ABSTRACT
Alain Locke explains in The New Negro, "With the American Negro, his new internationalism is primarily an effort to recapture contact with scattered peoples of African derivation." In terms of black expatriate writers who left the United States from the Civil War to World War I, since the dominant trend among writers was toward greater assimilation, and those few who did go were usually members of the African American elite, well-known politicians, entertainers, and some professionals. Along with McKay, Langston Hughes was perhaps the most widely traveled of the New Negro writers, yet travel alone did not make him an expatriate. It is also important to state that, once abroad, Hughes used the international forum to criticize United States racism, hence functioning in the traditional role established by slave narrative authors and black abolitionists. Hughes recognizes that despite the prominence he had attained in the 1920s, he was still a black writer whose social possibilities were limited by racism.
