Langston Hughes Radical Poetry

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Recommended: An Analysis of a Langston Hughes Poetry Essay

Dawahare, Anthony. "Langston Hughes's Radical Poetry and the 'End of Race'." MELUS, vol. 23, no. 3, 1998, p. 21. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GLS&sw=w&u=j079907016&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7 A54925292&asid=e71c3fdd2b21d0818e05994fea041e16. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. A large amount of Langston Hughes’s poems are centered around America’s nationalism and how African Americans fit into the puzzle of America. Similarities among people are what unite them as a nation and cause them to possess great nationalism. Furthermore, the similar features of a nation that people dislike unite people with internationals. Thus, internationalism is the bond of common hatred towards another nation. Throughout history, wars serve as the greatest …show more content…

In that, when one floods a nation, the other retracts. Nationalism most directly affects the upper class in America. Over time, the upper class African Americans have attempted to emulate the upper class white culture of nationalism. Whereas the for the lower class, African Americans have retained their unique culture which is expressed through jazz and folk music as some examples. Overall, this division within the black community has blinded the white community from the inequality of African Americans. The upper class whites sees the lower class blacks as distant savages in comparison to the upper class African Americans they encounter in their real life. Therefore, the issue of inequality is not only a race issue but a class issue as well. Since this literary criticism reflects Hughes’s works as …show more content…

In essence, the poem outlines America as a fantasy for a democracy but ironically contradicts it with America’s history for social injustice. Poor whites, African Americans, gays, and Native Americans are all put on the same level when facing injustice. The land that asked to be called home never embodied the characteristics of love and acceptance that home is meant to have. They different communities all share core desires for a land they can truly call free and America is simply an illusion. An illusion where the politicians and leaders are the greatest magicians of all time. The poem exposes America for its hypocrisy and invites it to live up to the ideals it publicizes to the world. This source will be useful in demonstrating how the issues of inequality included not only race but all classes and all those considered lower on the social hierarchy. I will have a paragraph dedicated to the poem “Let America Be America Again” and it will discuss the hypocrisy of the nation and how Hughes expresses how those who are not in the upper class white community are impacted by the false sense of democracy in

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