“this is my space / I am not movin”

Abstract

Throughout their literary careers, Langston Hughes and Ntozake Shange used poetry as a vehicle to address the prevalent social ills that affected the African American community during their time. In particular, they were concerned with the threat of the recolonization of Black spaces (minds, bodies, and/or physical territories) by white leaders in Jim Crow society. Tracing the ways in which their poetry not only archives the oppression of the Jim Crow era but resists it enables us to understand the resounding impact that Hughes and Shange alike have had on transforming the image of Black Americans in the US cultural imagination even today. This article therefore probes key works by these two literary lights in order to trace the thread of progressive activism in their works, their response to the threat of recolonization, and their representation of the beauty of Blackness as both a social and political act.