Ramona Tougas has published “Langston Hughes and Performing Transnational Presence: Scottsboro Limited and Harvest” in Comparative Drama, 49 (Fall 2015).

Article abstract: Theatre revealed shifts between movements in black modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. As Langston Hughes recalls in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) “the 1920’s were the years of Manhattan’s black Renaissance…. [T]he musical revue, Shuffle Along…gave a scintillating send-off to that Negro vogue in Manhattan, which reached its peak just before the crash of 1929, the crash that sent…all rolling down the hill toward the Works Progress Administration.” Hughes wrote Scottsboro Limited (1931) just before visiting the Soviet Union. Hughes co-authored Harvest with Ella Winter and Ann Hawkins shortly after returning to the United States but left the play unfinished in 1934. Both scripts provoke politically while experimenting in theatrical forms to aestheticize narratives of recent upheaval in the United States. Following Hughes’s markers for what he calls “that Negro vogue,” Scottsboro Limited and Harvest fall chronologically between Shuffle Along (1921) and the plays of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). These plays remain powerful indicators of a transitional cultural moment in which Soviet drama was also in vogue. Attending to these plays reasserts theatre as a ubiquitous and influential medium in 1930s cultures of the United States. Analysis of these plays participates in debates on the status of the transnational in modernism at large, while clarifying a crucial element of Hughes’s exchange with Soviet culture missing from recent literary studies.