Double Consciousness in Langston Hughes's Selected Poems

Abstract

          The research paper provides a description of Harlem Renaissance as a cultural movement. It demonstrates how the flowering of this movement has made possible for African American writers to bring about social change. Moreover, it shows how it has its impact on the representations of race and place. It also highlights the role of cultural memory in reconstructing personal stories and giving voice to the silenced and marginalized groups. 

           The research discusses Langston Hughes's identity split. It shows how double-consciousness operates in a discursive way as a tormenting and empowering experience. As an African-American poet, Hughes experiences ambivalence. In addition to his ethnic origin, the research touches on some autobiographical factors that shape and reshape his hyphenated persona. Three poems, namely “Cross”(1926), “Mulatto”(1926), and “Strange-un-Negro tongue”(1974), are chosen to be analyzed in the light of Du Bois' concept of ‘double consciousness’. All of these poems deal with Hughes's fragmented identity as an African writer living in the American Diaspora. The research reflects on the workings of Hughes’s memory and how this refashions his persona and poetry. It reveals how Hughes’s reminisces help him to travel geographically rather than just intellectually to different topographies where diverse voices can be heard.

 It concludes that racial identity is amorphous in nature for it can represent itself in superior or inferior positions; in positions of power or surveillance. Whiteness and blackness are social and ideological constructions that can be discursively configured. Moreover, Hughes’s in-between stance enables him to recapture his past homeland and embed it in his present landscape wherein his new personality is fashioned.