“Asiatic Black Man”: W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes in Soviet Asia, Part II—The Consolidation of Hughes’s Brown Afro-American Eurasianism in Central Asia

This essay examines the concept of the “Asiatic Black Man” as mapped out by African American intellectuals from Langston Hughes’s perspective. Challenging the extant academic interpretation of Hughes’s Central Asian narrative as “Black Atlantic,” this essay proposes “Brown Afro-American Eurasianism” as a new theoretical framework for analyzing Hughes’s extraordinary adventures in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Through his Brown odyssey in the Uzbek SSR, witnessing Soviet progress in transforming the Turkestani gender patterns, Hughes perceived communism as an empowering ideology for African Americans to dismantle the power dynamics sustained by religious patriarchy. On the other hand, Turkmen SSR communicated the promising image of how a socialist nation state could be as modern as it was raceless to Hughes. Grounded in his impressions of these Central Asian union republics, Hughes conceived the vision of the “United Soviet States of America” as a revolutionary thesis to address the nation’s racial injustice. Despite Hughes carefully burying this intellectual past after his return to the US, McCarthyism brought it to the open. Nevertheless, Hughes’s role as the intellectual accessory to Joseph Stalin’s persecution of Uzbek literary figure Sanjar Siddiq remains a skeleton in the closet—a suspended case in the Afro-American-Eurasian encounter that this essay also seeks to reveal. As Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois share narrative themes in their discovery of Soviet Asia, it can also be argued that Afro-American Eurasianism testifies to a transfigured “double-consciousness” of the “Asiatic Black Man”—poetically inviting while politically fragile. (YZ)