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Hughes, Cullen, and the In-sites of Loss
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 74, Number 2, Summer 2007
- pp. 429-447
- 10.1353/elh.2007.0017
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay explores how sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as "a memory that ultimately rewrites history." I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Countee Cullen's "Heritage," one of which reveals a vested interest in producing identity by turning to the body as a locus of cultural memory, while the other ostensibly seeks to dismantle what it articulates as a fundamentally nostalgic and politically dangerous structuration of memory.