Global Black Consciousness and Multimedia Aesthetics in Langston Hughes’ ‘Ask Your Mama’

Abstract

Ask Your Mama, a long poem by Langston Hughes, is unique, not only in its style and composition, but also in its content. Analyzing its materiality, stylistic complexity, and content, this paper argues that Hughes’ masterpiece is a multimedia project of Global Black consciousness, that is postcolonial and reformist in nature. The 12 poems-in-one, the text font type, the ink colors and type used, as well as the artistic design of the book stage it as an epic, which this paper terms as ‘an epic of blackness’. Moreover, my paper discusses that the book uses cubist-style figures, black comedy jokes (Yo mama jokes), along with allusions to famous artistic and political figures of the era. With its various features and references to popular figures, it appears as a polyphonic, multimedia project of modernist, reformist, and postcolonial nature that celebrates blackness and its common memory.