Chapter 2 - Jazz, Performance, and Modernist Embodiment in Langston Hughes’s Early Writing

Summary

In this chapter, I return to Hughes’s early jazz-inspired writing with an eye to his crucial awareness of music and embodiment as combined within African American contributions to modernism, and critical to an emboldened new Black subjectivity after World War I.  Associations between music, the body, and Black subjectivity are key to conceptualizing Hughes’s Black modernist style on its own terms – that is, without only looking for points of correspondence in literary form with the work of his white canonical counterparts.  Thus, I root my discussion of Hughes’s work in critical understandings of jazz, Black musical aesthetics, and performance that privilege uses of the body.  As I argue, Hughes’s vision for a decidedly Black modernist aesthetic depended always on his acute understanding of the radical effects of African American performance strategies and his appreciation for jazz not just as an innovation on musical form but also as an embodied counterpoint to the discursive and the semantic as privileged modalities.