Abstract：Abstract: Langston Hughes is a leading 20th-century African American poet, but his 1930s poems have not received due scholarly attention for they are usually viewed as more political than artistical. This article, however, gives a reading to his 1934 poem “Cubes” to examine how politics interplays with art in poetry. It is found that elitist modernism as represented by cubism plays a role of conspiracy in the politics of cultural space, contributing to consolidating the western suzerain state’s ideological domination over its African colony, and that Hughes, by criticizing and writing back against elitist modernism, expresses his popular modernist poetics. Hughes’s poetic practice in “Cubes” reflects the pragmatic poetics of art serving politics, which he adhered to in the 1930s, and meanwhile embodies his life-long pursuit of the ideal poetics, i.e., “integrating art with politics.”
Key words: Langston Hughes; modernism; politics of cultural space; poetics
