Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso

Abstract

In the spring of 1934, Langston Hughes published a poem called "Cubes" in the New Masses, the premier literary journal of the American anti-capitalist Left. Hughes had recently returned home from a year spent in the Soviet Union and, at the time of the poem's publication, he was at the height of his commitment to the revolutionary socialist movement. He was also thinking with particular intensity about the relationship between the expansion of capitalism and the spread of a racially based European imperialism. Like many of Hughes' poems from the mid-1930s, "Cubes" is centrally concerned with this connection between capitalism and empire—with the global system that had, over several centuries, produced the African diaspora. Within the context of these political concerns, "Cubes" offers a revelatory exploration of the international aesthetic transformation that we have come to call modernism. The poem is at once an innovative modernist experiment and a powerful critique of modernism from a black diasporic perspective. "Cubes" suggests that the revolutionary aesthetic practices of the early 20th century were symptomatic expressions of an expanding system of racial and economic exploitation. But the poem demonstrates that these practices could also provide artists in the African diaspora with an indispensable means of understanding, and thereby resisting, that system of exploitation. Before developing this argument, I want to contextualize my reading by describing briefly some of the idiosyncrasies of the scholarship on Langston Hughes and U.S. modernism. As we'll see, this history tells us important things about the ways in which this literary field has been structured—and how a reading of "Cubes" can alter our understanding of modernism itself.

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