This chapter explores the ways that the poet’s seminal work “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” engages a discrete geopolitical space rather than a generic African continent. While the poem names four rivers on three continents, references such as “I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep” are typically read as romantic. Although the poem’s political allusions may not be apparent to readers in the twenty-first century, at the time of its writing, the Belgian Congo was less than a generation removed from a massive international human rights campaign in which African Americans played a central role. Given the extensive coverage of the Congo in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, which first published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” contemporary readers of Hughes could not have avoided recognizing the Congo as a categorically political trope, which is instrumental in Hughes’s work from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to the 1960s.
Confrontations et alliances dans les Amériques Résumé : Cet article étudie la carrière de l'éducateur Booker T. Washington dans le contexte des relations transatlantiques entre les Afro-Américains et l'Etat indépendant du Congo. Bien que Washington soit surtout connu pour son oeuvre aux Etats-Unis, l'article avance l'idée que ses initiatives relatives à l'Afrique-principalement son engagement au sein de la Congo Reform Association-étaient en convergence avec son programme domestique, et s'inscrivaient au sein d'une importante préoccupation afro-américaine pour l'Afrique au début du 20 e siècle. Cette préoccupation commune permet d'éclairer les filiations parfois complexes entre des personnalités apparemment aussi différentes que B.
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