“Color Around the Globe”: Langston Hughes and Comparative Racialization

Jang Wook Huh, English

The Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, was not limited to New York but linked to Paris, Kingston, and even Chongjin, a port city in present-day North Korea. Langston Hughes visited Korea in 1933 at the peak of Japanese imperialism. This sojourn enabled Hughes to compare African Americans’ racial dispossession with Koreans’ colonial subjugation. Hughes’s antiracist poems inspired Koreans who were attempting to free themselves from the shackles of the Japanese empire. This talk considers this transpacific legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the dynamics of antiracism and anticolonialism within a framework of comparative racialization.

The New Faculty Seminar Series is a brown bag lunch event. Coffee and cookies will be provided.