Proletarian Plays for a Proletarian Audience: Langston Hughes and Harvest

Throughout his career, Langston Hughes used self-consciously performative tactics to create artistic and public personae designed to attract the audiences he courted by synthesizing his shifting politics and style as a writer into an apparently unified whole. During most of his career, this practice was hidden through his mastery of the tropes of “writing race,” and only the sudden, disharmonious shift from a writer of Blackness to a writer of Proletarianism during the 1930s revealed the constructedness of his practice, as well as his careful work balancing his sincere politics with his need for paying audiences to believe he shared and supported their ideologies. This process of realignment began with Scottsboro Limited in 1931, but reached fruition after his year in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1933, and is revealed through his work on the uncompleted manuscript of the Living Newspaper Harvest. Both its Comintern approved form and its orthodox Communist ideology reveal how Hughes wrote his new radical self into being, a practice of conscious creation that he maintained throughout his career. As a result, this work—historically undervalued by scholars—becomes the key to a new understanding of Hughes’s entire oeuvre.