“I, TOO, SING AMERICA”
UNDERSTADING BLACKNESS AND IDENTITY IN LANGSTON HUGHES’S POETRY OF PRESENCE
Keywords:
Identity; Blackness; Poetry; Langston Hughes.Abstract
This work aims to analyze the American writer Langston Hughes’s (1902-1967) poetic language, focusing on the theme of race and identity of black people. Associated with Harlem Renaissance, an emancipation movement of black art produced in the 1920s and 1930s in New York, Hughes published poems, dramatic texts, short stories, and essays committed to the notion of enhancing black identity. What we call poetry of presence is the author’s poetic language that highlights the search for blackness awareness from the deconstruction of themes related to oppression, enslavement, and violence that stigmatized black identity. Poems such as “I, Too” and “The Black Speaks of Rivers” present the commitment of black people to be recognized as part of American landscape. In this sense, understanding Hall’s (2011) concept of identity is primary for the analysis of Hughes’s poems. In addition, we rely on the studies by Fanon (2008) and Mbembe (2017) to map the condition of black people in Western History. In conclusion, we underline a self-emancipation of blackness in Hughes’s poetry which left a remarkable inherited cultural and identity resistance.
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