"I've Known Rivers": Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and the Emergence of Caribbean Modernism

Centering the analysis on three poems by Jacques Roumain-including two published in Haiti-Journal in 1931, the same year Roumain first met Langston Hughes, "Quand bat le tam-tam," which Hughes himself would eventually translate, and "Langston Hughes"-this article traces the chronology of encounters between Hughes and Roumain, calling attention to their shared affinities with poets such as Walt Whitman and Jules Laforgue, in order to explore the dynamics of influence between Hughes and Roumain, and to deepen our understanding of Hughes's contribution to the emergence of Caribbean modernism. Drawing on groundbreaking scholarship by Brent Hayes Edwards, Carolyn Fowler, Arnold Rampersad, J. Michael Dash, Michel Fabre, Madhuri Deshmukh, Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, Seth Moglen, and others, the author argues against a conceptualization of influence as mimicry, opening possibilities for research on Hughes's placement within the global cross-currents of high modernist and avant-garde influence in the New World.