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“Spectacles in Color": The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes
Sam See, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA English Department
May 31, 2007

Prompted by his description of Harlem as a “spectacle in color,” in this essay, I argue that Langston Hughes views early 20th-century Harlem as a drag performance and that The Weary Blues, a lyric history of modernist Harlem, similarly performs in drag. Hughes adopts this drag aesthetic to countermand the identitarian stereotypes of African-Americans and queers that were propagated by early 20th-century sexological science and degeneration theory. The poet accomplishes this critique by co-opting, rather than abjuring, the stereotypical terms of those discourses, however. Exploiting the blues and drag aesthetics’ chiasmatic feeling of laughing to keep from crying, Hughes historicizes the natural affect engendered by disruptively performing culturally-prescribed identities: his poems performatively dismantle pathologizing identity categories even as they perform non-normative feeling as natural.