"Any serious Hughes scholar will embrace and celebrate this diverse collection of essays. It provides an interesting and helpful new platform from which to launch the future generations of Hughesian scholarship.”––Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, author of Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes

            Over a forty-six-year career, Langston Hughes experimented with black folk expressive culture, creating an enduring body of extraordinary imaginative and critical writing.  Riding the crest of African American creative energy from the Harlem Renaissance to the onset of Black Power, he commanded an artistic prowess that survives in the legacy he bequeathed to a younger generation of writers, including award winners Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Amiri Baraka.

            Montage of a Dream extends and deepens previous scholarship, multiplying the ways in which Hughes’s diverse body of writing can be explored.  The contributors, including such distinguished scholars as Steven Tracy, Trudier Harris, Juda Bennett, Lorenzo Thomas, and Christopher C. De Santis, carefully reexamine the significance of his work and life for their continuing relevance to American, African American, and diasporic literatures and cultures.

            Probing anew among Hughes’s fiction, biographies, poetry, drama, essays, and other writings, the contributors assert fresh perspectives on the often overlooked “Luani of the Jungles” and Black Magic and offer insightful rereadings of such familiar pieces as “Cora Unashamed,” “Slave on the Block,” and Not without Laughter. In addition to analyzing specific works, the contributors astutely consider subjects either lightly explored by or unavailable to earlier scholars, including dance, queer studies, black masculinity, and children’s literature.  Some investigate Hughes’s use of religious themes and his passion for the blues as the fabric of black art and life; others ponder more vexing questions such as Hughes’s sexuality and his relationship with his mother, as revealed in the letters she sent him in the last decade of her life.

            Montage of a Dream richly captures the power of one man’s art to imagine an America holding fast to its ideals while forging unity out of its cultural diversity.  By showing that Langston Hughes continues to speak to the fundamentals of human nature, this comprehensive reconsideration invites a renewed appreciation of Hughes’s work—and encourages new readers to discover his enduring relevance as they seek to understand the world in which we all live.

 About the Editors
            John Edgar Tidwell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas and editor of several books, including Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press. Cheryl R. Ragar teaches at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and has contributed to the forthcoming exhibition catalog Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.

Contents

Foreword 
     Arnold Rampersad
Poeme pour Langston / Poem for Langston 
Cheikh Amadou Dieng / Mame Selbee Diouf
Langston Hughes Revisited and Revised: An Introduction by John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar

I. The Sacred and the Secular

Langston Hughes and Aunt Hager's Children's Blues Performance: "Six-Bits Blues"  bybSteven C. Tracy
Almost--But Not Quite--Bluesmen in Langston Hughes's Poetry  by Trudier Harris
Natural and Unnatural Circumstances in Not without Laughter  by Elizabeth Schultz

 II. The Public and the Private

 The Sounds of Silence: Langston Hughes as a "Down Low" Brother?  by John Edgar Tidwell
Langston Hughes on the Open Road: Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Question of Presence  by Juda Bennett
Gender Performance and Sexual Subjectivity in Not without Laughter: Sandy's Emergent Masculinity  by Kimberly J. Banks
Mother to Son: The Letters from Carrie Hughes Clark to Langston Hughes, 1928-1938  by Regennia N. Williams and Carmaletta M. Williams

III. Revisions Literary and Political

 "Luani of the Jungles": Reimagining the Africa of Heart of Darkness  by Jeffrey A. Schwarz
Langston Hughes's Red Poetics and the Practice of "Disalienation"  by Robert Young
The Paradox of Modernism in The Ways of White Folks  by Sandra Y. Govan

IV. Other Words and Other Worlds

 The Empowerment of Displacement by Isabel Soto
"It Is the Same Everywhere for Me": Langston Hughes and the African Diaspora's Everyman  by Lorenzo Thomas
Montage of a Dream Destroyed: Langston Hughes in Spain by Michael Thurston
The Russian Connection: Interracialism as Queer Alliance in The Ways of White Folks  by Kate A. Baldwin

V. Langston Hughes and the Boundaries of Art

 Langston Hughes and the Children's Literary Tradition by Giselle Liza Anatol
Circles of Liberation and Constriction: Dance in Not without Laughter  by Joan Stone
The Essayistic Vision of Langston Hughes by Christopher C. De Santis
Langston Hughes and the Movies: The Case of Way Down South by Thomas Cripps