Issues and Problems in Black Literary Theory



Issues and Problems in Black Literary TheoryRyan KernanMay 7, 2011The Reader Function in Effect: Langston Hughes v. Rick SantorumIn his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” W.E.B. DuBois writes, “all Art [sic] is propaganda” and “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent” (DuBois 295). In a 1969 lecture titled “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault proposes that the “author function” arose from the need to hold someone accountable for the views expressed in a given text and the potential to punish the expresser of these views depending on the degree of heresy present within them (Foucault 6). In amalgamating the ideas of two thinkers who lived in disparately different places at disparately different times, one can arrive at a few modest conjectures. The author, as an artist, is a propagandist whose presence and intention is felt in the interpretation of his work by an observer. Therefore, authorial presence (the author’s accumulated body of experience and reputation outside of a given text) and authorial intention unavoidably factor into the interpretation of an author’s work. To account for this process, I propose a “reader function,” a belief that during the act of reading, the reader’s accumulated body of experience is sublated with that of the author and his intention, providing a scope through which one is to interpret a given text. As readers we are allowed a wide openness of interpretation in processing a text, a freedom that is anchored and limited by the author’s presence and intention. Awareness of these limits and the author’s intention are necessary aspects of the reader function and its scope, a scope that can serve us in sifting through the bullshit of politicians who take an author’s words somewhere they were never meant to go. The necessity of the reader function has arisen from this flagrant abuse of authorial intention by subversive propagandist politicians who happen upon an author’s words and twist them to promote their own agendas. The reader function includes a wariness and skepticism towards the use of another author’s phrase as political propaganda, especially when the politician represents an opposing morality to that of the author. Recently, campaign writers for former Pennsylvania Senator, potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate and Fox News contributor Rick Santorum lifted part of a Langston Hughes poem and used it as the Santorum campaign slogan. The act of subverting authorial intention by taking a dead author’s words out of context to make new propaganda, propaganda supporting a political stance disagreeable to the original author, is the type of transgression DuBois gives a damn about, where the author is “stripped” of his intention and made “silent” by the new propagandist subverting his words. Part of the reader function is to be cognizant of the difference between the original authorial intention of a phrase and the intention of the political propaganda made from it. Langston Hughes was an apostle of DuBois in making propaganda out of his art to promote awareness of the African-American civil rights movement and call attention to the condition of poor and disenfranchised Americans in general. While most of Hughes’s letters spoke of the life of inner-city blacks, he also made propaganda that downplayed racial lines in favor of a focus on the struggle of the working and lower classes of all Americans. A prime example of this is in the 1935 poem “Let America be America Again,” where “poor white,” “Negro,” and “red man” struggle side by side in a nation that has not yet realized the dream upon which it was founded, an “America” that according to Hughes “never was America to me” (Hughes). Hughes’s America is one of immigrants, the men who left “dark Ireland’s shore,” “Poland’s plain” and “Black Africa” to build a “‘homeland of the free.’” The poem can be read as expressing pro-union sentiments, as an appeal to the immigrant working class “who made America,” and, says Hughes, will “make America again!” Hughes, who by 1935 had traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, urges the worker to “take back our land again” in an effort to topple the “same old stupid plan/Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” The poem is intended as propaganda for a large-scale societal change spurred by the lower classes during a time of widespread poverty and economic depression in the 1930s, not propaganda for some asshole to get voted into public office and perpetuate the status quo of the 2000s. Alas, the rhetoric of “Let America be America Again” was an easy target for mindless political spin-doctors, put to use as propaganda to support the platforms of wealthy, educated white men running for public office. The vagueness of the poem’s title allows for thoughtless voters to easily support a candidate who promises to fulfill their ideal vision of America’s future. Indeed, 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry used the title of Hughes’s poem, word for word, as his campaign slogan (Halbfinger). Unfortunately for Kerry, the slogan lifted from Hughes failed in making up for the general ineffectiveness of his campaign. Although he lost the 2004 election to the incumbent George W. Bush, at least Kerry and his staff properly quoted Hughes word-for-word in their slogan and preserved some of Hughes’s intention through a platform that endorsed the Development, Relief, and Education (DREAM) Act which made it easier for children of illegal immigrants born in the United States to apply for higher education at in-state tuition rates, among other socially liberal policies (Vaishampayan). The same cannot be said for Rick Santorum’s campaign slogan that alters the author’s original words in support of a politician whose vision of America differs from the vision presented in the Hughes poem. Upon Googling Rick Santorum, the first hit that appears is a paid advertisement from the Rick Santorum Exploratory Committee at . The site allows one to sign up for Santorum’s newsletter, donate to Santorum’s presidential campaign, and take in a couple pictures of Santorum (“Rick Santorum Official Website”). The first photo is of him and his smiling wife in cardigans in a sunny rural locale. The other depicts Santorum sitting by himself in a nondescript room that could virtually be any place but is probably meant to look like a nursing home based on the considerable grayness of the people conversing at a table behind him—people he is looking away from. Aside from the photos, the page’s focal point is its slogan “Fighting to Make America America Again.” Note the difference between Santorum’s slogan and Hughes’s title. The campaign must have considered Hughes’s rhetoric too tame for a candidate like Rick Santorum and doctored a line of the poem to make a more political statement. The word order “Fighting to Make America America Again” is nowhere to be found in the Hughes poem. The closest Santorum’s slogan gets to the poem is in the poem’s final stanza:Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,We, the people, must redeemThe land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states--And make America again! In comparing the final line of the poem to the slogan “Fighting to Make America America Again,” one will notice that in Hughes there is no mention of “fighting,” there is only one “America” in question, and there is no added emphasis on “America” present in the second “America” of Santorum’s slogan. What these alterations amount to is a more politicized statement than was intended in Hughes’s societal commentary. In the Santorum campaign slogan, the doubling of “America” and added emphasis on the second “America” reflects the campaign’s strategy of manipulating a bipartisan political climate, implying two separate Americas by establishing a conscious otherness in the division between the America that Rick Santorum stands for and the America he is “fighting” against. The Santorum campaign’s addition of “fighting” further politicizes Hughes’s words, invoking a return to a conservative America through toppling Obama in the political “fight” of the 2012 presidential election. Hughes’s poem was a call for the “taking back” of America by the working classes from “those who live like leeches on the people’s lives.” The Santorum slogan implies a “taking back” of America from one overfunded political powerhouse by the other, a transfer of power from one major “leech” to the other that occurs every four to twelve years and has little impact on blue-collar workers besides keeping them blue-collar. Returning to Google, directly below Santorum’s ad is the search result that Google’s intricate algorithms deem most relevant in a search of Santorum’s name, a link vaguely titled “Santorum” that takes one to “” (“Santorum”). Like many websites, Spreading Santorum has a title screen that you must “click to continue” to access the website’s content. The title page has a brown splotch in its center, coupled with what appears to be a dictionary entry, displaying “santorum (san-TOR-um) n.” with the definition, “1. The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.” Clicking further leads one to the main site where the second definition can be found, “2. Senator Rick Santorum.” This visceral counter-propaganda campaign against Rick Santorum, spearheaded by columnist Dan Savage in 2003, begs the question of what he did to inspire such a crude neologism (Savage). The definition’s reference to anal sex refers to his notorious comments on homosexuality and homosexual sex acts in a USA Today interview, stating that acts of sodomy “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family,” going on to say that the right to privacy “doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution” and that therefore “if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy… to polygamy… to incest… [and] to adultery. You have the right to anything” (Associated Press). In addition to his stance on homosexuality, Santorum is thoroughly anti-immigration, opposing the 2006 immigration reform proposal and the granting of amnesty to illegal immigrants while supporting the building of a barrier along the United States-Mexico border (Banville). He is in strong opposition to health care reform, what he calls “Obamacare,” and compares those in support of health care reform as being “no better than a drug dealer” (Largen). In the same speech Santorum went on to compare union members in Wisconsin to drug addicts, claiming that in their protests “they are acting like their drug is being taken away from them.” In light of these examples of what Rick Santorum stands for politically, Spreading Santorum’s “primary” definition may have been too kind a metaphor to describe him. However we define him, Rick Santorum’s platform embodies none of the values presented in Hughes’s poem and none that Hughes stood for personally. In fairness to Santorum, we must explore the possibility that the hijacking of Hughes’s words was all a misconception propped up by what has come to be known as “liberal media.” Considering the relatively commonplace message of Hughes’s 1935 poem, perhaps Santorum’s writers, without knowledge of the Hughes poem, came up with the slogan on their own. Santorum himself denies that the slogan was taken from Hughes, claiming it was a coincidence he “had nothing to do with” (ThinkProgressVideo). Blogger TruthiNessie of posits the possibility of such a coincidence, claiming, “similarity itself is not enough to prove a ripoff” (TruthiNessie). In an attempt to provide evidence to this claim, she links to the first five Google results for a search of the phrase “make America America again,” finding that none of the five results refers to the Hughes poem. Each result comes from a different author, three coming from user-submitted comments to online newspapers and political discussion forums, and one being a Facebook page for a small-business marketing company called SOSSMO that uses the phrase as part of its mission statement. The final result is a page made for (R) Glen Urquhart, a 2010 Delaware House of Representatives hopeful who once said at a Republican forum that the phrase “separation of church and state came from Adolf Hitler’s mouth” (Montopoli). His page describes him as a “Reagan conservative, who wants to make America, America again and restore liberty” (First Staff). Chalk up another right-wing politician using this same phrase, with its evocation of two dueling Americas, to support his conservative platform. It is not much of an imaginary stretch to think that in the Santorum campaign’s Verona, PA headquarters, one of his writers did some research on like-minded politicians in neighboring states to come up with the campaign slogan. I’d like to think Urquhart and Santorum used the same writer to come up with a slogan that sums up their overarching hardcore conservative platforms in a neat little nicety. In all likelihood they were different writers using the same language to support backwards-ass politicians. Regardless of whether or not Santorum and his staff knowledgably invoked the writing of Langston Hughes in their campaign slogan, they were probably better off using a different choice of words in getting their message across. Coincidence or not, by vowing to “make America America again,” Santorum was inevitably linked to Langston Hughes by informed bloggers and media pundits like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell who believes “a more appropriate slogan for a Santorum campaign is more likely to be found in a Pat Boone song” (O’Donnell). The fact that Santorum’s slogan has been associated with a pro-labor, pro-immigrant Langston Hughes poem, and that Santorum himself has been associated with a rumored-to-be gay, onetime socialist, liberal intellectual African-American, undermines the credibility of the Santorum campaign. As informed participants in the reader function who account for the original author’s presence and intention, we are able to discern the disparity in Hughes’s intention for “Let America be America Again” and the Santorum campaign’s intention in using similar language as propaganda for a Santorum America that is diametrically opposite to Langston Hughes’s “America.” The reader function has served to expose the irony in a conservative politician’s connection to a poem that calls for the type of America he is supposedly “fighting” against. The last laugh is on Santorum and his campaign. The justice of the reader function has kept Langston Hughes from turning over in his grave.Works CitedAssociated Press. "Excerpt from Santorum Interview." USA today [New york] 23 Apr. 2003: n. pag. USA Today. Web. 2 May 2011.Banville, Lee. "Still Trailing In Polls, Santorum Hammers on Illegal Immigration." Online NewsHour (PBS). N.p., 1 Aug. 2006. Web. 7 May 2011. <, W.E.B.. "Criteria of Negro Art." The Crisis 32 (1926): 290-297. Print.First Staff. "(R) Glen Urquhart News and Information." WHYY. N.p., 12 July 2010. Web. 7 May 2011. <, David M.. "In Five Words by Langston Hughes, Kerry Aides Hear a Campaign Slogan." New York Times 1 June 2004. New York Times Online. Web. 5 May 2011. Hughes, Langston . "Let America Be America Again." Esquire Magazine July 1936: 10-11. Print.Largen, Stephen. "Rick Santorum visits Spartanburg, blasts health care reform." Go Upstate. N.p., 22 Feb. 2011. Web. 7 May 2011. <, Brian. "Delaware GOP Candidate: Ask Liberals Why They're Nazis - Political Hotsheet - CBS News." CBS News. N.p., 17 Sept. 2010. Web. 6 May 2011. <'Donnell, Lawrence. "The Last Word: The Langston Hughes America." MSNBC. N.p., 14 Apr. 2011. Web. 7 May 2011. <;."Rick Santorum Official Website." Rick Santorum Exploratory Committee. Rick Santorum Exploratory Committee, n.d. Web. 3 May 2011. <;."Santorum." Santorum. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 May 2011. <, Dan. "Do the Santorum." The Stranger [Seattle] 29 May 2003. The Stranger. Web. 3 May 2011.ThinkProgressVideo. "Rick Santorum on his campaign slogan." YouTube . N.p., 15 Apr. 2011. Web. 6 May 2011. <. "Did Former Fox News Contributer Rick Santorum Rip Off Langston Hughes?." Restoring Truthiness. N.p., 16 Apr. 2011. Web. 5 May 2011. <, Saumya. "Bacow discusses DREAM act with Kerry, Brown." Tufts Daily [Medford] 22 Apr. 2010: Tufts Daily. Web. 3 May 2011.Foucault, Michel. "What Is An Author?." What Is an Author?. Josué V. Harari. Societé Francais de Philosophie, Paris. 22 Feb. 1969. Lecture. ................
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