On “Mulatto”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2011-01-06 03:49Z by Steven

On “Mulatto”

Modern American Poetry
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
Compiled and Prepared by Cary Nelson

From Langston Hughes (Twayne, 1967)
James A. Emanuel

This dramatic dialogue offers a tensely individualized conflict between father and son that is hardened by the vigor and scorn of the words and broadened by carefully placed, suggestive details from nature. The son’s adamant voice opens the poem, but is transformed into a passive Negro feminine presence exuberantly recalled by the white father, who feels half-pleasurably nagged in his fancied return to the conception and infancy of his son. The poet, employing the past awakened in the white man, leaves him musing and moves the growing child swiftly through years of hostile rejection by his white half-brothers—implying virtual estrangement from his father, whom he no longer reminds of sexual freedom in the Negro quarter….

A Comparison of Langston Hughes’s “The Mulatto” and Claude McKay’s “Mulatto”

2007
John Claborn

Reading McKay’s traditional poetics alongside his contemporary Langston Hughes’s open-form, experimental poetics brings out the specificity of the sonnet’s formalizing force. Consider Hughes’s “Mulatto” (1927) and McKay’s earlier 1925 sonnet, “The Mulatto.” Since slavery, the problem of the mulatto child disavowed by his/her white father-master has been a site of intense emotion and trauma—a problem that these two poems address head-on from the perspective of the mulatto son. Hughes’s “Mulatto” embraces a hybrid form structured by interpolations, multiple voices, and polyphony—in short, the poem is “mulatto” in form as well as content…

Read both essays here.

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