Paper #1
Langston Hughes: A Perfect Fit at Lincoln University,
by Kia Brazier
Paper #2
A timed essay
on Langston Hughes' poetry
Paper #3
Your
Darker Brother "I am the darker brother." (Langston Hughes), by Bradman
John
Paper #4
Black Schools Must Change,
by Lester Fields
Background:
Last
May, as I prepared to teach a summer section of English 103, I read an article
in the Chronicle of Higher Education
entitled "The Theories
of College Marketing Go Only So Far at Some Colleges," by Ben Gose. I was
surprised to see that the article uses the image of Langston Hughes and the slogan,
"A good fit...for people who don't want to fit in." The article quotes Marlboro
College President Paul J. LeBlanc as "raving" (A50) over the brochure, produced
by the Atlanta advertising firm Mindpower,
Inc. Ironically enough, President LeBlanc wanted "something that would punch
through the white noise"(A50), "like something straight out of a Benetton ad"(A50)
to help the college raise its worrisome admissions' numbers. I was surprised to
read about Marlboro's decision, and I decided to ask my students in English 103
to read Gose's Chronicle article and to perform online research to state
their opinions about Marlboro's marketing ideas. My three goals were:
- To encourage student desire in a research/writing project;
-
To locate their desire, without articulating it or vectoring it myself, in a particular
assignment's format (which also had as one of its goals the further use and experience
of online research to combat the digital divide); and
- To instigate institutional
critique (in this case, what I initially perceived, but did not emphasize, as
the imperialist, racist commercialization of African-American culture by dominant
culture-to wit, what can be seen as the subsumation of a kind of "subordinate"
"cultural moment" to the whims of dominant culture's commercial desires).
Some background on the article and my feelings about it: Lincoln University is
Langston Hughes' alma mater (class of 1929). Of the four people used in Marlboro's
recent advertising (Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Janis Joplin, and Eleanor Roosevelt),
only Hughes, as Gose writes, is a college graduate. The article does not mention
two other dynamics, which are as important as the four's alumni status, that of
the uncritiqued exertion of cultural power and the appropriation of cultural capital
without acknowledging that this capital was produced by ongoing and historical
conditions of racism.
I have never visited Marlboro College,
but I have had the chance to visit many predominantly white universities and colleges.
Most of these dominant institutions are in a perennial bind when it comes to recruiting
African-American students. I taught English
350 , literary criticism, at the University of
Rhode Island a few years back, which had one minority student: Charles, whom
I had encouraged to become an English major. When the class was discussing assigned
readings by Henry
Louis Gates and bell
hooks , another student wondered "What is it that they want?" All eyes turned
to Charles, and a silence ensued, as if he would enlighten the white middle class
audience about the needs and desires of minorities. At dominant institutions,
this, oftentimes, is what is meant by "fitting in."
While
teaching at Lincoln, on the first day of every class, I ask my students to describe
themselves and tell me why they decided to attend Lincoln. Invariably, the greatest
response goes like this: "To be around people like me," and "So that if I get
a lousy grade, my work, and not my race, will be the issue." The desire for autonomy,
while filiating in a group that allows for particular, contextual mediation of
desire, apparently runs strong among Lincoln students. "Fitting in," in this case,
involves allowing the subsumation of individual and group identities into larger
class-bound structures. This filiation and voluntary subsumation, as the reader
can see, is clearly undertaken as a matter of choice. That is, this choice is
an expression of desire. Attending and differentiating between dominant institutions
and HBCUs are micro-political acts of desire, and of social critique.
I
am not appalled at the use of Langston Hughes outside of Lincoln; that would be
shortsighted and parochial. The University of Georgia has an excellent publication,
The Langston Hughes Review, which is the official publication of the Langston
Hughes Society , both of which promote Hughes' work to a large audience. Hughes
is widely anthologized, and his work obviously has enduring qualities for the
entire culture. However his work and his biography (including the commercial use
of his image to suggest a different course in his life) are two different things.
Here at Lincoln we have Hughes' personal library as part of our special collections,
and it is located here at Lincoln for specific reasons. Hughes returned here frequently.
He must have felt like he fit in. The canonical way that his work currently fits
in with the American literary tradition is a little different though, and has
its own history of struggle and subsumation (some of it not ethical and/or voluntary).
However, it is not only disingenuous to suggest that Hughes
as a person would have fit in at Marlboro College, it is unethical. Hughes tried
a year at a dominant institution, Columbia,
and a few years later, he entered Lincoln. Why did he do this? We'll never
really know what caused his desire to attend Lincoln, but we can say that he did
in fact chose Lincoln, and not Columbia, or for that matter another dominant institution,
like Marlboro (even though it was not even in existence). A question naturally
arises from Marlboro's ad: "Was Hughes a potential Marlboro alumnus (even in spirit)?
Was he a non-conformist, some kind of Harlem Renaissance slacker, a proto-Deadhead,
a long-haired neo-hippie living in a treehouse?" No. These are all marketing ideas
and images with a currency in the disaffected white middle-class economy (where
we find the efficacy of the Benetton
ads. It is a form of imperialism to include Hughes in Marlboro's roster of alumni
in spirit. Hughes fit in here at Lincoln just fine, in the same way that Justice
Thurgood Marshall did. Lincoln University is a unique place, with a rich history,
and a stellar roster of alumni, all of whom fit in, and sought their degrees in
order to fit in with the larger (and often hostile) culture. This characterization
of Hughes is akin to the imperial "normalization" of student desire on two levels:
- Directly, in a subsumation of Hughes' desires;
and
- Indirectly, in an over-determination of the "normalized" Marlboro
College student desires.
Once again, the correlation
between subsumation and capital production is clear. This process is made possible
by the normalization of desire's utterances.
Kia Brazier,
a student in my summer section of English 103, puts it best in her paper, which
was the first paper written for the course. The course met for six weeks, four
days a week. There were three papers taken through a multiple draft process, including
two research papers. The other two essays, the mid-term and final exam, required
the students to analyze a class reading assignment. Kia's paper is a representative
of the first assignment, which had several requirements: Read the Chronicle
article, investigate Marlboro College, investigate Langston Hughes, and write
a four page research paper, using online sources, documented in current MLA style.
Thinking about the digital divide and the reluctance of many high tech employers
to encourage diversity, I came up with the web-based nature of the assignment.
(The second research paper involved source study. Students read one of Langston
Hughes' books and one of the books from his personal library, and elaborated on
the connections between them. The students were aided in this by Hughes' marginalia
and the dedications to him found in almost all of the books given to him, which
are in his personal library.)
