Hughes, Cullen, and the In-sites of Loss

This essay explores how sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as "a memory that ultimately rewrites history." I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Countee Cullen's "Heritage," one of which reveals a vested interest in producing identity by turning to the body as a locus of cultural memory, while the other ostensibly seeks to dismantle what it articulates as a fundamentally nostalgic and politically dangerous structuration of memory.