In 1931 writer Langston Hughes visited Haiti, where he met the poet and intellectual Jacques Roumain. Both were anti-colonial and anti-racist activists whose art focused on the Black masses—the U.S. Black working class and the Haitian peasantry. This talk by Johns Hopkins historian Minkah Makalani considers how Hughes and Roumain created images of modern Black folk as the focus of political struggle and artistic production, part of a larger current in the “New Negro” movement of the 1920s and ’30s, and explores how their correspondence sheds light on the politics of art in the 21st century.
Sponsored by Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau Art of Black Miami.
