Academic Review of Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture
- Dec 1, 2012
- 1 min read
From ResearchGate (originally published in an academic journal)
An important contribution to recent scholarship attempting to understand lynching within a broad American context.
W. Jason Miller’s Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture is an important contribution to recent scholarship attempting to understand lynching within a broad American context. Most analysis of lynching and literary responses to it focuses on the period between 1880 and 1920, when the number of lynchings in the United States was highest. Unlike other scholars, Miller’s analysis starts around 1920 with Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” By focusing on Hughes and his commentary on American lynching culture, Miller demonstrates how such a culture has had and continues to have an enduring legacy. Hughes’s marginalization within discussions of literary contributions to American lynching culture has persisted even within the recent scholarship. In addition to historical period, such persistence can be explained through relatively narrow definitions of “lynching.” Miller expands on received definitions, and explains that “American lynching culture” suggests “that lynching is a uniquely American practice that was enacted, sustained, and tolerated by a complex interplay of socioeconomic, psychological, racial, sexual, and political motives”.
