Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora” American Literary History 10.3 (Fall 2007): 689-711


    “I will argue that the archives of internationalism can be read for a sensibility––or more precisely, a poetics––that allow diaspora to serve as a critique of the totalizing pretensions of globalization. I will focus, in particular, on the ways that interwar internationalism might be read as a reformulation of diasporic eschatology…, especially through a range of bilingual or multilingual practices in literature” (691).

Edwards locates his project in several contexts, including contemporary debates on diaspora(s) and globalization. He begins by reexamining the Jewish scholarly tradition around diaspora, one that he says has been sadly ignored, to disorient the term’s connection with historical remembrance only. Rather, Edwards recovers a tradition connecting “the diasporic condition to futurity” (691). Through a close reading of Hughes’ “Letter from Spain,” Edwards demonstrates that the future may not be redemptive but does hold “a potential internationalist solidarity” among what is now called the global South.

Edwards’ argument rests on a close reading of the aforementioned Hughes text. Attention to the poem’s form, genre, rhyme scheme and structure of address is interlaced with historical details form the poet’s life. Deploying biographical details but not limiting himself to them, Edwards lays out the various contexts within which the ballad is written: the Spanish Civil War, Hughes’ work for various newspapers and a translation of Federico Garcîa Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. These contexts shape Hughes’ text at the level of content and form. Unlocking both is the key presence of salud closing the poem.

Outlining various readings the presence of this word allows, Edwards argues that it calls for a “diasporic responsibility [that] can only be signaled here at a distance, in the specific instance of encounter, through the specific interface of communication: the war in Spain and the particular Spanish idiom it engenders” (697, his emphasis). This particular vernacular moment consolidates the rest of the poem whose narrator is a black soldier writing home about his encounter with a dying enemy Moor soldier. The encounter is narrated in an English vernacular that is the “formal parallel”––not direct emulation––of Garcîa Lorca’s style. Content, context, form and structure of address intersect so that, suggests Edwards, “the singular idiom of “Salud” is grafted into the letter in a manner not just to carry over and commemorate that singular instance in Spain, but also thereby to transform the contours of English, and of “brotherhood” at home” (697, his emphasis). The poem is not a redemptive gesture, a healing, but the keeping open of a wound––the conscription of darker peoples in the logic and wars of European powers––and thus the possibility of solidarity at home with an internationalist consciousness.

A version of this brilliant and elegantly written essay was delivered a lecture during the 2006(?) Humanities Center Globalization Conference at Wayne State University. At the close of his talk, Professor Ken Jackson––himself very invested in “the religious turn”––prodded Edwards on both the overt and implicit “religious” logic his argument presents. The question was not taken as seriously as it should have been. Edwards’ claim that diaspora can, and indeed already has in the Jewish tradition, have an intimate tie to futurity parallels Derrida’s argument of the radical Other “to come.” The poem is, as Edwards repeatedly says, not redemptive but holds open the possibility of a new/ renewed diasporic consciousness; is this not solidarity “to come?” More importantly, Edwards seems to follow Derrida in an attempt to keep both the transcendent and immanent in play simultaneously. In Edwards’ argument, the poem is absolutely located in its historical, spatial and linguistic moment. And yet, the text attempts to transform a distant place (America), though a different language (the Spanish idiom) in the service of imagining a diasporic responsibility that is not yet available (i.e. that may yet come to be). The poem, in other words, takes uses its immanent context to build a bridge that will transcend the oceans.

And why not? I see nothing embarrassing in such an endeavor and I certainly don’t think that an elucidation of this logic undermines Edwards’, or Hughes’, project in any way. In fact, it may allow for a greater conversation between diaspora studies as articulated by both Jewish and global South scholars. Thinking through immanence and transcendence is difficult enough without limiting our tools and, as Edwards’ essay brilliantly demonstrates, one has to be immersed in the immediate contexts to even suggest possibilities to come.