After Revolutionary Alliance: Jazz and Langston Hughes’s Midcentury Internationalism

While studies of Langston Hughes’s transnationality don’t often prioritize his involvement with the international Left, this essay takes up the question of how his global imaginary and his radicalism inform one other, examining specifically the fate of Hughes’s early radicalism—his early understanding of African American liberation struggles as aligned with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements abroad—in his post-WWII writing. Against McCarthyism and the United States’ militant Cold War nationalism, Hughes develops a jazz poetics that salvages a margin of his ideal of revolutionary alliance—a poetics courting plausible yet indeterminable comparisons between the communality jazz enables across races and nationalities and a leftist international coalition. Hughes’s post-WWII deployment of jazz constitutes a “midcentury internationalism” that reckons with the diminishing possibilities of asserting solidarity among oppressed peoples. Hughes’s midcentury internationalism should be understood less as valorizing irreconcilable otherness and unpredictable encounters than as offering a complex imaginary that might maintain some sense of those possibilities.