Langston Hughes’ Racial Perspective on the Soviet Union  Presented in I Wonder as I Wander

Agnieszka Łobodziec

Opublikowane: 2018-05-13

Nr 1 (2018)

Langston Hughes’ Racial Perspective on the Soviet Union Presented in I Wonder as I Wander

Agnieszka Łobodziec

Abstrakt

Langston Hughes lived in a racially segregated country within which racialism – fortified by religious indoctrination, ontology, and pseudo-scientific assumptions – attributed inferiority to blackness and superiority to whiteness. Under these circumstances, Hughes developed racial consciousness and was likely to observe, negotiate, and assess realities beyond the United States through this prism. The article focuses on Hughes’ comparative negotiation of two contrasting geopolitical contexts i.e. the racially segregated USA and the supposedly racially progressive USSR that he elaborates on in his travelogue I Wonder as I Wander. Special focus is given to examining the ways Hughes refers to and interprets his experience of the USSR, its political system, cultural expressions, social services, customs and ethnicities from a black American racial conscious frame of reference predicated upon African American experience and folk culture. The analogies he found between the situations of black Americans and the Soviet working class and various ethnicities, particularly the special affinity he felt with the peoples of Turkmenistan and his observation of Muscovite superior and elitist attitudes towards marginalized and disenfranchised residents of impoverished regions are highlighted. Interestingly, although Langston Hughes was treated as a guest of honor in Moscow, he nevertheless ventured forth to Soviet Central Asia, where, as he put it, “the majority of the colored citizens lived”. Lastly, the extent to which Hughes’ Soviet experience may have both heightened his universalist perspectives and racial consciousness is addressed with racial consciousness approached positively in that it enriched, individualized, and deepened Hughes’ understanding of a country so different from his own.

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Zasady cytowania

Łobodziec, A. (2018). Langston Hughes’ Racial Perspective on the Soviet Union Presented in I Wonder as I Wander. Przegląd Rusycystyczny, (1). Pobrano z https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/PR/article/view/6195

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Agnieszka Łobodziec

aga_uz@tlen.pl

Afiliacja:

Uniwersytet Zielonogórski Polska

Biogram

Agnieszka Łobodziec is Assistant Professor and the head of the Section of Literature of the English Speaking World, English Department, University of Zielona Gora, Poland. In January 2015 she was elected a member of the Toni Morrison Society’s International Programs Committee. She is the author of Black Theological Intra-racial Conflicts in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2012) and From Oppressive Patriarchy to Alternative Masculinity: Black Men and Violence in Womanist Novels (2016). In 2012 she received a research grant from the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Berlin, Germany and in 2014 a grant from the United States Department of State to participate in a Summer Study of the United States Institute on Contemporary American Literature program in Louisville, Kentucky. Currently, she researches black American internationalism, intercultural discourses and womanism.

Nr 1 (2018)
Opublikowane: 2018-09-21

ISSN: 0137-298X

Wydawca

Polskie Towarzystwo Rusycystyczne oraz Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego

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Langston Hughes’ Racial Perspective on the Soviet Union Presented in I Wonder as I Wander

Abstrakt

Agnieszka Łobodziec

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