"Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation"--

Introduction: Langston Hughes in context Vera M. Kutzinski and Anthony Reed; Part I. Singing America: Different Voices and Genres: 1. Hughes, Chicago, and modernism Anita Patterson; 2. Jazz performance and Hughes's embodied modernism Michael Borshuk; 3. His way with white folks: Hughes and literary patronage Emily Bernard; 4. Distancing love in selected letters of Langston Hughes and Carrie Hughes Carmaletta Williams and John Edgar Tidwell; 5. Hughes's 1930s short fiction Gary Edward Holcomb; 6. Hughes and simple: across form and space to a political consciousness Sandhya Shukla; 7. Hughes's famous books, Ebony magazine, and the politics of civil rights in biographies for the young Katharine Capshaw; 8. Back-porch blues, black masculinity, and the rural Midwest Andy Oler; 9. From the sublime to the grotesque: red Langston reconsidered Juan Rodríguez Barrera; 10. Coalitional aesthetics: Hughes and the John Reed clubs Matthew Beeber; 11. Hughes's translingual poetics and pedagogy Keith Michael Green; Part II. The Global Hughes: Travel and Translation: 12. Hughes and the Haitian Revolution Philip Kaisary; 13. Taking Louise Bennett seriously: Hughes, gender, and transnational friendship Bernie Lombardi; 14. Hughes in Mexico Astrid Haas; 15. Hughes in Spain Evelyn Scaramella; 16. Hughes in Cuba and South America Vera M. Kutzinski; 17. Hughes, colonialism, and decolonization Shane Graham; 18. Hughes as cold-war diplomat Harilaos Stecopoulos; 19. Hughes in the Soviet Union Kate A. Baldwin; 20. Hughes in Italy Cristina Lombardi-Diop; 21. Hughes and the Shanghai jazz scene Selina Lai-Henderson; 22. Hughes's short fiction in 1930s Korea Jang Wook Huh; Part III. Afterlives: Home and Abroad: 23. Anthologizing the writings of Langston Hughes, 1925¿ 2020 Howard Rambsy II and Kenton Rambsy; 24. Hughes and the Black Arts Movement James Smethurst; 25. Hughes's simple story cycles in German translation Dorothea Fischer-Hornung; 26. Dreams deferred in Arabic: translating Hughes from the USA to Egypt Michelle Hartman; 27. A raisin in the (fallen) sun: a nuclear reading of The Black Pacific Etsuko Taketani; 28. Langston Hughes, queer Harlem renaissance author Gary Edward Holcomb; 29. Reading Scottsboro, Limited in the era of Black Lives Matter. Anthony Reed.