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Reviewed by:
  • Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes
  • Jon-Christian Suggs
Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes. Edited by John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2007.

Had I been responsible for the title of this uneven but ultimately useful collection of essays about Langston Hughes, I would have gone to the movies for my model. I would have done that not just because he is so photogenic or because his story unfolds over decades and continents and people and events, one scene after another. No, it would be because there is a movie the title and "argument" of which sums up the picture this collection gives us of Hughes: That Obscure Object of Desire. Reading the twenty evocations brought together here is like reading twenty versions of a discussion between Countee Cullen and Alain Locke about Langston's charms. Is he or isn't he, will he or won't he, did he or didn't he?

Why, one is led to wonder from time to time, are so many in pursuit of this man who, truth be told, despite working in multiple genres over forty years, produced not one stand-alone text that captures his moment. Some of the reasons can be found in this collection which gives ample evidence of Hughes's appeal to scholars of various interests and, yes, desires. In their accounts Langston is religious and secular, a bluesman and a jazzman, diasporic and American, gay and, if not straight, just on the "down low," a proto-proletarian and a true Modernist, a Hispanofilo and a Slavophile, an essayist, a novelist, a poet, a children's author, a dance critic and a filmmaker.

The very best of the essays such as those by Kate A. Baldwin, Lorenzo Thomas, Michael Thurston, and Robert Young, combine one or more of these "Langstons" with a well argued and well-researched explication of Hughes's commitment to a personal leftist political agenda in the 1930s (although all of these folks miss an important 1933 essay on Hughes by Lydia Filatova in International Literature). The least successful tread old water, revisiting the blues or exile or homosexuality each through a monocular lens. Nevertheless, many of these more quotidian essays are useful and instructive.

This collection reflects themes and discussions that emerged at the centennial observation of Hughes's birth held at the University of Kansas in 2002 and so can be expected to be diverse in focus and scope. That accounts for the ghetto-ization into a concluding section of some very intriguing essays on Hughes's writing for children, on his interest in dance in black culture, his sojourn into Hollywood's ever-disappointing racial schizophrenia, and his career as an essayist over some thirty years. Hughes offered something for everybody, it seems. Each contributor stakes out his and her favorite or most challenging Langston but none attempts to make him all of one piece across the career.

In their "Introduction," editors John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar note that the volume is an answer to Arnold Rampersad's call for a more nuanced appreciation of [End Page 204] Hughes's complexity. Their intention is to provide a space for the newer methodologies of cultural and literary study to reinscribe Hughes for a new century. It is the virtue of the collection that it reinforces just such a complex vision and reminds us that such a project does not lend itself to "summing up."

Jon-Christian Suggs
The City University of New York
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