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영어

This essay explores how Langston Hughes, the major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, handles the issue of “double-consciousness” that W. E. B. Du Bois pointed out as the psychological condition of black people in America. In his poems, Hughes pays great attention to the fragmented reality of American black people who are considered neither an American nor an African. His poem “Afro-American Fragment” epitomizes the sense of homelessness and disunity that troubles African Americans. Hughes presents a black diasporan unity as the practical way to resolve the sense of self-alienation and homelessness that African Americans had to go through in racist America. In Hughes’ poems, black diaspora is neither a purely mythical and utopian space created by his poetic imagination nor a nativistic movement which some African American groups embrace as the way to achieve a sense of belonging. Hughes describes black diaspora as the material space with historical time and geography. In his poems, Hughes diligently digs for the roots that connect black Americans to the Africans. As a result, Hughes brings all different kinds of black people—light skinned black, darker skinned black, African black, and American black—into the unified black diaspora that he imagines.