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Langston Hughes’s Poetics of the Masses and Blues Poetry

Langston Hughes has long been identified as a blues poet mainly because he had such a creative sensibility to modernize traditional black folk art genre, Blues and to manifest the spirit of low-down black folks. Recently, however, thanks to Callaloo’s special issue on Hughes, a new approach to Hughessocialist views has been being made in an active but careful way. In this context, it seems timely to re-read Hughes as a socialist poet and examine his blues poems in terms of Paul Gilroys concept of “a topos of unsayability.” According to Gilroy, black folk music genres has been shaped transmitting the “unsayability” of racial terror they had gone through as slaves. Therefore, semiotic expressions, which has often been viewed as having no meaning, can actually become the subversive space that challenges the established authority of white symbolic language as a dominant means of human communications. By looking into how Hughes embodies such unsayability of low-down black folks in his blues poetry, I like to indicate that he transmutes his blues poems into socialist comments that not only defy white racial discrimination but also confront black intelligentsia’s social demarcation against poor, ignorant blacks.