Tier-y Blues: Langston Hughes’s Poetics of Blackness

• Thesis title in Czech: Rozmanité Blues: Poetika Langstona Hughese
• Thesis title in English: Tier-y Blues: Langston Hughes’s Poetics of Blackness
• Key words: New Negro|Harlemská renesance|afroamerická komunita|afroamerická literatura|afroamerická poezie|jazz|blues|rasismus|segregace|demokracie|literární modernismus|básnická forma
• English key words: New Negro|Harlem Renaissance|African American community|African American literature|African American poetry|jazz|blues|racism|segregation|democracy|literary modernism|poetic form
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2020/2021
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: David Lee Robbins, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 09.06.2021
• Date of assignment: 09.06.2021
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 30.06.2021
• Date and time of defence: 08.09.2021 10:30
• Date of electronic submission: 15.08.2021
• Date of proceeded defence: 08.09.2021
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Pavla Veselá, Ph.D.

Guidelines

This thesis aims to analyse Langston Hughes’ poetic body of work from his first collection
The Weary Blues (1926) to Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) with particular regard to the black subject’s presence within the poems, and it’s relation to the New Negro Movement. In the times of the Harlem Renaissance, authors and other artists created a new sense of Afro-American consciousness. Therefore, my analysis will be partly based on the theoretical writings of his and his peers’ which are trying to capture the transformation of the Afro-American sensibility in the first half of the 20th century. Another objective is to recognise the disillusionment with the development and achievements and/or failures of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance in Hughes’ writing. The choice to analyse his works from the 1920s to the 1940s reflects the focus of this thesis – the works mentioned above were published during and several years after the Harlem Renaissance, and therefore will allow comparative exploration, collectively and on a case-by-case basis.

In “200 Years of Afro-American Poetry”, Hughes writes that thought the black poetry often
varied structurally, the themes stay the same, and it is most natural that almost every poet of
colour is a protest poet as well. Thus, the thesis will be thematically oriented – I’ve chosen
four recurring themes in Hughes’ poetry: 1) African American experience in America; 2) black community; 3) jazz; and 4) blues (these two latter parts will be treated marginally also as regards artistic form). I will research where, and in which forms, these themes occur in the defined range of Hughes’ work; in other words, the aim is not only to trace the Afro-American identity, the “Negro idioms and flavor”, but also to contextualise the development of that consciousness. One chapter will be dedicated to each of these topics, I will consider dividing them into subchapters as I make progress with the writing itself. The introductory chapter will be concerned with Hughes’ views on black art: what black art means for him in terms of aesthetics and politics, etc.; but also where his views fit in the tradition of African-American writing and in the opinion-spectrum of the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance. For the sake of theoretical background (mostly aesthetics, but occasionally historical matters), I will use his two autobiographies, mostly The Big Sea. If my hypothesis holds, it will be quite interesting to observe how Hughes’s changing opinions are reflected in his verse.

References

Writings I would like to draw, and, where possible, build on:
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989.
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Hutchinson, George ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Locke, Alain ed. The New Negro. New York: Antheneum, 1992.
Napier, Winston ed. African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: New York
University Press, 2000.
Lowney, John. Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of
Black Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.
Miller, Baxter R. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2006.
Soto, Michael. Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African-American
Identity, and Literary Form. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.