In The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Edwards writes: “It is not possible to take up the question of ‘diaspora’ without taking account of the fact that the great majority of peoples of African descent do not speak or write in English” (7). However, while scores of studies explore questions of black diaspora, internationalism, and transnationalism, only a handful explicitly focus on the linguistic dimensions of such movements and, furthermore, how they impact our understanding of black language diversity. Texts like Vera Kutzinski’s The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (2015) offer a bold way forward in this regard; still, the more common critical tendency is to privilege diasporic networks, while subordinating or neglecting the status of language in such relations.

This special session illuminates African American transnational writers’ engagement with languages other than English. Divided into three 15-minute papers from scholars at varying stages in their careers, the panel moves chronologically and explores the ways that non-English languages nuanced the lives and work of three iconic 20^th century black writers with extensive transnational ties: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Rita Dove. Professor Vera Kutzinski, an authority on the questions and languages discussed here, will provide commentary that interrogates these analyses and facilitates discussion.

The panel begins with Keith Green’s “Beyond Multilingualism: Langston Hughes’s Translingual Poetics and Pedagogy,” which explores the deployment of Spanish, German, French, and English in Hughes’s 1925 Crisis magazine poem, “To a Jazz Band in a Parisian Night Club.” It argues that the poem stages developing, anomalous, and neglected relationships to and between languages and its practitioners, reflecting what theorists in English composition studies might call a translingual approach. Geared towards valuing “actual language practices,” this approach rejects understandings of languages and language users as “discrete, preexisting, stable, and enumerable entities” (Horner 305) and instead views them as “always emergent” and “mutually constitutive” (Lu 587). Via this method, the poem provides a much richer sense of the linguistic subjects and verbal phenomena that attend black transnational encounters. Prefaced by knowledge that Hughes “taught English for fifteen months in Tolouca, Mexico,” the poem also adopts a pedagogical posture, suggesting that spaces for language instruction and practice should be more mobile, playful, and egalitarian.

Drawing on Pascale Casanova’s arguments related to the power of Paris and the French language to “consecrate” marginalized groups, Eric Strand’s essay, “Richard Wright and the World Republic of Letters,” engages the significance of Wright's reading of French texts in translation as well as the wide-ranging impact of his French-translated works. More specifically, he explores the impact of Marcel Duhamel’s translation of Native Son in 1947 and Black Boy in 1948, thus making them available to Francophone intellectuals like Martinique’s Frantz Fanon, Cameroon’s Ferdinand Oyono, and Senegal’s Sembène Ousmane. Wright’s Parisian privileges also facilitated Black American writing, as when Chester Himes relocated to Paris, where Duhamel translated If He Hollers, Let Him Go and further encouraged Himes to write his famous series of detective novels. Reversing priority, Strand concludes his paper by arguing that while Casanova illuminates the influence enabled by Wright’s entanglements with French translation, Wright influenced Casanova by making post-War France more attentive to racial inequality and thereby informing her theorization of the World Republic.

In “Germany, German, and the Transnational Dimensions of Rita Dove,” Jiann-Chyng Tu seeks to explore how Germany and the German language have shaped Rita Dove’s writing. Through a close reading of what he calls Rita Dove’s “Germany poems,” such as “Ö” and “Reading Hölderlin on the Patio with the Aid of a Dictionary,” he argues that having had to negotiate her identities and explored her poetic voice as a female Black American poet in Germany, and often in German, Dove is able to problematize her identity markers of “female,” “Black,” and “American.” By transgressing boundaries of race, gender, nation, as well as language, Dove ultimately writes against the aesthetic and ideological boundaries as well as cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement by rejecting “conventional notions of blackness and the limitations they impose on black life and identit[ies]” (Müller 12). His analysis calls attention to other African American women writers’ German engagements, such as Melba Joyce Boyd and Audre Lorde, whose transnational legacy in Germany has been foundational for Afro-German consciousness.

In line with this year’s convention theme, these essays provide an in-depth exploration of linguistic variety; they advance this theme by providing fresh insights, and adding new critical voices, to our appreciation of black U.S. writers’ engagement with a range of languages.