18 pages • 36 minutes read
Langston HughesI look at the world
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance—a period of remarkable Black creativity from the 1920s until the mid-1930s. Hughes wrote “I look at the world” in 1930 during the period. Indeed, the poem reflects one of the core values of the Harlem Renaissance: It centers on a Black individual and their feelings. The poem begins: “I look at the world” (Line 1). This is how a Black person views America. The poem communicates what they see and how they perceive it; the speaker is not going to water down their thoughts to please others. Arguably, the speaker’s confidence and power to speak their truth about racism in the United States is bolstered by the Harlem Renaissance and its ability to provide, more or less, an unfiltered platform for Black voices.
Modernism is another literary context for “I look at the world.” Modernism is commonly associated with white writers and poets like Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot. The emergence of big cities, advancements in technology, the rise of psychoanalysis, and the horrors of World War I shaped modernists and their view that the world, and the people in it, were fractured and alienated.
In “I look at the world,” the speaker is fractured. They break themselves into pieces. They discuss their “awakening eyes” (Line 2) and “black face” (Line 2), their “dark eyes” (Line 7) and “dark face” (Line 7), and their ‘“eyes no longer blind” (Line 12) and “hands” (Line 13). This list of body parts presents the body as a series of separate components. At the same time, Hughes counters the fragmentation of modernism: By the poem’s end, the speaker can stitch the bodily pieces together and create a unified body ready to act and take down oppression.
Historical Context
“I look at the world” captures the history of racism in the United States. Although Hughes wrote the poem in 1930, the poem alludes to racism in America throughout time and how it affects the speaker.
After the Civil War ended in 1865 and slavery was abolished, the “walls oppression build” (Line 9) remained. The South passed racist laws, known as Jim Crow laws, to keep Black people segregated and marginalized in a “fenced-off narrow space” (Line 4). Black people were routinely harassed, assaulted, and lynched. In 1916, people in Texas lynched Jesse Washington for allegedly killing and raping a white woman. A year after Hughes wrote “I look at the world,” people in Scottsboro, Alabama, tried to lynch nine Black teenagers for allegedly raping two white women on a train. According to the NAACP, 4,743 lynchings took place in the United States between 1882 and 1968. (“History of Lynching in America.” 2022. NAACP.org.)
Big cities like New York, where the Harlem Renaissance took place, were not free from oppression. An article for The Washington Post discusses the city in the early 1900s: “Black people in New York suffered from written and unwritten rules against racial mixing in marriage, public accommodations, and housing.” The authors note the “brutal encounters” between Black people and the police. (Purnell, Brian. Theoharis, Jeanne. “How New York City became the capital of the Jim Crow North.” 2017. The Washington Post.)
The world that Hughes’s speaker envisions is a world free of lynchings, persecution, and explicit or implicit segregation.
Related Titles
By Langston Hughes
