ABSTRACT
When Langston Hughes wrote the poem “I, too” in 1926, he was casting his mind to Walt Whitman’s meditative contemplations on the American nation in-the-making in “Song of myself” (1855). Problematising the speaker’s identification with the American national identity, Hughes relates a specific case of enforced discrimination seventy-one years after Whitman’s hopeful reflections, as his poem’s persona protests against a dishonourable separation from other guests at a dining table. Though his verse exposes the reality that there has been no considerable progress in American race relations, Hughes perpetuates the idea of plurality, adopting the same act of singing America as a performative protest against racial injustice and discrimination. Correspondingly, recognising that black and white communities interrelate closely in everyday American life, Hughes’ persona asserts his African American identity as he claims, “I, too, am America.” Known as the lyric voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes navigates Whitman’s optimism in the creation of a heterogeneous nation towards a more realistic dramatisation of racism in his short story “Home” (1934). This chapter explores the ways in which “Home” examines the political landscapes of racial identity and nationhood in its representation of how racism is a longstanding social issue in the American nation; and questions the problematic ways in which racism ruins the possibility of healing that art can provide.
