Academic

Tsai on Langston Hughes's Poetry as Popular Constitutionalism

By Lawrence Solum

Robert L. Tsai (American University - Washington College of Law) has posted Langston Hughes: The Ethics of Melancholy Citizenship on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

As a body of work, the poetry of Langston Hughes presents a vision of how members of a political community ought to comport themselves, particularly when politics yield few tangible solutions to their problems. Confronted with human degradation and bitter disappointment, the best course of action may be to abide by the ethics of melancholy citizenship. A mournful disposition is associated with four democratic virtues: candor, pensiveness, fortitude, and self-abnegation. Taken to heart, these four guiding ideas point the way to democratic renewal. Hughes?s war-themed poems offer a richly layered example of melancholy ethics in action. They reveal how the fight for liberty can be leveraged for the ends of equality. When we analyze the artist?s reworking of Franklin Roosevelt?s orations in the pursuit of racial justice, we learn that writing poetry can be an exercise in popular constitutionalism.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 19, 2009 (boomark / email).