Thesis

The course opens with Gramsci because Gramsci named the terrain. Power in developed capitalist societies is not held by the state alone; it is held in the everyday common sense that circulates through schools, newspapers, pulpits, pop songs, and family dinners. Gramsci called that consent-terrain hegemony, and he argued that any serious movement for socialism had to fight on it — patiently, institutionally, culturally — before it could fight on the terrain of the state.

The Namboodiripad–Pillai book is deliberately an introduction, not Gramsci's own text. That choice matters. The course is reading Gramsci through a global South Marxist lens — E.M.S. Namboodiripad was a founding leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the first Chief Minister of Kerala; P. Govinda Pillai was a Kerala writer and party theorist. Reading Gramsci through Kerala rather than through the Anglo-American academy reframes him: not as a footnote to Western Marxism but as a theorist of how the colonized and working classes actually remake culture.

The man

Gramsci was born in Ales, Sardinia in 1891 — poor, hunchbacked from a childhood injury, and sharp. He worked his way to the University of Turin on a scholarship, where he was shaped by the ferment of northern Italian factory struggles and broke with reformist socialism. In 1919 he co-founded the weekly L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), which became a theoretical organ for the factory council movement. In 1921 he was among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I); he became its General Secretary in 1924.

In November 1926, Mussolini's Fascist regime arrested him despite his parliamentary immunity. At his sentencing in 1928 the prosecutor reportedly declared: "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." They did not succeed. Between 1929 and 1935, in prison, Gramsci filled roughly thirty-three notebooks — the Quaderni del carcere, the Prison Notebooks — with approximately three thousand pages of history, philosophy, cultural analysis, and strategy written under censorship and deteriorating health. He was released from prison in 1934, ill; he died in Rome on April 27, 1937, at forty-six.

The concepts you will meet

From the Session 1 Deck

Hegemony. Gramsci distinguishes two faces of ruling-class power. One is direct domination — police, courts, prisons, armies. The other is intellectual and moral leadership — the capacity to get the dominated to internalize the dominant worldview as common sense. The first holds a society at gunpoint. The second doesn't need the gun most of the time, because most people have already agreed. Hegemony is the second.

Civil society vs. political society. Where coercion lives in political society (the state, narrowly), hegemony lives in civil society — unions, churches, schools, newspapers, neighborhood associations, publishing houses, theaters. Civil society is not neutral ground; it is a battlefield. Whoever wins hegemony there shapes what the state can or cannot do later.

Organic intellectuals. Every class produces its own intellectuals — people who articulate and organize its worldview. The capitalist class has its economists, its op-ed writers, its think tanks. The working class needs its own organic intellectuals, emerging from and accountable to working-class movements, not defecting from bourgeois universities. This is a theory of who gets to speak for whom.

War of position / war of manoeuvre. In societies where civil society is weak (Russia, 1917), revolutionary strategy can be a frontal assault on the state — a "war of manoeuvre." In societies where civil society is thick (Italy, the United States, most of Europe), frontal assault fails; the state is held up by an enormous civilian scaffolding of schools, media, churches. The only serious strategy is a "war of position" — a long, patient siege of cultural and institutional positions from below.

Common sense and good sense. Popular consciousness (senso comune) is a contradictory patchwork — fragments of old religious teachings, bourgeois ideology, lived experience of exploitation, solidarity from struggle. Inside this mess Gramsci finds buon senso — good sense, the shards of clear-eyed insight that lived experience produces even under hegemony. The political task is to excavate good sense from common sense and build it into a coherent worldview.

Historic bloc. The blocco storico is an alliance of class forces unified by a shared worldview — a coherence between economic base and cultural/ideological superstructure. Revolution is the forging of a new historic bloc. The working class becomes hegemonic by assembling allies (peasants, intellectuals, marginalized groups) under a vision, not by winning a majority at the ballot box.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

Most of what passes for "culture war" commentary in 2026 is Gramsci read badly by his enemies. The right-wing strategists of the last four decades learned Gramsci — consciously, Andrew Breitbart once said "politics is downstream from culture," which is a one-line summary of the war of position — and then the left stopped reading him. Reclaiming Gramsci means recognizing that contesting the terrain of common sense is not a distraction from "real" politics; in a society as densely mediated as this one, it is real politics. Building a counter-hegemonic press, counter-hegemonic schools, counter-hegemonic cultural infrastructure is not an aesthetic hobby. It is the work.

Gramsci also cuts against the temptation to treat cultural change as instant. War of position is slow. Forty years of conservative think tanks, legal societies, campus organizations, and media outlets built the current hegemony. Anyone who expects to reverse it in a news cycle has misunderstood the assignment.

Further reading

• Primary Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed./trans. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith (International Publishers, 1971) — the standard English entry point.
• Primary Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, critical edition ed. Joseph Buttigieg (Columbia University Press, 3 vols.) — the most complete scholarly English translation.
• Primer David Forgacs, ed., The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935 (NYU Press, 2000) — a shorter accessible gateway.
• Essay Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review 100, 1976 — the most influential critical essay in English.
• Extension Stuart Hall, "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 1986 — how Hall used Gramsci to read Thatcherism and race.
• Extension Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso, 1985) — a contested post-Marxist extension.
• Biography Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (Verso, 1990) — the canonical English biography.
• Online The Gramsci Institute (Fondazione Gramsci, Rome) — fondazionegramsci.org

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Cabral's claim is sharp and unfashionable in 1970: imperialism cannot be understood, and therefore cannot be defeated, unless culture is put at the center of the analysis. Colonial domination is not only the theft of resources and the occupation of territory; it is the "permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the dominated people." To unmake that domination, a liberation movement has to do more than expel the colonizer — it has to re-found the people's capacity to produce their own culture from their own history.

That sounds abstract. Cabral makes it operational. The struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde was an armed peasant war against a NATO-armed Portuguese empire, and Cabral is explaining to an international audience how culture did real logistical work in that war: it held the movement together across ethnic lines, it disciplined the cadre, it defined what victory would mean. This is not a lecture about symbols. It is a lecture about the cultural infrastructure of a liberation army.

The man

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was born in Bafatá, Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) on September 12, 1924, to Cape Verdean parents. He was raised in Cape Verde during the devastating drought-famines of the 1940s, an experience that made him an agronomist: he went to Lisbon on a scholarship and earned his degree in agricultural engineering in 1952, specializing in soil science. Back in Guinea, he was commissioned by the colonial administration to produce the first agricultural census of the territory — which he used, in effect, as a sociological survey of the colonized peasantry.

In 1956 he co-founded the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC). After the Portuguese police massacre of striking dockworkers at Pidjiguiti in 1959, PAIGC shifted from political protest to armed struggle, and Cabral became the political and strategic leader of a peasant guerrilla war against the Portuguese empire that ran from 1963 until independence. By the early 1970s PAIGC controlled most of rural Guinea-Bissau. Cabral was assassinated in Conakry on January 20, 1973 — shot by PAIGC members acting within a Portuguese-backed conspiracy. Guinea-Bissau's independence was formally proclaimed on September 24, 1973. He did not live to see it.

The concepts you will meet

Culture as resistance. Cabral argues that a people under colonial domination survive, materially, because they continue to produce culture — a shared system of meaning, language, collective memory, ritual — that the colonizer cannot fully reach. This is not a symbolic point. It is an operational one: the capacity for collective action depends on a cultural substrate the empire has not extinguished. Liberation begins in that substrate.

Return to the source. In colonized societies a native petite bourgeoisie forms — clerks, teachers, traders, junior administrators — whose survival depends on proximity to the colonizer's language, dress, institutions. Many of them aspire to become the colonizer. The "return to the source" names the political act by which some of them break that aspiration and re-identify with the popular masses, their languages, and their cultural forms. Cabral is one of them. He is describing himself.

Class suicide. Because the revolutionary petite bourgeoisie retains the habits and interests of its class, it must commit class suicide — it must actively destroy its privileged position and be reborn as workers, or it will become the new ruling class after independence. This is Cabral's most-cited formulation and the one he was most insistent about. He saw it happening to other African liberation movements in real time.

National culture, not essential culture. Cabral rejects the romantic idea of a single, pure, pre-colonial culture to be recovered intact. Culture is produced by the living labor and struggles of a people; it is plural, uneven, and constantly changing. The "national culture" that independence builds is the culture the struggle itself produces — multi-ethnic, historically specific, tied to material transformation.

Culture and the mode of production. Following a loosely Marxist framework (but one shaped by his fieldwork as an agronomist), Cabral insists that culture is the ideological expression of a concrete material history — a mode of production, a form of social organization, a relation to the land. Cultures change when those underlying conditions change. Revolution is, among other things, a change of cultural conditions.

Tell no lies, claim no easy victories. This phrase is not from National Liberation and Culture itself — it comes from PAIGC's internal party watchwords ("General watchwords," 1965) — but it is the ethical spine of the speech. Cultural liberation is only credible if the movement tells the truth about its own conditions, its own losses, its own failures. Cabral's discipline is anti-triumphalist.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

Cabral's National Liberation and Culture is the clearest defense in print of why a liberation movement cannot outsource its cultural work. In 2026 that question returns in a different register: it is not empires that dominate the cultural field so much as platforms, foundations, and their aligned media. The "return to the source" in our moment is the refusal to let liberation movements have their aesthetics and their theory shaped primarily by the institutions that fund them — the grant language, the conference circuit, the branded-content economy.

"Class suicide" is also overdue for serious re-reading. The petite bourgeoisie Cabral warned about — the intermediary professional class that articulates a movement's message to funders and media while drifting upward materially — is now global and heavily credentialed. His question stands: are the people who speak for the movement still identified with the people the movement is supposed to win material benefits for?

Further reading

• Primary Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches (Monthly Review Press, 1973) — includes National Liberation and Culture.
• Primary Amílcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings (Monthly Review Press, 1979) — the fuller collection.
• Primary Amílcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea (Monthly Review Press, 1969) — earlier speeches including The Weapon of Theory (Tricontinental, 1966).
• Biography Patrick Chabal, Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People's War (Cambridge University Press, 1983) — the canonical English biography.
• Extension Firoze Manji & Bill Fletcher Jr., eds., Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amílcar Cabral (CODESRIA / Daraja Press, 2013) — over 40 essays on Cabral's continued relevance.
• Extension Reiland Rabaka, Concepts of Cabralism: Amílcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory (Lexington, 2014).
• Context Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guiné: Aspects of an African Revolution (Penguin, 1969) — firsthand reportage from inside PAIGC-liberated zones.
• Online Amílcar Cabral archive at the Mário Soares Foundation — casacomum.org

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

A protest song is a piece of portable political infrastructure. Florence Reece wrote one in 1931 — a single page of verses set to a tune her community already knew — and it has been on American picket lines for ninety-five years. Understanding why means taking seriously what the song refuses: neutrality. Reece names the terrain of the Harlan County war and insists that on that terrain, there is no outside. You are with the union or you are a thug for the boss. The song's power is not that it persuades the undecided; it is that it removes undecided as a position you can hold and still face your neighbors in the morning.

The song, in its moment

Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931. The National Miners Union was organizing against the coal operators. The county sheriff, J.H. Blair, was on the coal companies' payroll and led a force of deputized "gun thugs" who broke up union meetings, raided miners' homes, and killed organizers. Reece's husband Sam was a union organizer on Blair's list. On an afternoon when Blair's men raided the Reece family home looking for Sam, Florence wrote the lyrics on a kitchen calendar, fitting them to the traditional Anglo-American ballad tune "Jack Monroe." The song spread along picket lines first, recording industry later.

The strike that produced the song — the Harlan County War — was brutal. Miners were shot, jailed on trumped-up murder charges, starved into scab labor. A national investigation led by the novelist Theodore Dreiser (Harlan Miners Speak, 1932) documented the terror. The song outlived the strike. It was picked up by the Almanac Singers in 1941, by Pete Seeger repeatedly, by the civil-rights movement (who sang it through Mississippi), by the 1973–74 Brookside Strike (where Reece, then 73, sang it again for Barbara Kopple's camera in Harlan County, USA), and by labor actions and racial-justice protests every decade since.

The full lyrics (Florence Reece, 1931)

What the song is doing

The binary as clarity, not simplification. "There are no neutrals there" — this is the song's central claim and the one most resisted by its critics. The song insists that in a real class fight, an unstated position is not an independent one; it is the position the stronger side collects by default. In 1931 Harlan, to refuse to choose was to refuse only in words; in material terms you were already with J.H. Blair. The song does not create the binary. It names it.

Song as portable organizing technology. Reece's lyrics are set to a tune her community already sang — the ballad "Jack Monroe." Anyone on the picket line could learn a chorus in one pass. This is deliberate: the song is not a work to be performed at you, it is a tool to be carried by you. The measure of the song is how many new pickets pick it up, not how well a soloist can render it.

Authorship from the kitchen, not the stage. Reece was not a professional songwriter, a union officer, or a "cultural worker" by title. She was a miner's wife, a mother of nine, writing while her husband was on a hit list. Her authorship is a reminder that the American labor song tradition was held significantly by women at home — Aunt Molly Jackson, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Ella May Wiggins — while men were at the mine or in jail.

The song is open source. "Which Side Are You On?" has been re-written dozens of times — by the Almanac Singers for the New York City transit strike, by James Farmer and the Freedom Riders for civil rights, by Billy Bragg for Thatcher-era Britain, by Natalie Merchant, Ani DiFranco, Rebel Diaz, and the Rebel Dykes. The tune carries; the verses get replaced. The song belongs to the picket, not the author.

Culture as "return to the source," before Cabral named it. Reece used the song-form her community already spoke. The tune was Anglo-Scots-Irish balladry carried into the Appalachian coalfields. The genius of the song is that its authority is entirely inside the tradition it mobilizes — it does not require union organizers to import an outside aesthetic. Cabral would recognize this move forty years later.

How it lands in 2026

"Which Side Are You On?" is one of a small handful of American songs that crosses movement boundaries on its own — no marketing required. It showed up in Madison, Wisconsin, during the 2011 public-sector strikes; in Ferguson, 2014; on picket lines with striking Amazon warehouse workers; at Starbucks Workers United actions; at "Stop Cop City" forest defense camps; at Columbia and Barnard encampments in 2024. Each time, the lyrics get rewritten to name the current opponent. The tune holds.

The enduring provocation is the refusal of neutrality. In 2026 that refusal is under renewed pressure — the managerial register of most institutional communication is built around the denial that sides exist. Reece's song is a direct contradiction of that register. It is also a test: if your institution cannot sing along to this song without disclaimers, notice that.

Further reading

• Primary Florence Reece, original 1931 lyrics — public domain, widely reprinted; authoritative text at the Library of Congress.
• Primary Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields, National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, 1932 — contributions from Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson.
• Biography John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On?: The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39 (University of Illinois Press, 1978) — the canonical historical study of the strike.
• Film Barbara Kopple, dir., Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) — Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; includes Reece herself, age 73, singing the song at a strikers' meeting during the 1973 Brookside Strike.
• Context Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (University of Illinois Press, 1972) — the scholarly ground of the Appalachian labor-song tradition.
• Context Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard, 1996) — how Reece's song entered the Seeger / Almanac / Dylan-era canon.
• Recording Pete Seeger, American Industrial Ballads (Folkways Records, 1956) — early canonical recording; Almanac Singers, Talking Union (Keynote, 1941) — the movement's own recording.
• Online Library of Congress, American Folklife Center — Florence Reece interview and field recordings, loc.gov.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Saunders' book is the most complete reconstruction in English of an operation that most of the American literary and art world lived inside without knowing: the Central Intelligence Agency's Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950–1967), which funneled covert money through foundation fronts to underwrite roughly 170 magazines, an international concert circuit, touring exhibitions, conferences, book translations, and the livelihoods of dozens of prominent anti-communist intellectuals. The book's argument is not that the CIA produced postwar Western culture. The argument is that the CIA paid, at scale, to shape what counted as sophisticated Western culture — and that the consensus we call "the liberal intellectual climate of the 1950s and 1960s" cannot be read honestly without knowing who paid for it.

For the course, Saunders is the empirical proof that Gramsci was describing something real. The state does invest in cultural hegemony. It does so covertly when coercion is politically costly. And it is willing to spend enormous sums to ensure that the "free" intellectual field abroad produces conclusions compatible with its geopolitical interests.

The author

Frances Stonor Saunders is a British historian and journalist. She produced her first major work on the cultural Cold War as a Channel 4 television documentary, then spent the next six years expanding it into Who Paid the Piper? (Granta, 1999) — published in the United States in 2000 under the less quotation-friendly title The Cultural Cold War. Her research drew on newly declassified CIA records, the papers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom at the University of Chicago, and over a hundred interviews with surviving CCF officers, CIA case officers, and participating intellectuals. Saunders is not a polemicist; the book is patient, archivally grounded, and willing to sit with the moral complexity of intellectuals who genuinely believed they were defending freedom while being paid by a spy agency.

The concepts you will meet

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Founded at a 1950 conference in West Berlin, nominally an organization of anti-totalitarian intellectuals, the CCF was in fact run out of the CIA's International Organizations Division under Tom Braden. By the late 1950s it had permanent offices in 35 countries, a staff of professional bureaucrats (led by executive secretary Michael Josselson, a CIA officer), and operating budgets routed through laundering fronts like the Farfield Foundation.

Cultural laundering. The CIA rarely produced the content it promoted. It funded — through deniable conduits — magazines, conferences, tours, and grants that already served its purposes: to demonstrate that Western culture was richer, freer, and more sophisticated than anything the Soviet bloc could produce. The laundering was the operation. The artists and writers were mostly sincere.

The journals. CCF money produced, directly or indirectly, Encounter (London, with Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol as founding editors), Preuves (Paris), Der Monat (Berlin), Cuadernos (Latin America), Quadrant (Australia), Tempo Presente (Italy), Hiwar (Arab world), Transition (Uganda, briefly), and American satellites like Partisan Review. Saunders reconstructs the funding trail for each.

Abstract Expressionism as Cold War weapon. Saunders documents how the Museum of Modern Art, working with CIA-adjacent Rockefeller networks, pushed touring exhibitions of Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko through Europe as proof of American artistic liberty. The artists themselves mostly did not know. The curatorial apparatus — what got shown, where, paid for by whom — did know.

The 1967 exposure. In March 1967, the New-Left magazine Ramparts revealed that the National Student Association had been CIA-funded. The thread led directly to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Within months, the New York Times confirmed the full operation. Many CCF participants said they had not known. A small number — editors, officers — had known. The CCF was renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom (quietly dropping the CIA funding, picking up Ford Foundation money) and limped on until 1979.

The "not-Stalinist" trap. Saunders' most careful chapters are about the intellectuals who signed on sincerely because they were genuinely horrified by Stalinist terror and thought the alternative was a vigorous anti-totalitarian liberalism. Her point is not to condemn their anti-Stalinism; her point is that a serious anti-Stalinism that does not examine its own patrons ends up being the left flank of empire.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

The CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom was shut down (sort of) in the late 1960s. What replaced it is worth examining: the large private foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Open Society — took over much of the infrastructure, along with a vastly expanded commercial sector of platforms and endowments. Saunders' question does not go away; it changes vendor. In the 2020s the more productive version of the question is: what does it mean for a cultural field to be almost entirely financed by a small number of strategic philanthropic actors, and what conclusions does that field pre-select for?

The second lesson of the book is about how cultural prestige launders political alignment. The artists did not know. Most writers did not know. But the prestige their work accumulated was being pointed, by people who did know, at an outcome. 2026 equivalents: the AI ethics circuit, the climate philanthropy field, the "democracy" grant portfolios — none of them reducible to their funders, but none of them coherent without accounting for them.

Further reading

• Primary Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, 2000) — the book under discussion.
• Primary Thomas W. Braden, "I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'," Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967 — the insider confession after the Ramparts exposure.
• Primary Sol Stern, "NSA and the CIA," Ramparts, March 1967 — the exposure that broke the CCF story.
• Extension Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008) — the fullest scholarly account of the CIA's domestic cultural operations.
• Extension Joel Whitney, Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers (OR Books, 2017) — a sharper update focused on the Paris Review, García Márquez, Baldwin, and the later Cold War.
• Extension Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1983) — the canonical text on Abstract Expressionism and postwar cultural power.
• Extension Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Artforum, June 1974 — the essay that first made the argument in the U.S. art press.
• Online The Congress for Cultural Freedom papers, University of Chicago Library Special Collections — finding aid.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Hughes wrote this essay at twenty-four, one week after George Schuyler published The Negro-Art Hokum in the same magazine arguing that there was no such thing as distinctive Black art — that the "Aframerican" was, in Schuyler's phrase, "merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon." Hughes's reply is one of the foundational documents of the Harlem Renaissance and of twentieth-century Black aesthetics. His claim is that there is a distinctly Black art, that its source is the Black working class (the "low-down folks"), and that the obstacle to its flourishing is not white prejudice so much as Black middle-class aspiration to whiteness. The "racial mountain" of the title is not external racism. It is the internalized pull of white aesthetic authority inside Black artistic ambition itself.

The young writer

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1901. His parents separated when he was young; he was raised partly by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, a figure of deep Reconstruction-era radicalism (she was the widow of Lewis Sheridan Leary, who died in John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry). Hughes's early poems — The Negro Speaks of Rivers, written at seventeen on a train crossing the Mississippi — were already the mature work of a major lyric poet. The Weary Blues, his first book, came out in January 1926. The Racial Mountain arrived five months later. By 1926 Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, writing alongside Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, and Jessie Fauset, and contributing to the short-lived but consequential magazine Fire!! (1926).

The essay's political register matters. Hughes spent the 1930s closely engaged with the Communist Party and with Soviet-sponsored anti-colonial networks; he traveled to the USSR in 1932 and to Republican Spain in 1937 as a war correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American. By 1953 he was a target of McCarthyism, testifying before Senator Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee under duress and partially recanting his earlier political poetry. The Racial Mountain is the work of a younger Hughes, but it is already the poet who will later write Good Morning Revolution (Session 2 of this course). The aesthetic self-determination of 1926 becomes the political self-determination of the 1930s.

The concepts you will meet

The racial mountain. Hughes's central metaphor. An unnamed young Negro poet tells Hughes, "I want to be a poet — not a Negro poet." Hughes hears in that sentence the whole problem: the desire to escape racial particularity into a "universal" (white-identified) poetry. Hughes calls this desire "the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America" — the internal obstacle of wanting to shed your people before you have written a line.

The Negro middle class as aesthetic problem. Hughes is unusually direct about class. He describes the Black middle class as trained in "Nordic manners" and repelled by its own vernacular — the blues, jazz, the dialects of the Black South — which it associates with embarrassment and scarcity. The middle class, Hughes argues, cannot produce distinctive Black art because its entire aesthetic ambition points away from the material it would have to draw on.

The low-down folks as source. Against the middle class, Hughes names "the low-down folks, the so-called common element" — the Black working class — as the wellspring. Their music, their humor, their dignity under pressure, their "play" and their "pain" — this is the material of Black art, because it is Black life that has not yet been edited to win Nordic approval. The essay is in this sense an inverted respectability politics: refinement is the obstacle, not the goal.

Jazz as form. Hughes is not being general about the vernacular. He is specifically naming jazz and blues — the Black popular music that 1920s respectability rejected as low, corrupting, or worse — as the formal source Black art should be building from. This is a specific aesthetic claim, not a generic call to authenticity.

Freedom within, not approval without. The ethical posture of the essay is encapsulated in its closing: If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. Hughes is naming the discipline the racial mountain forecloses — a Black art whose measure of success is not white reception. This is aesthetic Pan-Africanism avant la lettre; it is a direct forerunner of what Cabral would later call "return to the source."

The essay as manifesto. Alongside Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925) and Zora Neale Hurston's subsequent essays, The Racial Mountain is one of the documents that defines the second, younger wave of the Harlem Renaissance — the wave that refused the NAACP's respectability aesthetics and built an art out of Black vernacular life. It is the founding text Baraka, Sanchez, Neal, and the Black Arts Movement would pick up forty years later.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

The racial mountain has not flattened. Its shape changed. In 2026 the young Black artist is rarely told out loud to "write like a white poet" — the respectability apparatus speaks in gentler terms: crossover appeal, a wider audience, universal themes. Hughes's translation exercise is still the one to run. What is the word being used, what is it asking you to shed, and which people would you be shedding to get it?

Hughes's second provocation — that the Black middle class's aesthetic is the obstacle, not the white public — has become more, not less, applicable. The cultural-prestige economy runs on a Black professional class whose institutional success often requires distance from the "low-down folks" Hughes named. The essay's political demand is unchanged: stand on the mountain, free within ourselves.

Further reading

• Primary Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," The Nation, June 23, 1926 — the essay itself.
• Primary George S. Schuyler, "The Negro-Art Hokum," The Nation, June 16, 1926 — the essay Hughes is answering; read together.
• Primary Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (Knopf, 1926) — his first book; the aesthetic the essay defends.
• Primary Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert & Charles Boni, 1925) — the anthology that framed the Harlem Renaissance's first wave.
• Primary Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (Nov. 1926) — single issue, ed. Thurman; Hughes, Hurston, Nugent; the self-publishing answer to mainstream Black journals.
• Biography Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1986, 1988) — the canonical biography.
• Extension Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1987) — a foundational reading of Hughes within Black modernism.
• Online Academy of American Poets Hughes archive — poets.org.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Brecht is writing from exile in Denmark, addressing an international writers' congress convened under bombs in Spain. Fascism has taken power in Germany, Italy, and Portugal; Franco's forces are shelling Madrid. The Congress asks its writers to "defend culture." Brecht's speech narrows that phrase until it can do political work. You cannot defend culture by deploring barbarism as an ethical abomination. Barbarism has a material source — the economic crisis of capitalism — and a cultural defense that refuses to name that source is useless. He who fights fascism without fighting capitalism is not fighting fascism. The sentence has been attached to this speech because the speech is where Brecht makes the argument most compactly.

The writer in exile

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, on February 10, 1898. He had already reshaped German-language theater by his late twenties — The Threepenny Opera (with Kurt Weill, 1928) was a hit that paid his rent and marked him as a political target. In February 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht fled Germany. He spent fifteen years in exile — Denmark until 1939, Sweden, Finland, then the United States from 1941 to 1947. In Los Angeles he wrote The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In October 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee called him to testify; he left the United States the next day, eventually settling in East Berlin where he founded the Berliner Ensemble in 1949. He died on August 14, 1956. He did not attend the 1937 Paris Congress in person; the speech was sent and read by colleagues.

Brecht is also the twentieth century's most consequential theorist of politically serious theater — epic theater, the Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement or alienation effect) — methods designed to break the spectator out of emotional identification and into political thought. His aesthetic method and his political argument are the same argument. Fascism relies on affective identification; epic theater trains the audience against it.

The concepts you will meet

Barbarism as political-economic, not ethical. The Congress's language of "defending culture against barbarism" risks treating fascism as a moral aberration — something outside the normal course of civilization. Brecht refuses that framing. Barbarism is the emergency response of capital under crisis. To defend culture against barbarism without defending culture against the economic system that produced barbarism is to prepare for the next wave.

Culture as material infrastructure. This is the line the course turns on. Brecht treats culture as a physical thing — presses, theaters, typewriters, paper, houses, streets. Fascists burn books because books are objects and buildings where meaning is assembled. A defense of culture that is not prepared to defend culture's material base — the labor, the workshops, the buildings, the publishers — is decorative.

The writers' choice. The speech is delivered to a very specific audience: liberal, social-democratic, and communist writers who had come together to articulate an anti-fascist front. Brecht is applying pressure inside that alliance. He is not accusing his colleagues of sympathy with fascism; he is insisting that if the front does not name capitalism it will not hold.

Estrangement as anti-fascist aesthetics. Brecht's theater method — the Verfremdungseffekt — is the aesthetic companion to this political argument. Fascism rises on emotional identification: the leader is the people, the people are the nation, tears are evidence, feeling is authorization. Epic theater breaks identification. It shows the audience the mechanism, the gestus, the frame. It refuses catharsis. This is antifascist art at the level of form.

Internationalism under fire. The Paris congress was explicitly international — Latin American writers (Neruda, Vallejo, Guillén), African-American writers (Langston Hughes was there), European, Soviet. Brecht writes from exile in Denmark. His argument is that the culture being defended is not German, not French, not Soviet — it is the shared material of workers and writers across the borders fascism wants to harden.

Writing the truth, five difficulties. The 1937 Paris speech sits in a body of work Brecht was producing under exile. The essay Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth (1935) is its companion piece; read them together. They define Brecht's practical program for an antifascist writer: the courage to write the truth, the intelligence to recognize it, the skill to make it usable, the judgment about whom to hand it to, and the cunning to spread it where it cannot be suppressed.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

Brecht's demand — name capitalism when you name fascism — is the one most flinched from in current liberal antifascism. In 2026 the flinch takes familiar forms: authoritarianism, illiberal democracy, the far right, democratic backsliding. Each of these terms is useful. None of them answer Brecht's question. The question is: what economic order produces the constituency, and what economic alternative would demobilize that constituency? A defense of democracy that cannot answer that is running the 1937 exercise in reverse.

Brecht's aesthetic discipline is also newly relevant. Platform media trains affective identification at industrial scale. The Brechtian move — break identification, show the mechanism, estrange the audience from its own emotional response — is a countermeasure, not a style choice. Every public-facing piece of work RI ships tries to honor some version of this discipline: show the apparatus, name the funder, mark the editorial frame.

Further reading

• Primary Bertolt Brecht, "A Necessary Observation on the Struggle Against Barbarism" (1937) — anthologized in Willett & Mannheim, eds., Brecht on Art and Politics (Methuen, 2003).
• Primary Bertolt Brecht, "Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth" (1935) — the essay that sets up the 1937 speech; in the same Willett collection.
• Primary John Willett, ed. & trans., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (Hill & Wang, 1964) — the canonical English collection; includes A Short Organum for the Theatre.
• Primary Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, eds. Willett & Manheim (Routledge, 1976) — including To Those Born Later (1939) and the Svendborg Poems.
• Context Stephen Spender, World Within World (1951), Part IV — firsthand account of the 1937 Writers' Congress in Valencia and Madrid.
• Biography Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (Bloomsbury, 2014) — the fullest recent biography.
• Extension Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (Verso, 1998) — a strong theoretical reading of Brecht's politics for a contemporary left.
• Online Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin — adk.de.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Jordan's essay is a demolition job and a rebuilding job, performed in a single argument. The demolition: what the American academy teaches as "American poetry" — the tradition of Pound, Eliot, and the New Critics — is not actually American. It is an Anglo-European import, formalist, hostile to democracy, and politically pro-fascist at its fountainhead. The rebuilding: the actual American poetic tradition begins with Walt Whitman (for all his contradictions) and is carried forward today by exactly the writers the academy has segregated out of the category "American" — Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, Agostinho Neto, and the poets working in ordinary English in community rooms, classrooms, and picket lines. A people's poetry has always been the American poetry. The New Critics wrote it out.

The writer

June Millicent Jordan was born in Harlem Hospital on July 9, 1936, to Mildred Fisher (from Panama) and Granville Ivanhoe Jordan (from Jamaica). She grew up in Brooklyn, attended Barnard and the University of Chicago, and published her first poems in the early 1960s. Across forty years she wrote more than twenty-five books — poetry, essays, children's books, a libretto for John Adams (I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, 1995) — and taught at City College, SUNY Stony Brook, Yale, and finally the University of California, Berkeley (1989–2002). At Berkeley she founded Poetry for the People, a program that trained undergraduates not just to write poetry but to organize and perform it in the prisons, housing projects, and high schools of the Bay Area. The program is the operationalization of the essay. Jordan died of breast cancer in Berkeley on June 14, 2002.

The concepts you will meet

The two lineages of "American poetry." Jordan's structural claim: the academy's "American poetry" is really Anglo-European Modernism acclimated to American syllabi. Its founding figures are Ezra Pound (whose fascism Jordan refuses to soften) and T.S. Eliot (who repatriated himself to England and monarchism). The other lineage — the actually American — starts with Whitman, runs through Hughes, Neruda, Guillén, Neto, and has been taught as a separate, lesser, "political" or "ethnic" category for a century.

Walt Whitman, with his contradictions. Jordan does not sanitize Whitman. She names his nineteenth-century racism, his contradictory writings on race and empire, his obvious failures of the ideal he was announcing. She then insists: the democratic form he opened — the long line, first-person direct address, the catalog of the specific, the refusal of metrical closure, the willingness to name body and place — is still the form a democratic poetry must build from. The form is bigger than the man.

People's poetry, defined. For Jordan, people's poetry is not "poetry about ordinary people" and it is not "simplified poetry." It is poetry whose formal choices make it useful — readable aloud in rooms that are not seminar rooms, passable from stranger to stranger, adaptable to the occasion. Formal clarity without formal surrender. Jordan's model is Whitman, and also Hughes, and also the students in her Berkeley classes.

Pan-American lineage. Jordan performs a continental re-drawing of the canon. Pablo Neruda (Chile) and Nicolás Guillén (Cuba) and Agostinho Neto (Angola) are, in her reading, inheritors of Whitman's aesthetic more faithfully than any poet in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. This is an argument with teeth: it refuses the U.S. academy's habit of treating Spanish-language or African poetry as "world literature" while reserving "American poetry" for a small Anglo-European circle.

The New Critics as gatekeepers. The essay names the operation by name. The New Criticism of Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren — with its insistence on the poem as autonomous formal object, its hostility to biographical and political reading, its canonization of Pound and Eliot — constituted itself as "objective" while performing one of the most explicitly ideological acts of canon formation in twentieth-century letters. Jordan is calling it out by name, in 1980, from inside the academy.

Democracy as aesthetic. The deeper claim: "democratic" is not only a political adjective but a formal one. A democratic poem is one built to be read aloud in public, to travel, to be learned by people who are not paid to read poetry. The refusal of that form is a political refusal. The anti-Whitman canon is not neutral; it is anti-democratic at the level of prosody.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

The essay describes an operation — academic canon-formation as political gate-keeping — that still runs, in different institutional clothing. In 2026 the gatekeepers are not only English departments but also prize committees, publishers, algorithms, and literary-adjacent institutions. Jordan's test still works: what does the room consider "serious"? Who does that definition of serious exclude? What are the formal signatures of the excluded work, and why are they coded as "political" or "accessible" rather than as craft?

Jordan also provides the clearest practical model in the course. Poetry for the People was not an aesthetic theory; it was a program with a syllabus, student teachers, community partnerships, and a publishing house. If The Artist Must Take Sides is the course's question, Poetry for the People is one of the answers with receipts.

Further reading

• Primary June Jordan, "For the Sake of a People's Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us," in Civil Wars: Selected Essays 1963–1980 (Beacon Press, 1981).
• Primary June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (Basic/Civitas, 2002) — posthumous essay collection.
• Primary June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon, 2005) — the whole poetic output.
• Pedagogy June Jordan & the Poetry for the People Collective, June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (Routledge, 1995) — the syllabus in book form.
• Primary Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass — the 1855 first edition is the one Jordan's argument is built on.
• Extension Pablo Neruda, Canto General (1950) — the text Jordan names as the fullest Pan-American extension of Whitman.
• Extension Nicolás Guillén, Sóngoro Cosongo y otros poemas (1931); Langston Hughes translated much of Guillén; Jordan reads them as a pair.
• Online The June Jordan Archive, Harvard Schlesinger Library — schlesinger library.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

OSPAAAL is what a cultural cold-war counter-infrastructure looks like when it is built from Havana instead of from Washington. For roughly twenty-four years, an organization based at the Cuban state's expense produced a body of graphic design — hundreds of posters, across Arabic / Spanish / French / English, distributed by post to more than eighty countries inside a single folded magazine — that articulated a coherent anti-imperialist visual language for the Global South. If the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Saunders, Session 1 Source 04) is what happens when a superpower buys a cultural field, OSPAAAL is what happens when a small socialist state builds one on the opposite hypothesis: that liberation movements from Angola to Vietnam to Puerto Rico share an enemy, share a vocabulary, and can share a design system.

The organization

The Tricontinental Conference convened in Havana in January 1966, bringing together delegates from eighty-two countries under the banner of "anti-imperialist solidarity." The conference gave birth to the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina — OSPAAAL — which took as its task the political and cultural infrastructure of what Che Guevara, in his Message to the Tricontinental (April 1967), called "two, three, many Vietnams." Its main publication, Tricontinental Magazine, began in 1967 and ran (with gaps) until 2019. Folded inside most issues was a full-color poster — produced by OSPAAAL's in-house design team — that the reader was instructed to unfold and display.

Designers who worked under the OSPAAAL mark included Alfredo Rostgaard (first art director), Félix Beltrán, Olivio Martínez, Rafael Morante, Asela Pérez, Jesús Forjans, and others. Many came up in the 1960s ICAIC film-poster tradition, which fed directly into the OSPAAAL graphic vocabulary. The designers did not usually sign their work; the marks attributed to individuals have mostly been recovered by archival work from the 1990s onward.

Armed by Design (Interference Archive / Common Notions, 2015; reprinted 2017) is the English-language anthology of this output: essays, interviews, and reproductions of over 150 posters. Interference Archive, a volunteer-run archive of social-movement culture in Brooklyn, co-produced the book as part of its long practice of open-access movement archival work.

The concepts you will meet

Tricontinentalism. Not a synonym for Third-Worldism and not reducible to Pan-Africanism or Bolivarianism. Tricontinentalism is the explicit attempt, led from Havana, to assemble a single political-cultural front across Africa, Asia, and Latin America — on the premise that anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles on those three continents share an enemy (U.S. and European imperialism and their local proxies) and therefore must share an infrastructure. OSPAAAL is the design department of that premise.

Distribution as the artwork. The poster is not the final object; the poster-in-the-magazine-in-the-envelope-in-the-mailroom-in-Algiers is the final object. OSPAAAL's posters were folded, posted, opened half-way around the world, and pinned to walls in organizing offices, student unions, and living rooms. The graphic design is optimized for that trip. Bold shapes survive the folds. Flat colors reproduce on cheap paper. Translated captions land in whichever language the receiving organizer speaks.

Multilingual by design. Most OSPAAAL posters carry the same title in four languages — Spanish, English, French, Arabic — run vertically or stacked. This is not decoration. It is a distribution protocol. A single poster printed in Havana becomes usable in San Juan, Dakar, Beirut, and Bogotá without reprinting. This is what a shared Global South cultural commons looks like at a typographic level.

Collective, not individual, authorship. The designers' names were mostly absent from the published posters. Attribution has been reconstructed after the fact by archivists — notably by Lincoln Cushing and by Interference Archive. The political claim of anonymity was that the poster belonged to the movement it served, not to the designer it paid.

A shared visual vocabulary. Across designers and decades, OSPAAAL posters share a family resemblance: flat saturated color fields (magenta, cyan, orange, green, black), silhouettes with minimal modeling, photomontage collaged against bold planes, type used structurally rather than decoratively. The vocabulary fused Soviet constructivist heritage, Cuban ICAIC film-poster practice, Mexican print radicalism, and contemporary U.S. pop and psychedelia. It became the de facto graphic language of anti-imperialism for a generation.

Direct confrontation with the Cultural Cold War. OSPAAAL was the explicit counter-program to what Saunders describes in The Cultural Cold War. While the CIA was buying Abstract Expressionism tours and funding Encounter, Havana was printing solidarity posters with Angela Davis, Ho Chi Minh, Amílcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, and the Palestinian fedayeen — and mailing them for the price of postage. The posters are part of the same argument Session 1 is building.

Key works & passages

How it lands in 2026

OSPAAAL as an organization effectively ceased operating in 2019; the Cuban state discontinued Tricontinental in its original form that year. The aesthetic, distribution logic, and political premise it embodied remain directly useful. The poster networks coming out of Palestine solidarity work in 2023–2025, Land Back graphic practice, the abolition design vocabulary of the 2020 uprisings, and the Stop Cop City / Defend the Forest poster circuit all draw — knowingly or unknowingly — on the OSPAAAL system: flat color, silhouette, multilingual caption, printable on cheap paper, portable by mail or PDF.

The harder OSPAAAL question for 2026 is distribution. The magazine-in-the-envelope worked because the postal system was the network. In the platform era, the equivalent infrastructure is contested, compromised, and expensive. A studio that wants to inherit OSPAAAL's aesthetic without inheriting its distribution discipline is inheriting half the answer.

Further reading

• Primary Interference Archive & OSPAAAL contributors, Armed by Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba's Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (Common Notions / Interference Archive, 2015).
• Primary Tricontinental Magazine — archive of back issues at Interference Archive.
• Primary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, "Message to the Tricontinental," published by OSPAAAL, April 1967 — full text widely reprinted; Marxists.org.
• Extension Lincoln Cushing, ¡Revolución! Cuban Poster Art (Chronicle Books, 2003) — the first major English-language visual anthology.
• Extension Richard Frick, ed., The Tricontinental Solidarity Poster (Comedia Verlag, 2003) — a Swiss-published visual archive of the OSPAAAL output.
• Extension Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2018) — the fullest scholarly treatment of the Tricontinental idea.
• Context Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (MIT, 2000) — companion reading on twentieth-century state-scale visual political culture.
• Online Interference Archive, Brooklyn — interferencearchive.org; OSPAAAL poster digitizations at Docs Populi (Cushing).

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

For fifteen years — from 1967 until the Black Panther Party's decline — Emory Douglas made art the Panthers printed in a newspaper they mailed to over 200,000 readers a week. That is a circulation in the range of a mid-sized American daily, delivered to a Black political constituency, paid for by subscription and sold at community events. It is the largest sustained experiment in revolutionary graphic design ever attempted inside the United States. The work it produced — the bold-line, flat-color, photomontage-hybrid visual vocabulary most people now associate with "Black Power art" — was not a style in search of a movement. It was a party function: the Minister of Culture producing the weekly visual voice of the Black Panther Party. Session 2 opens here because Douglas is the clearest proof that what Session 1 described as a "war of position" can be staffed, budgeted, printed, and distributed.

The minister of culture

Emory Douglas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on May 24, 1943, and grew up in San Francisco, where he trained in commercial art at City College of San Francisco. He joined the Black Panther Party in January 1967 — the Party was three months old — after meeting Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and the activist-writer LeRoi Jones (soon to be Amiri Baraka, Session 2 Source 10) at a Malcolm X memorial. Within months he was designing The Black Panther, the Party's weekly newspaper. Within a year he was the BPP's formal Minister of Culture.

Douglas's work in that role was remarkable in both volume and discipline. He drew the paper's covers, designed its page layouts, produced the centerfold pull-out posters, and trained a studio of younger artists — all while the paper's circulation climbed from a few thousand to a peak of roughly 250,000 copies per week in the early 1970s. The pull-out posters were designed to be removed from the paper and pinned in kitchens, barbershops, union halls, and dorm rooms. This is the OSPAAAL distribution logic executed inside the United States by a Black working-class party.

Douglas traveled to Cuba in 1968 and was hosted by OSPAAAL; the cross-pollination visible in his visual vocabulary is documented and reciprocal. He has continued to produce political graphic design into the 2020s, including work for contemporary Palestinian, immigrant-rights, and Black Lives Matter campaigns.

The concepts you will meet

Revolutionary art as newspaper. Douglas's audience was not a museum audience. It was the Black Panther readership — Party rank-and-file, sympathizers, the broader Black working-class public. The paper arrived through the mail and through Panthers selling copies on street corners. The art was engineered for that route: high-contrast printable on newsprint, readable across the room in a community hall, legible to a seven-year-old at the kitchen table.

The people as protagonists. Douglas's iconic figures are overwhelmingly ordinary — Black mothers, elders, children, factory workers, tenants, patients at free clinics. Leaders appear, but are not the center of gravity. This is a choice against a dominant Black political aesthetic (of the same period) that centered exceptional individuals. Douglas was naming cadre — the people who made the Party work.

Pig iconography. Douglas drew police and state officials as anthropomorphic pigs in uniform. This is the most-copied of his visual inventions and also the most underestimated. The pig is a tool of de-authorization: it strips the state's visual claim to legitimacy by forcing a reader to see the uniform through satire. Contemporary abolitionist graphic work is still working inside the vocabulary Douglas set.

Photomontage + drawing hybrid. Many of Douglas's most powerful images combine a photograph of a specific Black person with drawn graphic elements — a hand-drawn rifle, a textured background, block-letter caption. The hybrid anchors the image in a real, identifiable community member while keeping the visual structure bold enough for reproduction on newsprint.

Culture as party function. The Panthers had ministries: Defense, Information, Culture. Cultural production was not freelanced or volunteered; it was assigned, paid, and disciplined. This is the structural lesson: revolutionary organizations that take culture seriously staff it as a ministry, not as an afterthought.

Influence circuit. Douglas is the clearest example of what Session 1's OSPAAAL source produced at scale. He exchanged directly with Cuban designers, drew on Chinese revolutionary posters, learned from Mexican muralists and the Chicano print movement, and in turn influenced nearly every subsequent Black political graphic artist: the AfriCOBRA collective, Kelly Fair, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Mims Lawrence, Sonia Sanchez's book covers, and more recently the abolitionist design practice of the 2020s.

Key passages & works

How it lands in 2026

Douglas's work is everywhere in 2020s political design, often uncredited. The visual grammar of abolitionist posters, mutual-aid graphics, Palestinian solidarity imagery, and Stop Cop City aesthetics all draw from the vocabulary he codified between 1967 and 1975. The more interesting inheritance is structural: Douglas's insistence that art be a party function, not a freelance adjacency, is newly relevant as movements argue about who designs, who pays, who owns, and who critiques movement aesthetics.

The harder Douglas question is the distribution one. He had a weekly newspaper with 250,000 subscribers. Contemporary movements have Instagram, which they do not own, running on an algorithm that can deprecate their work without notice. A movement that wants to inherit Douglas's aesthetic without building his distribution infrastructure is inheriting a shadow of what he did. Building the equivalent infrastructure — federated, owned, printable, mailable — is the Douglas homework for the next decade.

Further reading

• Primary Sam Durant, ed., Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (Rizzoli, 2007) — the canonical volume.
• Primary Emory Douglas, "Position Paper #1 on Revolutionary Art," The Black Panther, October 20, 1968 — reprinted in Durant and various Panther anthologies.
• Primary The Black Panther: Black Community News Service — digitized back issues at It's About Time BPP and the Freedom Archives.
• Firsthand Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Random House, 1970).
• Firsthand Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (Harcourt, 1973).
• Extension Colette Gaiter, "What Revolution Looks Like: The Work of Black Panther Artist Emory Douglas," essay in Durant (2007); Gaiter's subsequent scholarship is the best critical reading.
• Film Stanley Nelson, dir., The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015) — includes Douglas on-camera.
• Online Emory Douglas artist site and interviews — emorydouglasart.com.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Baraka is the single most consequential Black poet-organizer of the post-war American twentieth century, and the writer whose political movement across fifty years most vividly demonstrates what Gramsci called a long "war of position." S O S — the posthumous selected volume published in the year of his death — is not a greatest-hits book in the comfortable sense. It is a map of how one writer traveled from the Greenwich Village beat scene in 1960 to the founding of the Black Arts Movement in 1965, to a decade of cultural nationalism, to a 1974 conversion to Marxism-Leninism, and into thirty-plus more years of poetry that never retreated. Reading Baraka is reading a writer willing to repudiate his own earlier positions publicly when they stopped matching his political analysis. That willingness is what the course is asking of its students.

The poet, across six decades

Everett LeRoi Jones was born on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, into a middle-class Black family — his father a postal worker, his mother a social worker. He attended Howard University, served in the U.S. Air Force (and was expelled for "communist sympathies"), and by the late 1950s was a central figure in the Greenwich Village avant-garde alongside Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Diane di Prima, co-editing the little magazine Yūgen with his first wife Hettie Cohen. His first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (Totem Press, 1961), made him a recognized figure in the New American Poetry scene. His 1963 study Blues People: Negro Music in White America remains the most-cited single work of Black music sociology ever written.

The break came in February 1965, with the assassination of Malcolm X. Within weeks Jones had left Hettie, left the Village, and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre / School in Harlem — an event Larry Neal and subsequent scholars would name as the founding moment of the Black Arts Movement. Shortly after he took the name Imamu Amear Baraka (later Amiri Baraka). In 1966 he returned to Newark and founded Spirit House, a theater and organizing space. In 1970 he co-convened the Congress of African People. In 1974, after a serious internal reassessment of cultural nationalism, he publicly broke with Karenga and Kawaida and declared himself a Marxist-Leninist — a shift that cost him a significant portion of his Black Arts Movement audience. He continued to write, teach (SUNY Stony Brook, 1985–1999), and organize until his death on January 9, 2014, in Newark.

The later career included the inevitable controversies. His 2001 poem Somebody Blew Up America — delivered as New Jersey Poet Laureate after the September 11 attacks — contained lines about Israel that led to his removal from the laureateship (the New Jersey legislature eliminated the position entirely). The poem has been defended and condemned in equal measure for the past twenty-five years; any serious treatment of Baraka has to name it rather than go around it.

The concepts you will meet

The Black Arts Movement. Larry Neal's essay The Black Arts Movement (1968) remains its founding definition: "the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." Baraka was its founding figure. The movement's claim: Black aesthetic production is not supplementary to Black political struggle; it is one of the struggle's front lines. Baraka's role was theorist, anthologist (with Neal, Black Fire, 1968), institution-builder (BARTS, Spirit House), and relentlessly productive practitioner.

The break from Greenwich Village. Baraka's 1965 rupture with his prior artistic community is the founding act of Black Arts: the refusal of white-avant-garde integration as an acceptable terminus for Black artistic ambition. This was also personal — he left a white wife and their two daughters. That personal cost is part of the public political meaning. It is a textbook case of what Cabral (Session 1 Source 02) would call class suicide performed as artistic suicide.

Art as warfare. Baraka's 1966 poem "Black Art" (widely circulated, included in S O S) is the manifesto: "We want poems that kill. / Assassin poems, poems that shoot / guns." This is not metaphor for him; it is a program. Poetry's formal properties — direct address, auditory urgency, performability, repetition — are enlisted as weapons. The poem does something or fails.

Music as poetic method. Baraka learned from bebop, from the free-jazz avant-garde (Coltrane, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor), and from the deep-blues tradition. His poems are composed like solos — phrasing, breath, beat. Reading Baraka on the page and missing the music is reading him at half-volume.

The 1974 shift. Baraka's turn from cultural nationalism to Marxism-Leninism in 1974 is the least comfortable moment of his career for contemporary readers, and one of the most important. Baraka concluded that cultural nationalism alone could not analyze or combat racial capitalism. The shift cost him community; he made it anyway. The People's Forum's invocation of him in this course is not an accident — they are reading the later, Marxist Baraka as a living resource.

Newark as cultural ground. Unlike many Black Arts figures, Baraka made his home city his base. Spirit House, Kimako's Blues People (the arts space named for his sister, murdered in 1984), the 1970 Black and Puerto Rican Convention that elected Kenneth Gibson as Newark's first Black mayor — the institutional infrastructure is in one place, built over decades, with his son Ras Baraka now Newark's mayor. This is what a fifty-year war of position on home territory looks like.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

Baraka teaches two separate lessons in 2026. The first is the Black Arts Movement lesson: that a movement has to build its own institutions — theaters, presses, schools, anthologies, community arts spaces — or it will be dispersed into individual careers. Every contemporary poet-organizer from Mahogany L. Browne to Hanif Abdurraqib to Jericho Brown is working inside infrastructure Baraka and his contemporaries built.

The second lesson is harder: political revision as discipline. Baraka's 1974 move from cultural nationalism to Marxism-Leninism is exactly the kind of public, costly, communally difficult revision most contemporary political-artistic careers are structured to avoid. The lesson is not that everyone should become a Marxist; the lesson is that a fifty-year practice requires the capacity to publicly change your mind. The writers who cannot are the ones who calcify.

Further reading

• Primary Amiri Baraka, S O S: Poems 1961–2013, ed. Paul Vangelisti (Grove Press, 2014) — the selected poems under discussion.
• Primary Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (William Morrow, 1963) — the founding study.
• Primary Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Larry Neal, eds., Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (William Morrow, 1968) — the Black Arts Movement anthology.
• Primary Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (Freundlich, 1984; expanded ed. Lawrence Hill Books, 1997).
• Scholarship Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (UNC Press, 1999) — the canonical political biography.
• Scholarship James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (UNC Press, 2005) — the fullest movement history.
• Scholarship Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," The Drama Review, Summer 1968 — the founding definition.
• Online The Amiri Baraka archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL — nypl.org.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

For thirty-five years, cans of 16mm film sat in the basement of Swedish public television. Swedish journalists — from a neutral European country with no stake in the U.S. Cold War narrative — had gone to America between 1967 and 1975 and filmed the Black Power movement with a kind of access that American news crews at the time could not get. They came home, aired some of it on Swedish TV, and shelved the rest. Göran Hugo Olsson's 2011 documentary pulled the footage out of the basement, edited it chronologically, and layered it with contemporary voiceovers from Black American artists and activists responding to what they were seeing. The result is the rarest kind of archive recovery: not a correction of what Americans saw about Black Power, but documentation of what Americans could not see at the time because no American had been sent to film it. Session 2 uses Mixtape to teach archive as political practice.

The film, its sources, its voices

Olsson is a Swedish documentarian whose earlier work focused on Swedish cultural and political subjects. In 2009 he began combing through the SVT (Sveriges Television) archives, looking for footage that had aired once and been shelved. He found roughly seventy hours of 16mm material shot in the United States between 1967 and 1975 by Swedish journalists — interviews, footage from Panthers' Free Breakfast programs, street scenes in Harlem, jazz clubs, prison visits, the 1967 Stokely Carmichael speech tour, Angela Davis's 1972 prison interviews, Louis Farrakhan at rallies, Huey P. Newton at home, jazz bassist Bill Lee recording sessions. Most of it had never been seen outside Sweden.

The film is structured in chapters by year — 1967, 1968, 1969 and onward — with the archival footage edited chronologically. Over the footage, contemporary voices narrate, reflect, and argue back: Harry Belafonte, Angela Davis (speaking now, over her 1972 self), Erykah Badu, Questlove (Ahmir Thompson) of The Roots, Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Talib Kweli, Sonia Sanchez, Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets, Melvin Van Peebles, the rapper John Forté. The voiceover is not commentary-track; it is its own layer of history, a second Black generation responding to archive footage of the first.

Produced by Annika Rogell at IKON in Sweden with Story AB and Danny Glover's Louverture Films as U.S. co-producer, the film premiered in the World Cinema Documentary competition at Sundance in January 2011 and went into theatrical release that fall.

The concepts you will meet

The outsider's camera. The Swedish journalists could ask questions that American mainstream networks would not — or could not — ask. They arrived as outsiders to the U.S. racial and political compact, with no investment in protecting the national self-image. The footage is candid in the specific way footage from a camera whose operators are not your country's camera operators is candid. This is the underlying methodological insight the film carries: the archive you need is sometimes outside the country you are in.

The archive as political recovery. Seventy hours of movement footage sat unscreened for three decades. Olsson's central labor is not auteurist filmmaking; it is archival labor. The film argues — by existing — that recovering shelved movement footage is itself a political act. The archives of European state broadcasters, African state film boards, Cuban ICAIC, and many regional U.S. public-television archives still contain material of this kind, unscreened, waiting.

Mixtape as form. The title is precise. A hip-hop mixtape layers new voices over old records, rewriting meaning in the process. Olsson's film layers contemporary voices over archival footage and does the same work. The form is a formal argument: Black cultural and political history is continuous; what the camera caught in 1971 is speaking directly to 2011 (and to 2026). The form also does something Brecht (Session 1, Source 06) would have recognized — it interrupts identification, reminds the viewer of the archive as archive, refuses to disappear the production history of the footage.

Black Power as community practice. The Hollywood canonical frame for Black Power — leather jackets, berets, guns — gets corrected by what the Swedish footage actually shows: the Panthers' Free Breakfast for Children Program, free clinics, political education classes in community centers, women organizers at tables, jazz gigs as fundraisers. The movement was armed self-defense and social-service infrastructure. The film's balance is an argument about which of those most Americans were shown and which they were not.

International solidarity from the outside. That Swedish television sent crews to film Black Power for seven consecutive years is itself a piece of the story. European left public opinion — France, Italy, the Nordic countries, West Germany — treated Black Power as a live, relevant political movement, not a domestic American curiosity. The film's existence is evidence of the international cultural Cold War that OSPAAAL (Session 1 / 2, Source 08) was also building.

The Angela Davis reframe. The most-discussed scene of the film is Davis's 1972 Swedish prison interview, in which a Swedish journalist asks her whether she "approves of violence" as a tactic. Davis's reframe — that the question assumes Black Americans had a non-violent life to give up in the first place; that her classmates were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing; that the question reverses who started what — is one of the purest examples of a political prisoner reorienting the terms of an interview in real time. The scene has been re-edited, memed, clipped, and set to music for a decade. It is a teachable object in itself.

Key scenes

How it lands in 2026

The film's archival method is the most useful piece of it for 2026 work. The lesson is structural: the movement archive you need is often already shot, sitting in an institution that did not know what to do with it. Swedish Television had this footage. French public television, Italian RAI, West German ZDF, and Cuban ICAIC all have comparable material from the same decade. So does the Schomburg. So do dozens of regional PBS affiliates. The question is not whether the footage exists; the question is who is doing the basement-to-cut work.

The second lesson is that mixtape form — new voices over old footage — is a transferable architecture. The AI-assisted archive work Radical Imagination is doing on Garvey, Wells, and Du Bois could be described as the Black Power Mixtape protocol applied to textual and photographic rather than cinematic material. The voices of contemporary scholars and readers narrate the older record; the result is the archive as live conversation, not dead preservation.

Further reading

• Primary Göran Hugo Olsson, dir., The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (IKON / Story AB / Louverture Films, 2011).
• Companion Göran Hugo Olsson, dir., Concerning Violence (2014) — Olsson's follow-up, built on archival Swedish footage of African liberation, read by Lauryn Hill from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.
• Primary Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (Random House, 1974; reissued Haymarket, 2021) — the prison years in her own words.
• Primary Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) & Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Scribner, 2003).
• Context Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (Holt, 2006) — the most comprehensive overview.
• Context Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (The New Press, 2007) — the media-history complement to the Mixtape archival method.
• Film Stanley Nelson, dir., The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015) — comparative viewing on Panther history.
• Online SVT Öppet arkiv (Swedish Television Open Archive) — oppetarkiv.se, the institutional source Olsson drew from.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Tim Robbins's 1999 film dramatizes one of the clearest events in twentieth-century American cultural history — June 16, 1937, the night the federal government padlocked the Maxine Elliott Theatre in Manhattan to stop a union musical from opening. Producer John Houseman and director Orson Welles led the ticketed audience twenty-one blocks north to a hastily rented theater; Actors' Equity then forbade the cast from performing on the new stage; so the actors stood up one by one from their seats in the audience and performed the entire musical from the house, while Marc Blitzstein, alone on stage at an upright piano, played every note and sang every bridge. The film places this event inside three converging storylines — the HUAC-predecessor Dies Committee's investigation of the Federal Theatre Project; Diego Rivera painting and being censored at Rockefeller Center; Mussolini's cultural emissaries shopping for American patronage — to show what Session 2 means by "resistance as practice." The 1937 performance is the practice. The shutdown is the force meeting it. The actors standing up from the audience is one of the few fully satisfying cultural-resistance images in American labor history.

The film, the history it dramatizes

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was a Works Progress Administration program that, between 1935 and 1939, employed more than 12,000 theater workers, produced over a thousand shows — most free or very cheaply ticketed — and reached an estimated thirty million Americans. Its director was Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar theater professor who became the first woman to run a major federal program. Under her, the FTP produced Orson Welles's all-Black Voodoo Macbeth (1936), the Living Newspaper series documenting labor and housing conditions, and, in 1937, preparations for Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock.

Blitzstein (1905–1964) was an American composer — trained under Schoenberg in Berlin and Nadia Boulanger in Paris — who had met Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in the early 1930s. Cradle is dedicated to Brecht and is a deliberate American adaptation of the Brecht-Weill agit-prop musical model: an allegory about Steeltown, USA, in which capital (Mr. Mister) owns the church, the newspaper, the university, and the arts society, and the only figures with integrity are the organizer Larry Foreman and the prostitute Moll. Four days before the scheduled opening at the Maxine Elliott Theatre, the WPA abruptly canceled the production; armed guards padlocked the building; orders came down forbidding any government-funded actor from speaking any line on any stage.

Houseman and Welles improvised. They rented the Venice Theatre on short notice. Equity forbade Federal Theatre actors from performing for pay on a non-FTP stage. Unions were in play. The actors arrived at the Venice anyway. When they were told they could not walk onto the stage, they sat in the audience. Blitzstein took the stage alone, sat at a piano, announced the first song, and began to play. Olive Stanton, who played Moll, stood up in the back of the house and sang her part. One by one, every actor stood and sang. The audience — over 1,400 people — watched a union musical being performed by its cast from among them, accompanied by one piano and a composer. It is the founding set-piece of American cultural-resistance storytelling.

Robbins's 1999 film reconstructs the night and cross-cuts it with two other 1930s cultural battles: Diego Rivera (Rubén Blades) painting Man at the Crossroads for Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) at Rockefeller Center in 1933 and being ordered to remove the figure of Lenin; and Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon), Mussolini's former cultural advisor, touring New York selling Italian Fascist paintings to American capitalists. The cast includes Hank Azaria as Blitzstein, Angus Macfadyen as Welles, Cary Elwes as Houseman, Cherry Jones as Flanagan, Bill Murray as a ventriloquist red-baiter, Emily Watson, John Turturro, Vanessa Redgrave, and Joan Cusack.

The concepts you will meet

State-funded cultural labor at mass scale. The FTP paid actors, playwrights, scenic designers, stage crews, and box-office workers federal wages during the Great Depression. It treated theater as labor, not as a private luxury industry, and it treated the audience as a citizenry that needed the work. Nothing like the FTP has existed since. Its existence is the evidence that the U.S. is capable of investing in culture as infrastructure; its closure is the evidence of which coalition will close that investment the moment it produces political art.

The Dies Committee and cultural surveillance. The House Un-American Activities Committee, then chaired by Congressman Martin Dies, investigated the FTP in 1938–39 on charges of harboring communist sympathizers. The hearings included a famous exchange in which Committee member Joe Starnes asked Hallie Flanagan whether "this Mr. Marlowe" was a communist, not realizing Flanagan was quoting the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Robbins dramatizes the moment. It is funny and it is also a perfect encapsulation of the method: you do not have to know what you are investigating in order to shut it down.

The improvisation under repression. The 1937 Maxine-to-Venice walk and the sing-from-the-audience solution are the film's set piece. The political point is not Brechtian — it is pre-Brechtian and American. When every official channel is closed, the conditions that were supposed to block the work become, for two hours, the work's form. The audience members are the stage. The walk uptown is the prologue. The composer-alone-at-the-piano is the orchestra. Form follows repression.

Blitzstein as the American Brecht. Blitzstein is the clearest Brecht-line in twentieth-century American theater. He adapts Brecht and Weill's agit-prop model to American labor conditions and idiom. That Cradle is dedicated to Brecht is a direct through-line from Session 1 Source 06. Blitzstein is what Brecht sounds like when he is translated into the diction of a 1937 U.S. steel town.

Rivera / Rockefeller as counter-example. The film's Rockefeller-Rivera thread shows what state censorship looks like when performed by private capital. Nelson Rockefeller commissions a mural; Rivera paints it; Rockefeller objects to the figure of Lenin; Rivera refuses to remove him; Rockefeller has the entire mural destroyed. This is the same relationship of power as the WPA shutdown, dressed in different clothing. The film insists the two stories are the same story.

Fascism as cultural market. Sarfatti is the most unsettling thread. She is selling Italian Fascist art to American industrialists in 1937 while Mussolini bombs Ethiopia and Franco bombs Madrid. Robbins puts her on screen to make a Brechtian point visible: the same people who padlock the FTP also entertain Fascist emissaries in their living rooms. Culture is not neutral ground on which the battle happens; culture is a market in which the battle is waged.

Key scenes

How it lands in 2026

The FTP question is back on the table. In the late 2020s the cultural-policy conversation has begun to ask — in a way it has not since the 1980s — whether the United States should fund cultural labor at scale. The argument for doing so always cites the FTP. The argument against doing so always cites the Dies Committee shutdown. Both are correct. The lesson is not that state cultural labor is naïve. The lesson is that when a state does invest in cultural labor, the people who elected that state also have to be ready to defend it when the first congressman asks whether Marlowe was a communist.

The June 16, 1937 improvisation is useful in a different register. Platform-era cultural workers are already rehearsing versions of the Maxine-to-Venice walk every week — the newsletter when Twitter goes feral; the printed zine when Instagram deprecates the account; the in-person workshop when the platform's terms-of-service move against the topic. The composer alone at the piano is more and more the figure to carry.

Further reading

• Primary Tim Robbins, dir. & screenwriter, Cradle Will Rock (Touchstone, 1999).
• Primary Marc Blitzstein, The Cradle Will Rock: A Play in Music (Random House, 1938) — the libretto.
• Firsthand Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940) — Flanagan's own history.
• Firsthand John Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 1972) — the 1937 night, by the man who made it happen.
• Biography Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World (Oxford University Press, 2012) — the canonical Blitzstein biography.
• Biography Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking, 1995), chap. 9 — the 1937 Federal Theatre years.
• Scholarship Barry B. Witham, The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Online Library of Congress, Federal Theatre Project collection — loc.gov.

Questions to bring to class

Thesis

Most American anthologies teach the Langston Hughes who wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers and the later, softer lyric poems. The Hughes who wrote "Good Morning, Revolution" in 1932 — while in the Soviet Union with a Black American film delegation, publishing in the Communist Party's New Masses and International Literature — is a poet most syllabi still do not assign. Session 2 closes the course with this Hughes on purpose. The poem is short, direct, colloquial, and unmistakably in the voice of the same writer who wrote The Racial Mountain (Session 1 Source 05) six years earlier. It is the continuation of that earlier essay's aesthetic self-determination into explicit political self-determination. "Good Morning, Revolution" is also, in its publication history, the archetypal McCarthy-era erasure and post-McCarthy recovery: Hughes suppressed the poem from his own collected works under 1950s pressure, and Faith Berry's 1973 edition Good Morning, Revolution restored it to the record. The poem is its own argument about which Hughes is carried forward and who decides.

The 1932 Hughes, and the decades after

In June 1932 Hughes traveled with a twenty-two-person Black American delegation to Moscow to make a film about American racism. The project — a Soviet-produced film called Black and White — was abandoned under murky diplomatic pressure, but Hughes stayed on in the USSR for nearly a year, traveling through Central Asia, writing articles about race for the Soviet press (including the essay collection A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, 1934), and producing a body of overtly Marxist verse. "Good Morning, Revolution" is published in New Masses in September 1932, from Moscow. It is not a youthful radicalism; Hughes is thirty, already the country's most prominent Black poet, and he is writing as an aligned fellow-traveler.

Hughes returned to the U.S. in 1933 and kept writing in this register through the 1930s — Let America Be America Again (1935), Ballad of Lenin (1938), reports from the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American in 1937 — even as the Communist Party's organized base in Black American life reached its peak. Then came the postwar reversal. In 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations called Hughes to testify; under duress he distanced himself from his 1930s work, explicitly repudiated some of the most radical poems, and kept his subsequent collected editions largely free of the 1930s material. He died in 1967 without having republished most of it in book form.

Faith Berry, Hughes's biographer and the literary executor who understood what was missing from the public Hughes, edited Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings of Langston Hughes in 1973. The volume is the restored archive. It is how the Langston Hughes who wrote alongside Emory Douglas's Black Arts contemporaries, who taught Amiri Baraka, who stood inside the Third-World Marxist tradition — became again publicly readable. The People's Forum assigning this title is assigning that restoration.

The concepts you will meet

The revolutionary Hughes. The Hughes of Good Morning, Revolution, "Goodbye, Christ," "Let America Be America Again," and the Spanish Civil War reportage is a Marxist and Third-International-aligned poet. He is not flirting. He is building an American Black proletarian poetry in the specific international moment of the early 1930s — alongside and in correspondence with Louise Thompson, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. The "respectable" Hughes of the post-war syllabus is an edited subset.

Revolution in the vernacular. The poem's formal move is crucial. Hughes does not translate a European Marxist idiom into English; he writes revolution in Black American folk speech. The speaker greets Revolution the way you would greet a reliable friend at the corner store. The idiom is Harlem, the diction is working, the political object is Lenin's revolution. This is the aesthetic return to the source Cabral would later name — the Black American vernacular is the poetic form carrying the international political content.

Personal-political address. The poem is a letter to a friend named Revolution. This is not abstract theory; it is intimate politics. The formal choice makes Revolution familiar, local, addressable — the opposite of how bourgeois journalism treats the word. You can greet Revolution because Revolution is a friend you have been waiting for.

The McCarthyite erasure. The 1953 HUAC/McCarthy testimony, Hughes's partial retraction, his subsequent publishing decisions, and the twenty-year gap before Faith Berry restored the archive are part of the poem's meaning. The poem teaches the biography of McCarthy-era suppression in miniature. Its disappearance from the collected Hughes, and its 1973 return, is a case study in how cultural memory is constructed and re-constructed.

Internationalism in Harlem idiom. The poem references the Soviet revolution, invokes solidarity with "our cousin the Soviets," mentions pulling down "American factories" — but all in a voice that sounds like Hughes talking on a Harlem stoop. This is a specific aesthetic achievement and the one this course needs most: an international Marxist frame expressed in native American working-class Black voice.

The companion to The Racial Mountain. Read the 1926 essay (Session 1 Source 05) and the 1932 poem as a pair. In 1926 Hughes argues Black artists must write from their own people rather than toward white approval. In 1932 he answers the obvious follow-up: what is that writing for. For the revolution. That is the course's argument about the Harlem Renaissance aesthetic: it was never just aesthetic self-determination; it was aesthetic self-determination in the service of political self-determination.

Key passages

How it lands in 2026

The most useful thing about closing Session 2 with this Hughes is what it forces students to carry. If the course's question is "the artist must take sides," Hughes is the most famous American case of an artist who did take sides, was punished for it, partially retracted under duress, and whose honest record required thirty-plus years of archival labor to recover. Every contemporary writer who publishes a political statement now — and worries about the career cost, the social-media cost, the grant-funding cost — is looking at a small-scale rehearsal of Hughes's bigger question. The lesson is not that everyone should write "Good Morning, Revolution." The lesson is that the historical record is a fought-over thing, and the fighters include editors, executors, biographers, and teachers as much as the original writers.

The poem also provides the course's closing formal demonstration. Session 1 built the theoretical frame (Gramsci, Cabral, Saunders, Brecht). Session 2 named the practice (Emory Douglas, Baraka, the Mixtape film, Cradle Will Rock). Hughes's poem is the seam between the two: it is theory in the voice of the street. It is the craft demonstration of what all the rest of the course has been describing.

Further reading

• Primary Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings of Langston Hughes, ed. Faith Berry (Lawrence Hill Books, 1973; reissued Citadel Underground, 1992).
• Primary Langston Hughes, "Good Morning, Revolution," New Masses, September 1932 — the poem.
• Primary Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, eds. Arnold Rampersad & David Roessel (Knopf, 1994) — includes the 1930s political work, restored.
• Primary Langston Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers, Moscow, 1934) — the USSR-year essay book.
• Biography Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America (Oxford University Press, 1986); Vol. 2 covers the McCarthy years.
• Biography Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (Lawrence Hill, 1983) — Berry's full biographical treatment.
• Scholarship James Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (Oxford University Press, 1999) — the context for the 1930s Hughes.
• Online The Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale — beinecke.library.yale.edu.

Questions to bring to class