Havana Reads the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and the Dialectics of Transnational American Literature

Abstract

This essay reconsiders a famous episode of anti-imperial modernism, Langston Hughes' collaboration with the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. While the episode is often remembered in American literary history as an instance of the more famous Hughes tutoring Guillén in setting popular music in modernist verse, Cuban criticisms of the Harlem Renaissance show how the dynamics of anti-imperial politics, personal competition, and translation shaped hemispheric cultural practice. A comparative reading of the Renaissance and the Afro-Cuban revival underscores the importance in each of vernacular "folk" expression and experimentation. At the same time, English mistranslations of Guillén's work have meant that his ironic critiques of the Harlem Renaissance—as both a product of American racial segregation and a medium of U.S. cultural imperialism—have been neglected by Americanists who, in emphasizing this case of cross-cultural solidarity, have overlooked the misapprehensions that also produce diaspora culture.

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