Langston Hughes's Poetry: Rewriting the American Dream in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

[ENG] During the Roaring Twenties, two opposed events took place in the United States: the development of the American Dream concept in terms of white privilege, and the rising of the Harlem Renaissance, an African American cultural and artistic movement based on the fight for racial equality and the inclusion of black people in the American Dream. The African American writer Langston Hughes was a key figure in this movement, and his poetry thus reflects those revolutionary characteristics of the Harlem Renaissance which challenged the bases of the ‘white’ American Dream. This paper intends to analyze how the ideology promoted during the Harlem Renaissance was present in Hughes’s work, in what ways his poetry represented the African Americans and how it questioned the mainstream US society’s perception of the American Dream. The main critical framework for the present study will be cultural studies, with a specific focus on the role of ethnicity and race in a selection of Hughes’s poems. The paper will examine the way in which Hughes reshapes the American Dream at four different levels. Firstly, particular attention will be paid to the poet’s rebellious and critical attitude towards the privileged white section of the American society reflected in his poems, and how that social panorama results in racial injustice. Afterwards, the analysis will center on the visibility of black culture and history, and how it challenges archetypal views about the American Dream. The third section will be devoted to the use of the African American non-standard variety of the English language and how this use contributesto the criticism of the American Dream’s notion of a homogenous culture. Finally, the study will focus on Hughes’s attitude about the Great Depression and the American Dream’s decadence, as well as to the way in which his poetry assimilated a more pessimistic tone than in previous times. In conclusion, Langston Hughes played a key role in the rewriting of the American Dream as an inclusive and achievable ideal lifestyle that should allowAfrican Americans to achieve freedom and equality.