A Culturalist Interpretation of the Dark Brothers’ Sound Bitterness in Hughes’s I, Too, Sing America

Abstract

Langston Hughes is an important poet over the Harlem Renaissance who has contributed to the enhancement of the thematic profundity of his poetry in the association of African-American culture rooted in its literature, music, theater, art, and politics with his poetic production. Inspired by the original newness of his great poems, many foreign and Chinese scholars and critics have not only discussed much about his indispensable role in promoting dark brothers’ folk culture on the basis of their valuable explorations among his works but also made a mention of dark brothers’ lower social position as well as their unfair treatment in American society that has been dominated by their counterparts’ culture through the careful combination of his poems with the unbearable experience they have been suffering from. What they haven’t focused on in their respective studies of dark brothers’ discriminated culture is a sound and detailed discussion about the dark brothers’ empirical bitterness in the whole textual spaces of one of their academic essays or monographs in correspondence to one of his poems. To reduce the academic limitations in this respect, this essay will take one of his poems, I, Too, Sing America, as an analytical example to give a culturalist interpretation of the dark brothers’ sound bitterness.