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Passing Langston Hughes: Exploring Identity, Race, and the Illusion of Belonging
Langston Hughes, a titan of the Harlem Renaissance, didn't just write about the Black experience; he lived it, breathing life into characters grappling with complex realities. While he didn't pen a single work explicitly titled "Passing," his oeuvre subtly yet powerfully explores the agonizing theme of racial passing, a concept that resonated deeply within the societal fabric of his time and continues to hold relevance today. This blog post delves into how Hughes masterfully weaves this delicate and fraught subject into his narratives, exploring the psychological toll, societal pressures, and ultimately, the elusive nature of true belonging. We will examine specific examples from his poetry and prose to illuminate his nuanced approach to this challenging topic.
H2: The Weight of Double Consciousness: Internal Conflict in Hughes' Work
W.E.B. Du Bois' concept of "double consciousness," the feeling of always looking at oneself through the eyes of a prejudiced other, is central to understanding the experience of passing in Hughes' work. His characters, often caught between two worlds, experience a profound internal conflict. They grapple with the constant negotiation of identity, forced to navigate a treacherous terrain where authenticity is sacrificed for survival or social advancement. This inner turmoil isn't simply a matter of choosing one identity over another; it's a constant, exhausting balancing act, fraught with self-doubt and a sense of profound alienation. Hughes subtly reveals this internal struggle through the use of symbolism, understated language, and evocative imagery, leaving the reader to grapple with the implications of the characters' choices.
H2: The Illusion of Acceptance: Social Pressures and the Masks We Wear
Hughes' works subtly showcase the societal pressures that propelled individuals towards passing. The allure of acceptance within the dominant white society, the escape from the pervasive racism of the Jim Crow South, and the potential for economic advancement were powerful motivators. However, this "acceptance" was often illusory, a fragile façade masking a deep-seated sense of unease and the constant fear of exposure. The characters' choices, often presented with a sense of tragic irony, highlight the limitations of escaping one's identity and the ultimate impossibility of true assimilation. Hughes didn't shy away from depicting the ethical complexities of this decision, leaving the moral judgment to the reader.
H3: Examples in Hughes' Poetry and Prose
While not explicitly about passing, poems like "I, Too, Sing America" hint at the desire for inclusion and the struggle against societal exclusion. The poem's subtle defiance hints at the internal struggle of a character who yearns to claim their rightful place, even while facing systemic oppression. In his prose, the subtle hints at characters living "double lives" can be seen as reflecting this complex reality, where appearances mask deep-seated feelings of dispossession and alienation. The characters often occupy a liminal space, never truly belonging in either world, always caught between two identities.
H2: The Unattainable Dream: The Limitations of Passing
Hughes' exploration of passing isn't a celebration of escape. Instead, it's a poignant exploration of its limitations. His characters often find that the price of passing is too high, the loss of cultural identity and community too significant. The very act of denying one's heritage creates an existential void, a sense of rootlessness that profoundly impacts their sense of self. This underscores a central theme in Hughes' work: the significance of embracing one's heritage and the vital importance of community.
H2: Beyond the Binary: Exploring Nuances of Identity
Hughes' work transcends a simple binary understanding of passing. It explores the complexities of identity formation within a racially charged society. His characters are not simply "passing" or "not passing"; they inhabit a spectrum of experiences, making difficult choices under duress and grappling with the ever-shifting boundaries of race and belonging. This nuanced approach highlights the limitations of simplistic narratives and the multifaceted reality of racial identity in a segregated society.
Conclusion
Langston Hughes’ masterful exploration of passing, though not explicitly the subject of any single work, permeates his body of work. He reveals the psychological toll, the societal pressures, and the ultimate futility of attempting to escape one's true identity. Through subtle symbolism, evocative imagery, and nuanced character development, Hughes leaves us with a profound understanding of the enduring complexities of race, identity, and the search for belonging. His legacy compels us to consider the enduring relevance of these issues and the ongoing struggle for authentic self-expression in a world still grappling with issues of racial justice and equality.
FAQs
1. Did Langston Hughes ever explicitly write about the concept of “passing”? While he didn't have a work directly titled "Passing," the theme is subtly yet powerfully woven into many of his poems and prose, often through the portrayal of characters living double lives or grappling with racial identity.
2. How does Hughes' depiction of passing compare to other contemporary writers? Hughes offers a nuanced perspective, avoiding simplistic narratives and highlighting the internal conflicts and societal pressures that contribute to the decision to pass. Unlike some who might focus solely on the negative consequences, Hughes explores the complexities and moral ambiguities involved.
3. What literary devices does Hughes employ to explore this theme? He utilizes symbolism, evocative imagery, understated language, and character development to paint a picture of the inner turmoil and social pressures faced by characters considering or engaging in passing.
4. What is the significance of "double consciousness" in understanding Hughes’ treatment of passing? The concept of "double consciousness," as coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, is central. Hughes’ characters experience a profound internal conflict, constantly negotiating their identity and looking at themselves through the eyes of a prejudiced society.
5. How does Hughes' work on passing contribute to our understanding of racial identity today? Hughes' exploration of passing remains profoundly relevant. His nuanced portrayal of the complexities of racial identity challenges simplistic narratives and highlights the ongoing struggle for self-acceptance and belonging within a society still grappling with racial inequality and prejudice.
| passing langston hughes: The Ways of White Folks Langston Hughes, 2011-09-07 A collection of vibrant and incisive short stories depicting the sometimes humorous, but more often tragic interactions between Black people and white people in America in the 1920s and ‘30s. One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but these stories showcase his talent as a lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Stories included in this collection: Cora Unashamed Slave on the Block Home Passing A Good Job Gone Rejuvenation Through Joy The Blues I'm Playing Red-Headed Baby Poor Little Black Fellow Little Dog Berry Mother and Child One Christmas Eve Father and Son |
| passing langston hughes: Langston Hughes: Short Stories Langston Hughes, 1997-08-15 Stories capturing “the vibrancy of Harlem life, the passions of ordinary black people, and the indignities of everyday racism” by “a great American writer” (Kirkus Reviews). This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963—the most comprehensive available—showcases Langston Hughes’s literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns in the decades that preceded the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes’s uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general. “[Hughes’s fiction] manifests his ‘wonder at the world.’ As these stories reveal, that wonder has lost little of its shine.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer |
| passing langston hughes: The Short Stories Langston Hughes, 2002 For the first time in many years, Langston Hughes's published collections of stories are now available in a single book. Included in this volume are: Ways of White Folks, originally published in 1934; Laughing to Keep from Crying, originally published in 1952; and additional stories from Something in Common and Other Stories, originally published in 1963; as well as previously uncollected stories. These fictions, carefully crafted in the language Hughes loved, manifest the many themes for which he is best known. We meet and come to know many characters--black and white, young and old, men and women & mdash;all as believable as our own families, friends, and acquaintances. Hughes's stories portray people as they actually are: a mixture of good, bad, and much in-between. In these short stories, as in the Simple stories, the reader enjoys Hughes's humor and irony. The stories show us his inclination to mock himself and his beloved people, as much as he ridicules the flaws of those who belittle his race. His genuine characters interact and realistically bring to life this era of America's past. By maintaining the form and format of the original story collections, this volume presents Hughes's stories as he wanted them to be read. This volume will be an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in African American literature generally and the fiction of Langston Hughes specifically. |
| passing langston hughes: The Big Sea Langston Hughes, 2022-08-01 DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of The Big Sea by Langston Hughes. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature. |
| passing langston hughes: Passing Nella Larsen, 2022 Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926. |
| passing langston hughes: Crossing the Line Gayle Wald, 2000-07-24 As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires. Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.” Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism. |
| passing langston hughes: Langston Hughes and the *Chicago Defender* Langston Hughes, 2022-10-17 Langston Hughes is well known as a poet, playwright, novelist, social activist, communist sympathizer, and brilliant member of the Harlem Renaissance. He has been referred to as the Dean of Black Letters and the poet low-rate of Harlem. But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose. This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction. |
| passing langston hughes: Passing, Posing, Persuasion Christina Yi, Andre Haag, Catherine Ryu, 2023-11-30 Passing, Posing, Persuasion interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify with the empire while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them and marking their attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of “passing” or “posing.” Visions of inclusion encouraged assimilation but also threatened to disrupt the very logic of imperialism itself: If there was no immutable difference between Taiwanese and Japanese subjects, for example, then what justified the subordination of the former to the latter? The chapters emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity. The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the outer markers of ethno-national identification. This book showcases how actors—in multiple senses of the word—from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, thus troubling its ontological boundaries. |
| passing langston hughes: Not Without Laughter Langston Hughes, 2012-03-05 Poet Langston Hughes' only novel, a coming-of-age tale that unfolds amid an African American family in rural Kansas, explores the dilemmas of life in a racially divided society. |
| passing langston hughes: Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture W. Jason Miller, 2011-01-02 Langston Hughes never knew of an America where lynching was absent from the cultural landscape. Jason Miller investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Hughes on the subject of lynching to explore its varying effects on survivors, victims, and accomplices as they resisted, accepted, and executed this brutal form of sadistic torture. Starting from Hughes's life as a teenager during the Red Summer of 1919 and moving through the civil rights movement that took place toward the end of Hughes's life, Miller initiates an important dialogue between America's neglected history of lynching and some of the world’s most significant poems. This extended study of the centrality of these heinous acts to Hughes's artistic development, aesthetics, and activism represents a significant and long-overdue contribution to our understanding of the art and politics of Langston Hughes. |
| passing langston hughes: A Chosen Exile Allyson Hobbs, 2014-10-13 Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions. |
| passing langston hughes: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes James Langston Hughes, 1994 Here, for the first time, is a complete collection of Langston Hughes's poetry - 860 poems that sound the heartbeat of black life in America during five turbulent decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s. |
| passing langston hughes: Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture Judith Ruderman, 2019-01-09 In Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture Judith Ruderman takes on the fraught question of who passes for Jewish in American literature and culture. In today's contemporary political climate, religious and racial identities are being reconceived as responses to culture and environment, rather than essential qualities. Many Jews continue to hold conflicting ideas about their identity—seeking, on the one hand, deep engagement with Jewish history and the experiences of the Jewish people, while holding steadfastly, on the other hand, to the understanding that identity is fluid and multivalent. Looking at a carefully chosen set of texts from American literature, Ruderman elaborates on the strategies Jews have used to pass from the late 19th century to the present—nose jobs, renaming, clothing changes, religious and racial reclassification, and even playing baseball. While traversing racial and religious identities has always been a feature of America's nation of immigrants, Ruderman shows how the complexities of identity formation and deformation are critically relevant during this important cultural moment. |
| passing langston hughes: Thank You, M'am Langston Hughes, 2014-08 When a young boy named Roger tries to steal the purse of a woman named Luella, he is just looking for money to buy stylish new shoes. After she grabs him by the collar and drags him back to her home, he's sure that he is in deep trouble. Instead, Roger is soon left speechless by her kindness and generosity. |
| passing langston hughes: The Historian's Passing Lynn Domina, 2018-10-01 This meticulously annotated edition of Nella Larsen's novel Passing contextualizes the novel's many historical and cultural references and introduces readers to a central theme: crossing the color line in the hopes of living a more privileged life. Nella Larsen's Passing is widely regarded as a classic novel of African American literature—a groundbreaking work in which the author keenly depicted an under-acknowledged element of early 20th-century American life: crossing the color line in the hopes of living a more privileged life. Now, readers can appreciate the full text of Larsen's masterpiece, accompanied throughout by invaluable annotations that transform this classic into a fascinating historical documentation of American life and society during the Harlem Renaissance. This meticulously annotated edition draws on the wealth of race scholarship that has been produced during the last generation to contextualize the novel's many historical and cultural references. It includes introductory essays focusing on Nella Larsen's life and its influence on her novel, and on events in American history and culture that appear in the novel. The book concludes with a comprehensive list of resources for further research. |
| passing langston hughes: Selected Poems of Langston Hughes Langston Hughes, 1990-09-12 Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who rushed the boots of Washington; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in the raffle of night. They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life. The collection includes The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Weary Blues, Still Here, Song for a Dark Girl, Montage of a Dream Deferred, and Refugee in America. It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity. |
| passing langston hughes: Projections of Passing N. Megan Kelley, 2016-04-04 A key concern in postwar America was “who's passing for whom?” Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety. The potent, imagined fear of passing linked the language and anxieties of identity to other postwar concerns, including cultural obsessions about threats from within. Passing created an epistemological conundrum that threatened to destabilize all forms of identity, not just the longstanding American color line separating white and black. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa). Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. N. Megan Kelley shows that these films transcend genre, discussing Gentleman's Agreement, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Island in the Sun, My Son John, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Rebel without a Cause, Vertigo, All about Eve, and Johnny Guitar, among others. Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity, Projections of Passing broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history. |
| passing langston hughes: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes Langston Hughes, Dolan Hubbard, 2001 The sixteen volumes are published with the goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people. Each volume will include a biographical and literary chronology by Arnold Rampersad, as well as an introduction by a Hughes scholar lume introductions will provide contextual and historical information on the particular work. |
| passing langston hughes: Race Passing and American Individualism Kathleen Pfeiffer, 2010-02 Pfeiffer studies the fiction of William Dean Howells, Frances E.W. Harper, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. She supports the ambiguous theory that the African-American characters found in these six authors' works are reinventing themselves by passing as white. |
| passing langston hughes: A Study Guide for Nella Larsen's "Passing" Gale, Cengage Learning, A Study Guide for Nella Larsen's Passing, excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs. |
| passing langston hughes: The World of Jim Crow America [2 volumes] Steven A. Reich, 2019-06-24 This two-volume set is a thematically-arranged encyclopedia covering the social, political, and material culture of America during the Jim Crow Era. What was daily life really like for ordinary African American people in Jim Crow America, the hundred-year period of enforced legal segregation that began immediately after the Civil War and continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965? What did they eat, wear, believe, and think? How did they raise their children? How did they interact with government? What did they value? What did they do for fun? This Daily Life encyclopedia explores the lives of average people through the examination of social, cultural, and material history. Supported by the most current research, the multivolume set examines social history topics—including family, political, religious, and economic life—as it illuminates elements of a society's emotional life, interactions, opinions, views, beliefs, intimate relationships, and connections between individuals and the greater world. It is broken up into topical sections, each dealing with a different aspect of cultural life. Each section opens with an introductory essay, followed by A–Z entries on various aspects of that topic. |
| passing langston hughes: A History of the Harlem Renaissance Rachel Farebrother, Miriam Thaggert, 2021-02-04 This book presents original essays that explore the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance literature and culture. |
| passing langston hughes: The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire Karl Jacoby, 2016-06-13 Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award An American 'Odyssey,' the larger-than-life story of a man who travels far in the wake of war and gets by on his adaptability and gift for gab. —Wall Street Journal A black child born on the US-Mexico border in the twilight of slavery, William Ellis inhabited a world divided along ambiguous racial lines. Adopting the name Guillermo Eliseo, he passed as Mexican, transcending racial lines to become fabulously wealthy as a Wall Street banker, diplomat, and owner of scores of mines and haciendas south of the border. In The Strange Career of William Ellis, prize-winning historian Karl Jacoby weaves an astonishing tale of cunning and scandal, offering fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race in America. |
| passing langston hughes: Culturally Responsive Reading Durthy A. Washington, 2023 This book presents the LIST Paradigm to help educators unlock literature with four keys to culture: Language, Identity, Space, and Time. The text includes teaching strategies, classroom examples, and texts by writers of color-- |
| passing langston hughes: The Negro W. E. B. Du Bois, 2001-05-22 A classic rediscovered. |
| passing langston hughes: Illustrated Dictionary of Literature Jack Richardson, 2009-02 Covering various areas on literature, this work is suitable for students and teachers. |
| passing langston hughes: The Langston Hughes Review , 2003 |
| passing langston hughes: Not in My Library! Sanford Berman, 2013-08-14 Foreword by Mitch Freedman, a reprinted Counterpoise interview and 45 of Sanford Berman's U*L columns dealing with book-burning, genocide, government secrecy and repression, cataloging, indexing, classism, self-censorship and free speech for library staff (et cetera!). Index by Chris Dodge. |
| passing langston hughes: Hollywood be Thy Name Judith Weisenfeld, 2007 This is a ground-breaking book. The text is remarkable in its use of MPAA files and studio archives; Weisenfeld uncovers all sorts of side stories that enrich the larger narrative. The writing is clear and concise, and Weisenfeld makes important theoretical interpretations without indulging in difficult jargon. She incorporates both film theory and race theory in graceful, non-obtrusive ways that deepen understanding. This is an outstanding work.--Colleen McDannell, author of Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression |
| passing langston hughes: Historical Dictionary of the 1940s James Gilbert Ryan, Leonard C Schlup, 2015-03-26 The only available historical dictionary devoted exclusively to the 1940s, this book offers readers a ready-reference portrait of one of the twentieth century's most tumultuous decades. In nearly 600 concise entries, the volume quickly defines a historical figure, institution, or event, and then points readers to three sources that treat the subject in depth. In selecting topics for inclusion, the editors and authors offer a representative slice of life as contemporaneous Americans saw it - with coverage of people; movements; court cases; and economic, social, cultural, political, military, and technological changes. The book focuses chiefly on the United States, but places American lives and events firmly within a global context. |
| passing langston hughes: A Chosen Exile Allyson Hobbs, 2014-10-13 Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions. |
| passing langston hughes: RDV'S INTERNET ANTHLOGY PLUS Regardless Victory, 2009-05-20 A strategic book based on internet morals, websites, writing, poetry, public and social morals.These ethics are written by Regardless Devon Victory. www.coherstcoherstlive |
| passing langston hughes: A Modern Mosaic Townsend Ludington, 2000 Examines the impact of the modernist art movement on American popular culture in a collection of critical essays. |
| passing langston hughes: Black Like Us Rachel Atkins, 2016-11 Synopsis: Family secrets ripple through time when three present-day sisters discover the truth about a young African-American woman passing for white sixty years before. What happens in between is a frank and funny look at the shifting boundaries of tolerance and what identity really means. Cast Size: 5-8 Females. Racially Diverse. |
| passing langston hughes: Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal Yuval Taylor, 2019-03-26 A Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography “A complete pleasure to read.” —Lisa Page, Washington Post Novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Langston Hughes, two of America’s greatest writers, first met in New York City in 1925. Drawn to each other, they helped launch a radical journal, Fire!! Later, meeting by accident in Alabama, they became close as they traveled together—Hurston interviewing African Americans for folk stories, Hughes getting his first taste of the deep South. By illuminating their lives, work, competitiveness, and ambitions, Yuval Taylor savvily details how their friendship and literary collaborations dead-ended in acrimonious accusations. |
| passing langston hughes: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism Joseph Darda, 2022-03-15 How Americans learned to wait on time for racial change What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism—with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness—has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal frontlash, from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock. |
| passing langston hughes: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth Aimee Pozorski, Maren Scheurer, 2023-12-14 The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth provides a comprehensive, must-have survey of interdisciplinary scholarship on one of the major American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth presents state-of-the-art scholarship on new research methods, current debates, and future directions in Philip Roth studies. It illuminates how Roth, one of the most influential American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, not only reflected American history and culture in his important novels but uncannily anticipated our American future. Divided into six main sections, this Handbook considers such topics: - The full range of Roth's writing, from his novels and short stories to essays and life writing - Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives across literary studies, politics, gender studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism - Roth's literary legacy across contemporary fiction, Jewish literature, the arts, and culture studies - Key contexts including American political movements since the 1950s, the American Jewish experience, and intertextual relationships Uniting scholars and artists who have built the field of Philip Roth studies from the ground up along with emergent scholars from around the world, this Handbook includes chapter summaries, study questions, and an author biography and timeline that includes key dates in Roth's life and publication history. It also contains a bibliography of secondary sources for further reading as well as an overview of film and television adaptations. |
| passing langston hughes: Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance: K-Y Cary D. Wintz, Paul Finkelman, 2004 An interdisciplinary look at the Harlem Renaissance, it includes essays on the principal participants, those who defined the political, intellectual and cultural milieu in which the Renaissance existed; on important events and places. |
| passing langston hughes: The African American Roots of Modernism James Smethurst, 2011-06-06 The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The African American Roots of Modernism explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity. In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, Smethurst upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. Smethurst introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, Smethurst illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed. |
| passing langston hughes: Sellout Randall Kennedy, 2008-01-08 An incisive and unflinching study from the national bestselling author of Say it Loud! that tackles a stigma of America's racial discourse: selling out. “Brisk and enjoyable, no small feat given the density of its ideas.”—Los Angeles Times Randall Kennedy explains the origins of the concept of selling out, and shows how fear of this label has haunted prominent members of the black community—including, most recently, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama. Sellout also contains a rigorously fair case study of America's quintessential racial “sellout”—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the book's final section, Kennedy recounts how he himself has dealt with accusations of being a sellout. |
PASSING LATINITIES - JSTOR
PASSING LATINITIES My, my. A body does get around. — WILLIAM FAULKNER (1990: 30) If the reader has accompanied me through chapter 1, it should by now be- ... (1871–1938) and …
Memoirs of “When the Negro was in Vogue”: Langston …
text, “The Big Sea presents the Hughes who responds to minor events but fails to record clearly the Hughes who reacts to personal crises” (20), ultimately passing on crucial “opportunities to …
Those Who Have No Turkey - What So Proudly We Hail
Page | 1 Those Who Have No Turkey LANGSTON HUGHES This story by celebrated African American poet and short-story writer Langston Hughes (1902–67), written in 1918 when he …
Memoirs of “When the Negro was in Vogue”: Langston …
text, “The Big Sea presents the Hughes who responds to minor events but fails to record clearly the Hughes who reacts to personal crises” (20), ultimately passing on crucial “opportunities to …
Yo tambi6n soy Am6rica: Langston Hughes Translated
Langston Hughes Translated Vera M. Kutzinski Y canto ese dia, Langston, Langston, Para todos ese dia, Langston, Langston! Alejo Carpentier1 Langston Hughes hermano, hermano de raza …
Langston Hughes Biography - HCC Learning Web
allowed Hughes to discuss very serious racial issues. The Simple columns were also popular--and they ran for twenty years and were collected in several books. Portrait of Langston Hughes, …
Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative - JSTOR
passing for white, The Bluest Eye artfully reinforces its interest in racial passing by alluding to Peola, the passing figure in Imitation of Life. This intertextual play effectively evokes the myth …
Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A …
distanced. A troubled Langston Hughes expressed his concern in The Big Sea, and noted how distortions in black artistic practice were developing because of blacks’ interaction with whites. …
LANGSTON HUGHES: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY …
Langston Hughes." Crisis 88.6 (1981): 278-306. This article is an excerpt from Berry's biography: Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. The substance of this essay is condensed from …
Creative Approaches to Social Justice - Stockton Wordpress
Langston Hughes considered passing to be a joke played on white Americans. It took a great deal of bravery and “guile” (as Hughes himself says) because if a person’s ancestry were revealed …
'Jazz at Night and the Classics in the Morning': musical
white world' (Hughes 1926, p. 694). For Hughes, jazz and blues best expressed lived experience; the sounds and forms of these musics subsequently permeated his oeuvre. Hughes also saw …
AML 4311 sec. 24874 - The World of Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes' literary and sociopolitical writings, and apply critical race theory, which scholars as Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren, and essayists like …
Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes and …
Langston Hughes and His Critics by Meta DuEwa Jones Few doubt the significance of Langston Hughes' presence in 20th-century Amer-ican literature. But how is this presence accounted for …
Langston Hughes’ ‘The Big Sea’: A Critical Study
Langston Hughes’ ‘The Big Sea’: A Critical Study. Prof. S.D. Sargar, Veer Wajekar College, Phunde . Langston Hughes, a poet, dramatist, fiction writer and journalist, was born on …
LANGSTON HUGHES IN CONTEXT - Cambridge University …
Langston Hughes and Simple: Across Form and Space to a Political Consciousness Sandhya Shukla v. Cambridge University Press & Assessment 978-1-316-51212-8 — Langston Hughes …
A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO America Street
Passing the Bread / Veera Hiranandani 13 Hamadi /Naomi Shihab Nye 14 Drum Kiss / Susan Power 15 Yiddische Baby / Rivka Galchen 16 The Summer of Ice Cream / Tope Folarin 17 …
On the Perfect Unification of the Setting and the Characters ...
Langston Hughes was the leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance, and the most original and versatile black writers in the last century. ... a great many people went passing hurriedly. On …
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story T - mj.unc.edu
June 10th, 2018 - Passing was written during the Harlem Renaissance a period spanning the 1920s during which black literature intellectual thought music and art flourished During this …
Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr.: Together in …
features is that Langston Hughes also made this same trip to Nigeria, and he traveled with Martin Luther King, Jr. Langston Hughes’s relationship with King has profound significance for …
The Ways Of White Folks Langston Hughes ; Langston …
Home Passing A Good Job Gone Rejuvenation Through Joy The Blues I'm Playing Red-Headed Baby Poor Little Black Fellow ... Langston Hughes’s literary blossoming and the development …
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story T
Passing Study Guide from LitCharts The creators of. 4th Grade Reading Lessons. BibMe Free Bibliography amp Citation Maker MLA APA. Browse All Poems Love Poems Poem Hunter. ...
Passing Langston Hughes (Download Only) - netsec.csuci.edu
Passing Langston Hughes: Exploring Identity, Race, and the Illusion of Belonging Langston Hughes, a titan of the Harlem Renaissance, didn't just write about the Black experience; he …
Langston hughes short story passing
Langston Hughes’ “Who’s Passing for Who” shows the issues regarding racial discrimination that was occurring at the time of the piece and confronts those issues with a solution of “color …
Langston Hughes - poems - Poem Hunter
Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). …
A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO America Street - Squarespace
Passing the Bread / Veera Hiranandani 13 Hamadi /Naomi Shihab Nye 14 Drum Kiss / Susan Power 15 Yiddische Baby / Rivka Galchen 16 The Summer of Ice Cream / Tope Folarin 17 …
Passing - Archive.org
passing, 3t1s3dosee37din! co. bynellalarsen quicksand1928. r paing x by u-f
Degree Project - DiVA
“passing” or “crossing the colour line” from black to white society. The crossing of racial boundaries later led to the so called “tragic mulatto trope” used in a number of films and works …
AND BID HIM TRANSLATE: LANGSTON HUGHES' …
2. For a comprehensive listing of Hughes' Spanish translations see, Donald C. Dickinson, A Bio-bibliography of Langston Hughes 1920-1967, Archon Books, 1967. 3. Hughes' translations …
LANGSTON HUGHES’S SPANISH CIVIL WAR VERSE
Langston Hughes’s Spanish Civil War Verse Luis Girón Echevarría 93 AEF, vol. XXVIII, 2005, 91-101 Poèmes, one of a series of leaflets called Les Poètes du Monde Défendent le Peuple …
Langston Hughes - ResearchGate
Langston Hughes was an American artist, writer, and dramatist whose African-American subjects made him an essential supporter of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Langston Hughes was
SARC Report for Aspire Langston Hughes Academy - Aspire …
Aspire Langston Hughes Academy By February 1 of each year, every school in California is required by state law to publish a School Accountability Report Card (SARC).The SARC …
Langston Hughes: Voice Among Voices - Yale University
Langston Hughes has been accepted by people all over the world as one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the American Negro. He has written several volumes of poetry, six novels, nine …
Langston Hughes “Democracy” - theproutschool.org
Langston Hughes – “Democracy” Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear. I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet …
The Short Stories Of Langston Hughes - resources.caih.jhu.edu
the first time in many years, Langston Hughes's published collections of stories are now available in a single book. Included in this volume are: Ways of White Folks, originally published in …
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story T Copy
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story T Langston Hughes: Short Stories Langston Hughes,1997-08-15 Stories capturing the vibrancy of Harlem life the passions of ordinary black people and …
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story Text - lakeland.umd.edu
Sep 13, 2024 · Passing Langston Hughes Short Story Text Browse All Poems Love Poems Poem Hunter. The Lexile Framework for Reading Lexile. African American literature Wikipedia. …
Portraits: The Black Experience in American Culture - Yale …
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings , Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Nella Larson’s Passing , and assorted poetry by Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn …
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain - College of …
By Langston Hughes, The Nation, 23 June 1926 [In 1926, the Harlem Renaissance was in full flower; the poet Langston Hughes was one ... Chestnutt go out of print with neither race …
The Harlem Renaissance's Hidden Figure - Ursinus College
Langston Hughes is a male as is Countee Cullen and these are the names that are usually referred to when speaking of the movement. My project will intend to alter this male driven …
Passing for Oneself Literature of Passing, Covering, and …
Creighton / Passing for Oneself / 1 Passing for Oneself Literature of Passing, Covering, and Becoming Course To pass is to be recognized as belonging to a race, sexuality, gender, or …
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story Text [PDF]
Langston Hughes: Short Stories Langston Hughes,1997-08-15 Stories capturing “the vibrancy of Harlem life, the passions of ordinary black people, and the indignities of everyday racism” by …
July 2024 January 2025 - Aspire Public Schools
Title: CV Teacher Work Calendar/ School Calendar/ Bell Schedules/ Instructional Minutes Calculator- 2024-25 Created Date: 10/30/2024 1:25:22 PM
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story Text (2024)
Passing Langston Hughes Short Story Text Marta Fossati. Content Langston Hughes: Short Stories Langston Hughes,1997-08-15 Stories capturing “the vibrancy of Harlem life, the …
THE PAIN OF PASSING - JSTOR
Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes—Hobbs argues both that these figures understood the costs and perils of passing and that they struggled to find their own ways to negotiate the …
Salvation By Langston Hughes
Salvation By Langston Hughes!! IwassavedfromsinwhenIwasgoingonthirteen.Butnotrea lly!saved.!It!happened!like!this.!There! was!a!big!revival!at!my!Auntie!Reed's!church ...
A Classic American Short Story By Langston Hughes - cuni.cz
By Langston Hughes Standing over the hot stove cooking supper, the colored maid, Arcie, was very tired. Between ... Little Joe stood outside the ten-cent store in the light, and the snow, and …
Working with Short Stories - medienverbund-phsg.ch
10 Passing, Langston Hughes (1263 words) topics: race relations, race and racism 26 11 Scheherazade, Charles Baxter (1269 words) topics: aging, dementia, love 28 12 The …
Langston Hughes - Notable Folklorists of Color
Hughes, Langston, Dolan Hubbard, Nancy Johnston, Leslie Catherine Sanders, Donna Sullivan Harper, Christopher C. De Santis, Steven Carl Tracy, and Dellita Martin-3 Ogunsola. 2003. …
The Complete Fiction Of Nella Larsen Passing Quicksand And …
Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the …
