“The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain” (1926)

1. “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain” (1926) by Langston Hughes

2. The Rise of the Negro Periodical

3. George S. Schuyler, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” Nation 122 (June 16, 1926): 662–3: Central Arguments • Renaissance Nonsense: There is African Art and Africamerican art, and the latter is merely a subset of the former. • The notions of a separate and distinct Africamerican art are derived from essentialist assumptions about U.S. blacks and their culture(s). 3) Africamerican Art is not the product of African racial essentialism or retentions, but of specific American circumstances 4) Art does not eschew nationalism or internationalism, but it is, foremost, the inevitable outgrowth of a collision between certain socio-economic circumstances and “talent” (as in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth”). 5) So called “Aricamerican” art is not the product of the masses, but rather that of a Black cultural elite (who share far more in common with whites than they do with their oppressed brethren)

4. SCHUYLER CONTENDS There is American Art and Africamerican art, and the latter is merely a subset of the former. HUGHES WRITES African-American Art:Subset v.s. Separate and Distinct Talking Points: 1) How does Hughes position himself vis-à-vis the Nordicized Negro Intelligentsia and white editors? 2) To what is Hughes referring when he points to an “honest American Negro” literature? 3) What is the rhetorical effect of Hughes’s list of arts-to-come produce? What is the rhetorical effect does Hughes’s phrasing, “Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame”?

5. SCHUYLER CONTENDS The notions of a separate and distinct Africamerican art are derived from essentialist assumptions about U.S. Blacks and their culture(s). HUGHES WRITES Essentialism, Primitivism, Cultural Education, and “Inherent Expressions Talking Points: 1) What is the rhetorical effect of Hughes decision to embed the sentence “You aren’t black” in a series of question from hypothetical detractors who are nevertheless his “own people? 2) Who might these detractors be said to “stand for” as group? 3) Eternal tom-toms? 4) What is the rhetorical effect of Hughes’s musings over the Philadelphia clubwoman’s “lifetime”?

6. SCHUYLER CONTENDS Africamerican Art is not the product of African racial essentialism or retentions, but of specific American circumstances. Hughes Writes The Origins of Negro Art Talking Points: 1) What is the rhetorical effects of Hughes’s use of the phrases “Without going outside his race” and “But still Negro enough to be different”? 2) To what extent is Hughes’s claim that when the Negro artist “chooses to touch on relations between Negroes and whites […] there is an inexhaustible supply of themes” in (and out) of harmony with Schuyler here? 3) What rhetorical effect does the invocation of Clara Smith produce? What’s the mountain?

7. SCHUYLER CONTENDS So-called “Africamerican” art is not the art of the masses, but rather the literary production of a cultural elite. The masses, as a matter of fact, care and think very little about art. Hughes Art and the Masses Talking Points: 1) What rhetorical effect does Hughes’s use of the term “aping” have on his portrayal of “self styled ‘high class’”? 2) What rhetorical purpose is served by Hughes’s line of “Nordic” phrases? 3) What do you make of the implied claim of the phrasing “discover himself and his people”? 4) What does Hughes’s shift in register in the second paragraph accomplish?

8. SCHUYLER CONTENDS Art does not eschew nationalism or internationalism, but it is, foremost, the inevitable outgrowth of a collision between certain socio-economic circumstances and “talent” (as in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth”). HUGHES WRITES Art and Cultural Nationalism Talking Points: What rhetorical purpose is served by Hughes’s repeated use of the word “Let”? 2) What are the implications of Hughes’s shunning of white praise and/or criticism? Why do you think Hughes uses the term “colored” (given his use of the term Negro throughout)? 3) To what extent is Hughes call to racial awakening also a call to a class awakening? 4) What do you make of the somewhat paradoxical implications of the phrase “free within ourselves.”?

9. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Nation 122 (June 23, 1926): 692-94 1) Socio-economic factors do indeed play an important, and at times determining, role in the artistic production of the American Negro. 2) However, these very same socio-economic factors have, over time, given rise to (and perpetuated) a nearly irreducible cultural difference between whites and blacks that cannot be trumped by class alone. 3) The fact that middle- and upper-class Negroes both “ape” American culture and are ashamed of the artistic and cultural production of the black masses bares witness to this irreducible difference. Moreover, it is this inferiority complex that constitutes the “racial mountain” that must be climbed if the Negro artist is to discover himself and his people. 4) The cultural production of the black masses—which also constitutes their social fabric—has been and is being mined (with the advent of the New Negro) to produce art that has been and will be acclaimed internationally as separate and distinct from so-called American Art both because it is produced by Negroes who have resisted “American standardization.” 5) The cultural production of the black masses is indeed rooted in “the inherent expressions” of Negroes in America and in the “eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul,” but this “inherent” or “eternal” quality is not a function of racial essentialism. Rather, it is the product of historical circumstance—the manifestation of revolt against the oppressiveness of the white world. 6) Thus, “true Negro art” is (and will be) the product of Negro artists who are not ashamed of their race’s individuality, and who recognize that “true negro art”—art mined from the cultural production of the Negro masses—is governed by what might be labeled proto-black-nationalist criterion that need not and is not concerned with the criterion that governs the artistic production of “American Standardization.”