Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred observes Harlem’s griefs and difficulties, but unli... more Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred observes Harlem’s griefs and difficulties, but unlike contemporary work about the neighborhood by other authors, his poetry resists the suburban impulse that swept the United States after World War II. “No Room for Fear” reads the Montage as a response to a postwar anti-urbanism that portrayed high-density cities as sites of physical and moral contagion, and exalted suburban living as a literal form of “social distance” that separated individuals by race and nuclear family of origin in the supposed interests of health and wellbeing. The article argues that Montage celebrates Harlem’s diversity as a good made possible only by the crowded conditions writers of social protest fiction deplored. It concludes by considering how Hughes’s defense of urbanism remains relevant seventy years later, when a new version of the suburban impulse trumpets the internet instead of the automobile as an instrument to “free” New Yorkers from dangerous proximi...
A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, ... more A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, which reflected the political outlook of both the far left and the far right at the time. Among these translations and adaptations, the one made by Dorothy Peterson for the Harlem Suitcase Theater in 1937 is of special interest. Although her work was intended as an aid for a free verse adaptation by Langston Hughes, this article argues that Peterson's ostensibly “literal” translation made a conscious attempt to link the late-medieval setting of the play with the faux-medieval mythology of the antebellum South, thus exposing the idea of Southern “chivalry” as based on sexual violence. Peterson's translation contains a racial coding of the original drama's characters that would have been immediately intelligible to the Harlem Suitcase Theater's audiences, and which was designed to make a culturally distant work immediately comprehensible and relevant to a specifically Afric...
My dissertation argues that Spain was as important to the development of African American literar... more My dissertation argues that Spain was as important to the development of African American literary consciousness as more studied locales such as Paris, Harlem, or Chicago. I argue that a literary idea of Spain gave African American writers a conceptual space for thinking about race in the past and the future, and for considering the intersections between race and religion. Drawing on the work of Arthur Schomburg, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Peterson, and Richard Wright, I contend that mid-twentieth century African American writers adapted a broader trend of Anglophone historiography that viewed Spain as a quintessentially "medieval" country (feudal, agrarian, and Catholic), set in opposition to the essentially "modern" United States (democratic, industrial, and Protestant). This historiography appropriated Spanish history to position Spain as the physical site of the pre-modern history of the United States, creating what I call "geographic temporality," where a physical space is associated with a specific time period.
A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, whic... more A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, which reflected the political outlook of both the far left and the far right at the time. Among these translations and adaptations, the one made by Dorothy Peterson for the Harlem Suitcase Theater in 1937 is of special interest. Although her work was intended as an aid for a free verse adaptation by Langston Hughes, this article argues that Peterson's ostensibly “literal” translation made a conscious attempt to link the late-medieval setting of the play with the faux-medieval mythology of the antebellum South, thus exposing the idea of Southern “chivalry” as based on sexual violence. Peterson's translation contains a racial coding of the original drama's characters that would have been immediately intelligible to the Harlem Suitcase Theater's audiences, and which was designed to make a culturally distant work immediately comprehensible and relevant to a specifically African American public.
Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred observes Harlem’s griefs and difficulties, but unli... more Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred observes Harlem’s griefs and difficulties, but unlike contemporary work about the neighborhood by other authors, his poetry resists the suburban impulse that swept the United States after World War II. “No Room for Fear” reads the Montage as a response to a postwar anti-urbanism that portrayed high-density cities as sites of physical and moral contagion, and exalted suburban living as a literal form of “social distance” that separated individuals by race and nuclear family of origin in the supposed interests of health and wellbeing. The article argues that Montage celebrates Harlem’s diversity as a good made possible only by the crowded conditions writers of social protest fiction deplored. It concludes by considering how Hughes’s defense of urbanism remains relevant seventy years later, when a new version of the suburban impulse trumpets the internet instead of the automobile as an instrument to “free” New Yorkers from dangerous proximi...
A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, ... more A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, which reflected the political outlook of both the far left and the far right at the time. Among these translations and adaptations, the one made by Dorothy Peterson for the Harlem Suitcase Theater in 1937 is of special interest. Although her work was intended as an aid for a free verse adaptation by Langston Hughes, this article argues that Peterson's ostensibly “literal” translation made a conscious attempt to link the late-medieval setting of the play with the faux-medieval mythology of the antebellum South, thus exposing the idea of Southern “chivalry” as based on sexual violence. Peterson's translation contains a racial coding of the original drama's characters that would have been immediately intelligible to the Harlem Suitcase Theater's audiences, and which was designed to make a culturally distant work immediately comprehensible and relevant to a specifically Afric...
My dissertation argues that Spain was as important to the development of African American literar... more My dissertation argues that Spain was as important to the development of African American literary consciousness as more studied locales such as Paris, Harlem, or Chicago. I argue that a literary idea of Spain gave African American writers a conceptual space for thinking about race in the past and the future, and for considering the intersections between race and religion. Drawing on the work of Arthur Schomburg, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Peterson, and Richard Wright, I contend that mid-twentieth century African American writers adapted a broader trend of Anglophone historiography that viewed Spain as a quintessentially "medieval" country (feudal, agrarian, and Catholic), set in opposition to the essentially "modern" United States (democratic, industrial, and Protestant). This historiography appropriated Spanish history to position Spain as the physical site of the pre-modern history of the United States, creating what I call "geographic temporality," where a physical space is associated with a specific time period.
A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, whic... more A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, which reflected the political outlook of both the far left and the far right at the time. Among these translations and adaptations, the one made by Dorothy Peterson for the Harlem Suitcase Theater in 1937 is of special interest. Although her work was intended as an aid for a free verse adaptation by Langston Hughes, this article argues that Peterson's ostensibly “literal” translation made a conscious attempt to link the late-medieval setting of the play with the faux-medieval mythology of the antebellum South, thus exposing the idea of Southern “chivalry” as based on sexual violence. Peterson's translation contains a racial coding of the original drama's characters that would have been immediately intelligible to the Harlem Suitcase Theater's audiences, and which was designed to make a culturally distant work immediately comprehensible and relevant to a specifically African American public.
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