Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T14:18:07.795Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sam See
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

Type
Cluster on Queer Modernism
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 798 - 816
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Baker, Houston A. Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benston, Kimberly. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Berman, Louis. The Glands Regulating Personality. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Print.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Carter, Julian. “Normality, Whiteness, Authorship: Evolutionary Sexology and the Primitive Pervert.” Science and Homosexualities. Ed. Rosario, Vernon. New York: Routledge, 1997. 155–76. Print.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Chinitz, David. “Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes.” Callaloo 19.1 (1996): 177–92. Print.Google Scholar
Dace, Tish, ed. Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Havelock, Ellis. Introduction. Sex in Civilization. Ed. Calverton, V. F. and Schmalhausen, S. D. Garden City: Garden City, 1929. 15–28. Print.Google Scholar
Havelock, Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. 1927. Vol. 1. Middlesex: Echo Lib., 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Havelock, Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol. 7. Philadelphia: Davis, 1928. Print.Google Scholar
Evans, Orrin C. “Modern Muse Presents New Book of Poems.” Philadelphia Tribune 12 Feb. 1927. Rpt. in Dace 92–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Garber, Eric. “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem.” Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. Ed. Duberman, Martin, Vicinus, Martha, and Chauncey, George Jr. New York: NAL, 1989. 318–21. Print.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Foreword. Wirth, Gay Rebel xi–xii.Google Scholar
Hemphill, Essex. Introduction. Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Ed. Hemphill, . Boston: Alyson, 1991. xv–xxxi. Print.Google Scholar
Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holcomb, Gary. Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. New York: Hill, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. Ed. De Santis, Christopher C. London: U of Missouri P, 2002. Print. Vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. I Wonder As I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. 1956. New York: Hill, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. Langston Hughes Papers. JWJ MSS 26. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lib., Yale U.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues. 1926. New York: Knopf, 1927. Print.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston, and Vechten, Carl Van. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. Ed. Bernard, Emily. New York: Knopf, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. “Harlem: The Culture Capital.” Locke, New Negro 301–11.Google Scholar
Jones, Howard Mumford. “Two Negro Artists.” Chicago Daily News 29 June 1927. Rpt. in Dace 125.Google Scholar
K[elley], W[illiam] M. “Langston Hughes: The Sewer Dweller.” New York Amsterdam News 9 Feb. 1927. Rpt. in Dace 91–92.Google Scholar
Knadler, Stephen. “Sweetback Style: Wallace Thurman and a Queer Harlem Renaissance.” Modern Fiction Studies 48.4 (2002): 899–936. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Langston Hughes + Poetry = Blues.” Callaloo 25.4 (2002): 1140–43. Print.Google Scholar
Lind, Earl. The Female-Impersonators. 1922. Amsterdam: Fredonia, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. “Negro Youth Speaks.” Locke, New Negro 47–53.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” Locke, New Negro 3–16.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Simon, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Mandelik, Peter, and Schatt, Stanley. A Concordance to the Poetry of Langston Hughes. Detroit: Gale, 1975. Print.Google Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
“Negro Poet Sings of Life in Big Cities.” Washington Post 6 Feb. 1927. Rpt. in Dace 89.Google Scholar
Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1972. Print.Google Scholar
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Park, Robert, and Burgess, Ernest W. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1921. Print.Google Scholar
Ponce, Martin Joseph. “Langston Hughes' Queer Blues.” Modern Language Quarterly 66.4 (2005): 505–38. Print.Google Scholar
Rampersad, Arnold. 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Print. Vol. 1 of The Life of Langston Hughes.Google Scholar
Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seitler, Dana. “Queer Physiognomies; or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality?” Criticism 46.1 (2004): 71–102. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject.” Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
“Under the Lash of the Whip: A Column of Constructive Criticism of Men and Measures in the Hope of Correcting Errors and Evils.” Chicago Whip 26 Feb. 1927. Rpt. in Dace 100.Google Scholar
Van Vechten, Carl. “Introducing Langston Hughes to the Reader.” Hughes, Weary Blues 9–13.Google Scholar
Vogel, Shane. “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife.” Criticism 48.3 (2007): 399–425. Print.Google Scholar
Wirth, Thomas H., ed. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. By Richard Bruce Nugent. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Wirth, Thomas H, ed. Introduction. Wirth, Gay Rebel 1–61.Google Scholar