Public Lecture: On Langston Hughes’s Black Leninism

This talk is part of a project, "Black Leninism: How Revolutionary Counter-Moods Are Made," which turns to the black radical tradition in order to understand the formation of transformative political collectives. Here, Flatley focuses on Langston Hughes, and Hughes’s engagement with the political and poetic problem of representing a black collectivity—first of all to itself. Flatley suggests that Hughes’s poetry speaks not only to fundamental questions in African American letters concerning the political import of black writing, but also to basic questions in the Marxist tradition about the role of representation and aesthetic experience in the creation of a revolutionary “class-for-itself.” And he makes a case for the continuing relevance of Hughes’s poetry to the present moment, when the representation and affirmation of black lives
 remains a vital political and poetic task.