Langston Hughes’s “Rejuvenation Through Joy”: Passing, Racial Performance, and the Marketplace

This essay reads Langston Hughes’s “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” a satirical tale of passing from his short story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934), to explore how racial authenticity is produced and capitalized upon within mass-consumer culture in the interwar period. I argue that “Rejuvenation” offers a critique of racial capitalism in the age of the modern assembly-line by demonstrating the ways that race intersects with labor markets, class relations and commodity culture. In this capacity, “Rejuvenation” portends contemporary narratives of race, shedding light on the intersection of popular discourses of colorblindness, post-raciality and racial authenticity in the post-9/11 moment.