“Let us look at the immediate background of this young poet”: Langston Hughes and the Sociological Critique of Taste

Abstract:Langston Hughes’s classic essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is commonly read as a defense of Black racial pride. I argue that it simultaneously performs a subtle but radical sociological critique of the Kantian paradigm of disinterested taste. “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain” should therefore be read as a proto-sociology of literature that highlights the blind spot in regard to race often found in Bourdieusian frameworks. Hughes’s work can also provide the sociology of literature today with alternative models for thinking about the entanglement of taste, class, and power, and for conceptualizing aesthetic autonomy.