Shane Graham Article Finds Home in Norton Critical Edition

“From Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude,” an article written by English Department Professor Shane Graham, has found a new home in the Norton Critical Edition of Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter. The article was originally published in 2014 in the journal Twentieth-Century Literature but was temporarily unavailable online.

“I was really proud of that article and still consider it some of my finer scholarship — it’s big and ambitious, but also attentive to detail,” Shane reflects. “It came out right as the journal was transitioning to a new publisher, and for a couple of years the issue in which my piece appeared wasn’t available electronically (and thus essentially didn’t exist) through either the old or the new publisher.”

Shane called the article a preview to a book he published in 2020, Cultural Entanglements: Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and Caribbean Literature.

“It explores American writer Langston Hughes, his influence on and connections to the writers in the French-language Negritude movement, and then how a generation of Black writers in South Africa in the 1950s-1960s responded to both Hughes’s and Negritude’s representations of Africa,” Shane says of the article. 

Shane shares that he’s excited to see his article receive a second life, especially in a book edited by R. Baxter Miller, who he calls the biggest name in Langston Hughes studies. 

“Not Without Laughter is the first book by Langston Hughes to appear in a Norton Critical Edition, and it’s a huge honor to have my article selected alongside some of the most important scholarship on Hughes from the last 30 years,” Shane says.