“Negroes Were Not Strange to Spain”

Isabel Soto studies Langston Hughes’s Civil War writings in relation to two other contexts: the “hot cabin” of a Spain- and Africa-bound merchant ship, and the Soviet Union. In these writings, textual fluidity replicates the fluidity of racial and gender boundaries. For Soto, race, gender, and homoeroticism appear connected in a transnational paradigm that also expresses Hughes’s awareness of his racial liminality, which does not prevent his own “racialization” of Spanishness. Underlining the intersectionality of racial and male constructs, Soto affirms that Civil War Spain became a space where African American volunteers challenged white supremacist ideology, and enabled new representations of black masculinity now associated with military heroism and humanity. Without overlooking the racial paradoxes of the war found in Hughes’s works, the critic concludes that “[t]he spatial politics of antiracism, antifascism and (black) masculinity intersect, becoming co-constitutive in the Spanish context.”