American Literature Association Conference, May 24-27, 2012, in San Francisco

The Langston Hughes Society will sponsor a panel at the 2012 American Literature Association Conference that reexamines the vexed relationship between political and aesthetic radicalism in Hughes’s writing. Critical judgments of Hughes have long distinguished between the works of a politically-radical, leftist Hughes and the works of a formally-radical, modernist Hughes. For instance, Hughes’s sociopolitical Marxist verse of the 1930s, when not dismissed, has been devalued in relation to his modernist blues- and jazz-informed verse experiments of the 1920s and 1950s. As one of the modern period’s pre-eminent African-American writers, the bifurcation of political and aesthetic radicalism—of vanguardism and avant-gardism—in Hughes’s work shapes general assumptions we bring to African-American and U.S. literary politics and literary form.

In order to begin rethinking what radicalism means for studying Langston Hughes, we welcome submissions that address any aspect of Hughes’s political and formal projects, including:

Ways Hughes’s work dialogues with radical political movements such as Marxism, Pan-Africanism, and the Black Radical Tradition

The sociopolitical ramifications of Hughes’s poetic experiments with the blues and jazz

The relationship of Hughes’s work to predominant/canonical forms of modernist innovation

Hughes’s experiments with popular verse forms/ his relationship to popular verse culture

The politics of Hughes’s popular and/or literary-critical reputation

The dominant periodization of Hughes’s political radicalism as a limited 1930s phase

Cross-genre comparative analyses of the formal and political labors of Hughes’s verse, prose, and drama

International aesthetic and sociopolitical influences on Hughes’s work

The sociopolitical uses to which Hughes’s iconic literary and cultural status has been put

Please send a 250-word abstract and CV to Nathaniel Mills at nathaniel.mills@csun.edu by December 10, 2011. All presenters must be members of the Langston Hughes Society by May 1, 2012.