When one thinks of Western or Eur-American travel writing, one thinks typically of white travellers voyaging to more or less exotic lands and reporting back. Within the framework of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, much of this writing has been considered either ideologically suspect or as "condescending veneration."
Whatever the analysis of "white" writing may be, the travel writing of non-Westerners in the West, and of non-white Westerners to any lands, is less frequently considered. In this paper, therefore, I will address one instance of this writing, Langston Hughes's short, virtually unknown, Moscow-published and never since reprinted 1934 A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia.
In 1932, the young Negro poet Hughes was hired by the Soviet film industry to help write a feature which would deal with race-relations in the United States. Once Hughes arrived, however, the project fell through, and Hughes spent the next several months travelling through the Soviet Union's "colored republics," those now called Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgzstan and Tajikistan. His brief book A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia deals with many aspects of his travels, including the relationship between cotton production in the US and Soviet Souths, the breakup of Central Asian theocracies, women, "the Orient," and more.
One of the more interesting aspects of this fascinating text is how Hughes sees Soviet Central Asia not only through "Western" and "radical" but also through "colored" eyes, eyes which everywhere see contrasts with the racial situations in the United States. In my talk, I'll give a general overview of the book, put it in the context of Hughes's broader writings, and more closely look at a few passages from the book. Currently I am preparing an expanded reissue of the text, and this presentation will serve as a tentative introduction to it.
Separately, I will briefly deal with some unexpected aspects of teaching "international" African-American texts in the African American Literature class.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.