Harlem

“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes (1926, reprinted 2009)

This essay on the Harlem Renaissance is in dialogue with critics and artists who question the need for an artistic tradition separate from the white mainstream. Hughes identifies a pull away from racial identity toward mainstream whiteness as the obstacle that stands in the way of the African American artist. He urges his fellow writers to build on their experiences, using Black music, dialects, and traditions in their art. “Harlem” manifests this ethos.

Harlem in Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (2011)

In a series of essays, Rhodes-Pitts writes about the cultural and historical significance of Harlem, using recorded history, literature, and individual accounts. These essays help contextualize "Harlem," enabling readers to better understand the poem.

“Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language” by Christine Dualé (2018)

The article explores Hughes’s vision of the American Dream by examining his poetic technique, relationship to music, and description of experience. Placing his work in historical and cultural context helps readers understand Hughes’s lens. Dualé discusses jazz, the American Dream, the history of Hughes’s Harlem, and poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred, including “Harlem.”

“Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz: Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred” by Bartholomew Brinkman (2011)

Brinkman argues that Hughes uses jazz and film in his poetry as a form of social and political resistance. Jazz, an authentic African American art form, contends with the white capitalist culture of film as a revolutionary action that can be brought into lived political spaces. Brinkman identifies bebop in particular with Black rebellion, claiming that Hughes’s use of it raises class consciousness and moves readers to action.