple the black bartender and his foil the white interlocutor, showing how both have the potential to act as Hughes’s mouthpiece and voice his opinions, especially during the turmoil of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. The two chapters on the blues poetry of Hughes are also a great addition. The reading of Hughes’s experimenting techniques with the blues offers new and revisionary scholarship on his contribution to the genre. Stephen Tracy’s groundbreaking Langston Hughes and the Blues, first published in 1988, and republished in 2001 with a new introduction, lays the emphasis on folkloric and musical contexts. Tracy, as a blues musician, adopts a folkloristic approach in his interpretation of Hughes’s blues poetry. He asserts that Hughes’s target was to be authentic in employing the genre as an American art least tinged by African and European influences. Chinitz’s analysis has much to add to this point; he also stresses the notion of authenticity but from another viewpoint. Hughes’s blues poetry is read as a technical experimentation that seeks to reestablish the foundations of black authenticity in order to embrace the urban and the modern instead of focussing solely on the rural South. Chinitz gives brilliant close readings of the blues poems and highlights Hughes’s poetic craft. Through avoiding syntactic closures, injecting elements of performance, carefully placing the line breaks, and employing syncopation to complicate the rhythm, in addition to a nuanced revival of black dialect, Hughes not only creates racial authenticity, but also performs it. An interdisciplinary tour de force, scholars of African American poetry, literary criticism, history and the blues will find Chinitz’s book profoundly illuminating and very informative. In an exemplary study with so many points of strength, there is only one shortcoming which is worth mentioning. Chapter 5 argues that Hughes’s adoption of the Popular Front–left liberalism discourse was a sudden shift in his line of thought and not a betrayal as it had been seen by some of his critics and even friends. Chinitz bases his notion upon the fact that Hughes realized that this discourse would deliver his message of seeking social justice and obliterating racial discrimination better than communist rhetoric. Being contextualized within the framework of compromise, Chinitz’s defence of Hughes lacks conviction, for it is greatly undermined by the very examples he cites in chapter 4 as evidence of Hughes’s compromise, upon which Chinitz comments, “Hughes compromised expediently, and consciously so” (87). Other examples provided as proof of Hughes’s ambivalence, particularly from his testimony before McCarthy’s subcommittee, actually exhibit compromise more than ambivalence. But Hughes definitely left many greyish zones that raise a host of questions. In The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (2000), Susan Duffy entertains the possibility that the real compromise by Hughes was joining the radical socialists in the ¨p¨x¨r¨os to sustain his writing career, since communism seemed then to have been in the air. Chinitz’s argument would have been more persuasive if he had engaged with Duffy and her reading of Hughes’s inclination. But Hughes’s testimony as analysed in Chinitz’s book captures Hughes in a stoop-without-conquering situation in which he was willing to turn his back against his previous beliefs, works and comrades so long as he got cleared by his interrogators and saved his literary career. Despite their shortcomings, The Worlds of Langston Hughes and Which Sin to Bear? are daunting reads and they fill in a lacuna in the reappraisal of his works. The new readings adumbrate Hughes’s position in “fringe modernism” and his experience in the treacherous terrains of politics in the McCarthy era. They set up a strong foundation for future readings of Hughes’s hearings which can help in solving many of the puzzles related to Hughes’s ambiguous choices. They raise important questions for future research concerning Hughes’s own understanding of racial authenticity, his true stance towards compromise, and his modernist contribution in poetry. The basic premises of the two books are well organized and provide valuable textual exegeses for their readers. Both books suggest that a new undertaking of a critical reassessment of Hughes’s life and works is imperative. The arguments in both works are thought-provoking; they generate myriad discussions, prompt a great deal of debate and call for further critical review concerning Hughes as an American, not only an African American, writer. The books are commendable scholarly achievements that effectively add to the existing huge literature on Hughes and aver that Hughes’s life and works are not an outworn tale. Yomna Saber | |||