Cultural entanglements: Langston Hughes and the rise of African and Caribbean literature

Shane Graham’s Cultural Entanglements: Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and Caribbean Literature offers a broad inquiry into black transnational relation and aesthetics by way of Langston Hughes’s literary exchanges. Graham, who builds off his splendid work as co-editor (with John Walters) of a volume of correspondence between Hughes and numerous Drum-era South African writers, engagingly moves, here, from archive to argument. No classic single-author study, Cultural Entanglements is a materialist literary history that casts Hughes as “catalyst and hub for the network of black Atlantic writers that helped usher in the era of postcolonial literature.” Reading Hughes alongside key contemporaries and successors – primarily, Claude McKay, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, Peter Abrahams, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Paule Marshall – Graham probes the ways they expressed the meanings of Africa and blackness to one another and their readers. He assiduously combs through Hughes’s bountiful correspondence with Caribbean and African authors as well as their published work (poems, plays, novels, speeches, anthologies) to define a 20-century pan-African aesthetics perpetually negotiating commonalities and differences. Resolutely part of the transnational turn in black literary studies, Cultural Entanglements joins a growing effort by scholars to break Hughes and other authors out of the strictly national frame to which they have long been confined. Given that his early years were spent – and his iconic poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” was composed – shuttling between the U.S. Midwest and Mexico, Hughes is an ideal core subject for this kind of study. Like Vera Kutzinski’s The Worlds of Langston Hughes and Ryan Kernan’s forthcoming New World Maker, both of which track Hughes’s movements and fecund literary affiliations beyond the United States to the Caribbean, South America, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union, Cultural Entanglements commits itself to a wider, planetary scale. But whereas Kutzinski and Kernan variously reread Hughes and his work abroad through the prism of translation, Graham casts black transnationalism, generally, and Hughes’s oeuvre and engagements, specifically, through the concept-metaphor of entanglement. For Graham, entanglement is a materially mediated process made possible by the physical circulation of people and literary production that help knit together what he calls “fellow feeling.” The virtue of entanglement is that it metaphorically names a range of conditions. Most obviously, it emphasizes the willed political and aesthetic connections sought by black writers in different countries: “the sense of solidarity, community, and identity that the circuits of cultural exchange provided to black people scattered over oceans and continents.” But it equally highlights: the knotty complications that meet such pursuits; cross-contamination of aesthetic philosophies and practices, intentional or not; and complicities between individuals, parties, and social visions of the past/present/future. Encompassing both embrace and inextricability, entanglement lends Graham considerable conceptual and interpretive dexterity. The value of entanglement’s elasticity is sharply evident throughout the study, but the explanatory force of entanglement’s accompanying array of metaphors seems less clear. When arteries, canals, cables, nerves, threads, and chains – or in collective forms as networks, webs, circuits, and skeins – appear as sometimes