Review: Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture

Mar 1, 2014
1 min read

By John Hyland

Thick descriptions of social contexts and nuanced close readings ... a tightly constructed study

W. Jason Miller’s Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture opens with this observation: “Langston Hughes never lived in an America where the very real threat of lynching did not exist” (1). Despite this fact, an in-depth study of Hughes’s relationship to these gruesome events that marked his lifetime has not been undertaken until now. While often acknowledged as a prevalent theme, no one has previously shown how the violence of lynching fundamentally shaped this titanic twentieth-century writer. Miller’s argument is similar to Abdul R. JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound Subject (2005), which analyzes how the constant “imminent threat of death” determined the work of Richard Wright. Miller, however, employs different methodologies. With thick descriptions of social contexts and nuanced close readings, he combines cultural studies, biography, and textual criticism in order to trace the lines of connection between Hughes’s literary production and the cultural formations engendered by lynching. The result not only illuminates a (if not the) defining aspect of Hughes’s oeuvre but also offers a model for analyzing the relationship between violence and the literary arts.