"Child-Poems," Transnational Affinities, and Literary Activism: Langston Hughes and Rabindranath Tagore for Young Readers

Rabindranath Tagore and Langston Hughes had a transnationally shared interest in poetry that was directed at child audiences and took the experiences of children as its subject. Like Hughes's poetry collection The Dream Keeper, Tagore's collection The Crescent Moon does important anti-racist and anti-colonialist work, foregrounding ethnic histories that counter Western-centric global narratives and supporting vital notions of cultural pride. In the process, both collections not only confront child audiences with alternative ways of seeing culture, ethnicity, and power; they also pose alternative renderings of childhood itself that counter racist ideologies.