From Awakening Of National Consciousness To Cultural Fusion:A Study On Langston Hughes’s Poems From The Perspective Of Frantz Fanon’s National Culture Theory

Langston Hughes was regarded as one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance and known as the "spokesman of the black masses" and "Poet Laureate of Harlem".The time span of Hughes’s poetic composition was large, which started from Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s to the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. The theme was changeable during his over-40-year poetic composition career. Recently, foreign and domestic critics have researched poetic artistry, theme, language technique and poetic concepts and so on, but they mainly focused on a certain period. Quite a few scholars explore Hughes’s poems of his whole composition career. Therefore, this thesis presents a relatively comprehensive analysis on the Afro-Americans’ national consciousness in Hughes’s poems from the perspective of Frantz Fanon’s national culture theory.Taking Luo Lianggong’s classification on Hughes’s poems for reference, this thesis makes exploration by dividing Hughes’s literary career into three periods. In the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes presented his expression on Afro-Americans’national consciousness and tried to awaken Afro-Americans’national consciousness by revealing their inferiority and admitting their identity; in the radical period, Hughes showed his sympathy for the oppressed all over the world and encouraged them to fight against the exploiters to gain the freedom and equality; in the period after the McCarthyism, Hughes chiefly searched the possibility of combining the black culture and the white culture, which highlighted his pluralistic cultural and social views. Hughes’s poems in these three periods reflect an upward process that Afro-Americans’ national consciousness changes from sag to awakening, from struggle to fusion. According to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, his national culture theory can be summarized as the criticism on cultural and psychological invasion, call of the violent revolution as well as thinking on national culture construction. The central points of Fanon’s national culture theory coincides with the process of Hughes’s poetic composition and provides the theoretical foundation for clearly understanding Hughes’s poems.At last, the thesis concludes that Hughes’s gradually mature process of poetic composition and Fanon’s national culture theory both explored the cultural autonomy and renaissance of black race in the hegemony of the mainstream white culture, reflects the commonness of black scholars’ national consciousness development.