In his autobiographies The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956), the Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) recounts his life as waiter and cook in a nightclub in Paris and his journeys through wars and revolutions across Cuba, Russia, Haiti, Japan and Civil War Spain. Hughes composed a worldly subjectivity in his prose that marked an itinerant writer attentive to the translation of racial difference across a multitude of borders. For the black British writer Bernardine Evaristo, Hughes’s autobiographies were an “inspiration” – they were “a testament to a man who refused to be fettered by the cultural and geographical boundaries within which he was supposed to play …
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Citation: Saroukhani, Henghameh. "Soul Tourists". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 May 2020 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35686, accessed 01 December 2024.]