Book contents
- Langston Hughes in Context
- Langston Hughes in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Singing America
- Part II The Global Langston Hughes
- Chapter 12 Langston Hughes and the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter 13 Taking Louise Bennett Seriously
- Chapter 14 Langston Hughes and Mexico
- Chapter 15 Langston Hughes in Spain
- Chapter 16 Langston Hughes in Cuba and South America
- Chapter 17 Langston Hughes, Colonialism, and Decolonization
- Chapter 18 Langston Hughes and Cultural Diplomacy
- Chapter 19 Langston Hughes in the Soviet Union
- Chapter 20 Translating Blackness
- Chapter 21 Langston Hughes and the Shanghai Jazz Scene
- Chapter 22 Langston Hughes’s Short Fiction in 1930s Korea
- Part III Afterlives
- Index
Chapter 13 - Taking Louise Bennett Seriously
Langston Hughes, Gender, and Transnational Friendship
from Part II - The Global Langston Hughes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2022
- Langston Hughes in Context
- Langston Hughes in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Singing America
- Part II The Global Langston Hughes
- Chapter 12 Langston Hughes and the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter 13 Taking Louise Bennett Seriously
- Chapter 14 Langston Hughes and Mexico
- Chapter 15 Langston Hughes in Spain
- Chapter 16 Langston Hughes in Cuba and South America
- Chapter 17 Langston Hughes, Colonialism, and Decolonization
- Chapter 18 Langston Hughes and Cultural Diplomacy
- Chapter 19 Langston Hughes in the Soviet Union
- Chapter 20 Translating Blackness
- Chapter 21 Langston Hughes and the Shanghai Jazz Scene
- Chapter 22 Langston Hughes’s Short Fiction in 1930s Korea
- Part III Afterlives
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on Hughes’s friendship with the Jamaican poet and dramatist Louise Bennett throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The chapter approaches their friendship by way of letters written by Hughes to Bennett, through Hughes’s discussion of Bennett in his correspondence with other Black male diasporic writers, and by examining his discussion of Bennett’s work in a 1955 article on transnational Black migration in the Chicago Defender. While Hughes’s response to Bennett’s work, particularly his consequent laughter, alludes to his convoluted relationship to diasporic women’s writing, these sources reveal how Bennett’s Jamaican and highly gendered folk poetry influenced Hughes’s understanding of transnational Black experience and identity. In addition, by orienting Bennett’s life and work transnationally through the lens of her relationship to Hughes, the chapter also attempts to shift discourse on her folk aesthetic beyond national and domestic frames. Among other things, doing so extends the parameters through which we can interpret humor’s function in Bennett’s embodied performance of Jamaican folk culture.
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- Information
- Langston Hughes in Context , pp. 140 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022