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While Langston Hughes is typically read as a staunch supporter of solidarity defined by descent, I suggest that his 1961 poem Ask Your Mama pursues a form of sociality that privileges race but is not exclusively determined by it, instead exploring possibilities for cosmopolitan exchange. As the negotiation of alterity and the reexamination of inherited attachments—cultural, racial, or national—cosmopolitanism is a crucial although understudied radical strain of thought in this moment, and one we can hear sounded in Hughes’s jazz poem. Hughes’s column for the Chicago Defender displays traces of a cosmopolitan ethos leading up to the composition of Ask Your Mama, traces that coincide with the transnational values inspired by jazz’s increasingly international circulation. Drawing on the surge in music’s postwar commercial and state-sanctioned circulation, Hughes’s poem becomes a unification of his own impulse to expand affiliations across national and ethno-racial lines and the discourses around jazz and other vernacular music. Ask Your Mama combines generic forms and overlays scales of exchange that exceed any neatly defined geographic origin or cultural category. Analyzing these combinations of poetry and music, I show how networks of alternative meanings are produced that reconfigure relations between geographic distance, community, and identity, the comingling of disparate cultures and national affiliations formalized in the interstices of music and poetic verse. Ultimately, Hughes demonstrates how, amid the overlapping seizures and resignifications of black cultural production at mid-century, jazz music could be reclaimed and repurposed to transform poetry’s structure and rearticulate the boundaries of ethno-racial solidarity.
While Langston Hughes is typically read as a staunch supporter of solidarity defined by descent, I suggest that his 1961 poem Ask Your Mama pursues a form of sociality that privileges race but is not exclusively determined by it, instead exploring possibilities for cosmopolitan exchange. As the negotiation of alterity and the reexamination of inherited attachments—cultural, racial, or national—cosmopolitanism is a crucial although understudied radical strain of thought in this moment, and one we can hear sounded in Hughes’s jazz poem. Hughes’s column for the Chicago Defender displays traces of a cosmopolitan ethos leading up to the composition of Ask Your Mama, traces that coincide with the transnational values inspired by jazz’s increasingly international circulation. Drawing on the surge in music’s postwar commercial and state-sanctioned circulation, Hughes’s poem becomes a unification of his own impulse to expand affiliations across national and ethno-racial lines and the discourses around jazz and other vernacular music. Ask Your Mama combines generic forms and overlays scales of exchange that exceed any neatly defined geographic origin or cultural category. Analyzing these combinations of poetry and music, I show how networks of alternative meanings are produced that reconfigure relations between geographic distance, community, and identity, the comingling of disparate cultures and national affiliations formalized in the interstices of music and poetic verse. Ultimately, Hughes demonstrates how, amid the overlapping seizures and resignifications of black cultural production at mid-century, jazz music could be reclaimed and repurposed to transform poetry’s structure and rearticulate the boundaries of ethno-racial solidarity.
Langston Hughes published his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in June 1921 in The Crisis magazine. The poem helped inaugurate the Harlem Renaissance, became Hughes's calling card, and established certain core themes of the vast body of work he would publish in the next half-century: the positive affirmation of Blackness; the deployment of a collective “I”; the catalog of place names evoking both global solidarity and historical particularity; and the use of water imagery to denote worldwide interconnection and link the world's oppressed populations to the human community. One hundred years after “Rivers” was first published, the Langston Hughes Review is devoting two issues to celebrating and assessing this important milestone in twentieth-century literature and the legacy that began with this single poem. This foreword contextualizes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and assesses its significance on its centennial. The poem feels topical and urgent in part because it was born into a time of crisis that resonates powerfully with our own moment.
This essay examines the reception and reinvention of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ. It argues that Hughes reconstitutes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in “Blues in Stereo”—the fifth section or “mood” of ASK YOUR MAMA—for the era of global decolonization. He does so by embracing jazz as the primary communicative context and mode of address. Hughes's effort illuminates the uneasy tensions that animate the book's differential address to black and white US readerships as well as to readers outside of the U.S. and the Anglophone world. The tensions internal to Hughes's final book-length poem owe their existence to contradictions that Hughes and his contemporaries wrestled with in the period; namely, that the articulation of the possibilities for black internationalist solidarity made them vulnerable to technological “capture” by the culture industry and the State Department. By reflecting on its status as a text mediated both by jazz and by technologies of reproduction, Hughes's later work enjoins us to read and hear it as political precisely in its redistribution of sound and sense. By design, MAMA's jazz poetics sustain alternative structures of address and anticipation that are protective of the collective possibility of reading, playing, and hearing the future otherwise.
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