A Cultural exchange to the poem Cultural Exchange by Langston Hughes

About Author

Langston Hughes is one of the most recognizable names in African- American literature. In the early part of the 1920's, he moved to Harlem along with a growing number of young African American writers, dancers, musicians, and artists that formed what is now know as the Harlem Renaissance. While there, Hughes composed a significant body of work, including volumes of poetry, plays, short stories, essays, and novels. Hughes used his writing to reflect his thoughts about political injustices, racial oppression, poverty, the black experience, family, and work. Hughes drew on his own perception of working-class culture and his life experiences for subject matter and character construction (Mullen p 256). His characters are almost always workers. They are strong and dependent only on each other. Hughes showed how members of the working class endure the hardships of poverty and despair. But he also showed that they have laughter and a strong sense of family and community. These qualities, though present in much of his work, are most prevalent in his first novel Not without Laughter. The character of Aunt Hagar embodied the spirit and beauty of the working class.

Cultural Aspect in the Poem

The poem presents two examples of "cultural exchange" between black and white America of the 50's or 60's: the COMFORTABLE image of Leontyne Price (where German light opera somehow drifted into the Negro Quarters of Mississippi and she enriched lyric opera by bringing some of African-American culture and sensibility to her performance of these pieces and the unacknowledge FEAR of White America that what they've REALLY taught to American blacks what they've really "exchanged" through the culture of white dominance that exists in America is all the values of DOMINATION and EXPLOITATION and as soon as African-Americans gain power, they'll start enslaving whites. Langston Hughes can be heard bearing witness to the rich resilience of his personal culture, and its universally time-honored humanity (Emanuel p 85).

The commentaries on this Caedmon collection (under the general catalog of HarperAudio) are exceptional in unveiling the roots of Hughes' unique conception of Poetry twined in Jazz (well-honed in the 1920s, long before Jack Kerouac hit the literary scene). The author's plainspoken homespun proves most astute in pinpointing the foibles of American culture in both the vested exploitation and brutal suppression of non-Western cultures within its midst, and around the word. Gathered from talks with the BBC in 1962 and 1964, the album's selections cover a great deal of aesthetic ground, from the fleeting everyday to the monumentally visionary (Barksdale p 45). Featuring widely acclaimed epics such as "The Negro Speaks Of Rivers" alongside lesser-known landmarks such as the tempest forecast of "The Explanation Of Our Times" and the sly, brilliantly satirical "Cultural Exchange", it takes little time for the author's canny folklore to gently reach heart and soul, as the mind is relentlessly engaged to consider all with a focused purpose (Jemie p 14). It has yet to be improved upon. In the ...