Langston Hughes in Context

by Philip Kaisary, Anthony Reed (Editor), Philip Kaisary

Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage with his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation.

400 pages, Hardcover

Published November 24, 2022

About the author

Philip Kaisary is Professor of Law, English, and Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University. He was previously the 2023–2025 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor of Cultural Mediations in Carleton’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. Before joining Carleton’s faculty in 2016, he held a Fulbright Fellowship at Vanderbilt University, taught at the University of Warwick, directed the Death Penalty Defense Project in Warwick Law School’s Centre for Human Rights in Practice, and practiced law in the United Kingdom.

His publications include From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024) and The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014). A Spanish-language edition of From Havana to Hollywood is forthcoming with Ediciones ICAIC. His next book, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, is titled, Worlding Law and Literature: A Materialist Critique and Reconstruction.

Philip holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh, a master’s degree from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick. As a recipient of a Lord Haldane Scholarship, awarded by Lincoln’s Inn, he earned a qualifying law degree and was admitted to the Law Society of England and Wales in 2012. While in graduate school, Philip interned in the office of the first Capital Defender for the Southeastern District of Virginia in the United States and received an Attorney General Award for Pro Bono activities. Philip enjoys cross-country skiing, cycling, cooking, and jazz. Born within the sound of the Bow Bells in London, he now lives in Ottawa, Ontario.