Resumo de Langston Hughes: Life And Works

LANGSTON HUGHES LIFE AND WORKS: AN ABSTRACT This covers a wide area of Langston Hughes? life, WORKS as well as influences. This WORK is a culmination of two lectures given to mark Black History month at the U.S Embassy in Freetown. And indeed the study was quite relevant and significant in commemorating the black struggle to assert their human dignity and for restoring their citizenry. Hughes? significance is enhanced by his spanning all the genres. For Hughes considered himself an artist who would venture into every single area of literary creativity to reach every reader for whom at least one of those genres has a special appeal. Hughes? appeal is further drawn from his commitment to Africa concretized in both words and deeds. Heeding Marcus Garvey?s call for Negroes to go back to Africa to escape the wrath of Whites in 1923, he went on exploring and studying Africa. The effect of this love and contact with Africa is sensed in most of his poems. In many he thought he felt the beating of the jungle tom-toms (African drums) in the negroe?s pulse. They thus conveyed a nostalgic mood with some infused with the rhythms of African dancing and music. Langston Hughes? articulating his concept of American Negritude in countless works helping new writers carrying their cause at home and abroad and editing pioneering Pan-Africanist anthologies stimulated a black renaissance. Hughes was central to this Harlem renaissance of black creativity as well as black intellectual liberation. From the 1920?s a decade of extraordinary creativity in the arts for African-Americans ensued from the slum-infested New York district of Harlem. An unprecedented variety and scope in publications thus came from blacks. In all literary genres as well as in other forms of art many African Americans worked out a sense of achievement never before experienced in their long troubled history . This creativity came from a common source ? the irresistible impulse of blacks to create boldly expressive art of a high quality as a primary response to their deprived social conditions thus affirming their dignity and humanity in the face of poverty and racism. At that same time African and Carribbean students in Paris and progressive young West Indian intellectuals and artists were reading the works of black writers, thinkers and creators from the diaspora and were taking the first tentative steps toward the Negritude Movement and in another the flowering of literature in the British West Indies. Negritude, a movement mainly of French-speaking black writers like Senegalese poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, Congolese poet, Tchicaya U?Tamsi, West Indian poets Leon Damas and Aime Cesaire emphasized a distinctly African aesthetic. The work then goes on tracing Hughes? life from his birth in Joplin, Missouri showing him as part of a social community of blacks to whom he was profoundly attached from early in his life. It examines his fractured family life with his father?s severance from his mother and emigrating to Mexico to seek a new break in life leading his mother to go out to maintain the family. This work follows Langston Hughes? life as his literary pursuits started whilst at Central High School in writing poetry and short fiction for the school?s literary magazine and editing the school year book. His arrival in New York to attend Columbia University had his heart captured by the seediness of Harlem The publication of his greatest poem ?The Negro Speaks of Rivers? brought his talent to the spotlight. He also got introduced to the laughter and pain, hunger and heartache of blues music. The night life and culture of Harlem thus lured him out of a boring and oppressive one year stay in college. Strong influences from the blues and jazz music started becoming evident in his work especially in ?The Weary Blues? and the volume from which it is draw, all reflecting the frenzied hedonistic Harlem night life and approximating the phrasing and meter of blues music. It also included poetry of social commentary like ?Mother to Son? urging blacks to remain tough to face the hurdles ahead. The varied influences on Hughes? works include Whites as well as Blacks. These include poets Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg and a Philanthropist Ann Osgood-Mason as well as black writers as Claude Mckay, W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson. Hughes, like Whitman and Sandburg, preferred writing verse capturing the realities of American speech and especially reflective of the varieties of black speech. He also fearlessly portrayed elements of lower class black culture including its sometimes raw eroticism which was unprecedented in serious poetry. Hughes took up various exciting occupations to keep himself going as a poet and to support his mother. He even travels to Africa and Europe ending working for months in a night-club kitchen and then wandering off to Italy The work though compact manages to represent the entire gamut of Hughes? work cutting across all genres. But a most interesting part of the work explores his creation of a humorous but fictitious black character Jesse B Simple who thrilled readers for years in his serial weekly column on The Chicago Defender. He is described as one of the freshest most fascinating and enduring Negro characters in American fiction It is in short a very absorbing read - a must for all who love good literature.LANGSTON HUGHESWrite your abstract here.

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