Hughes enriches the inquiry of his most well-known poems through a transnational and translational approach to long-celebrated themes of his work in the United States: racial uplift, Black aesthetics, and full social and political emancipation and enfranchisement for people of color. In his poem, “I, Too,” Langston Hughes expands the notion of what it means to be American to include that of the Black American. “I, too, sing America. / I am the darker brother,” we recall from introductory poetry lessons. Troubled Lands adds complexity to this “America” of which we sing. How does solidarity traverse the national identities to which so many of our rights to land and liberty are enthralled? The collection reveals the interconnections between Black America as a continental and diasporic identity, asking if there are possibilities for a more expansive world revolution. As perhaps the living embodiment of the Harlem Renaissance, this collection posits the era in alignment with concomitant movements of Afrocubanismo and Negritude (in the formerly French colonies), suggesting an aesthetic alignment and boom of Afro-descendant artists and intellectuals across the diaspora during the interwar period. In a letter to a friend, Hughes notes that these stories delve into “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists.” The collection reflects the porousness of national identity, as the independence movements of Cuba and Mexico were complicated by American imperialists and capital interests in production of sugarcane and other products “Made in Mexico,” as the title of one of the stories suggests. Yet, tensions arise as, at this time in particular, the importance of developing a national culture and self-determination seemed a key task of the postcolonial nation-state. It would never be enough to simply shake off an old identity, so Black people across the diaspora fashioned new identities, a “New Negro,” and new nations based on ideals of freedom and self-determination.

Given this historical, economic, and political context, the stories are relatively short by contemporary genre expectations. Taken together, they present a panoramic view of the life and times of factory and field workers, common soldiers, and shopkeepers across Cuba and Mexico. Brutality upon brutality befalls proletarian men and women at the hands of the state and its machines: firing squads, fatal factory accidents, assassinations. In Arturo Ramírez’s “Hatred,” the third-person limited narrator laments the seemingly purposeless nature of the protagonist’s life,

The characters acutely feel the relative senselessness of endless toil and inability for “revolutions” at the highest level of governance to meaningfully impact their working conditions, lives, and souls. The material conditions of the lives of the characters often takes precedence over interpersonal conflicts, presenting the short stories as almost a tidal mass of voices.

One might look to canonical psychoanalytic theorist Frantz Fanon for instruction here on the violence of the colonial mode of production; while de jure colonialism no longer exists, its de facto remnants color and constrain the lives of the characters in Troubled Lands. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes “for the war goes on; and the enemy organizes, reinforces his positions, and comes to guess the native’s strategy. The struggle for national liberation does not consist in spanning the gap at one stride; the drama has to be played out in all its difficulty every day, and the sufferings engendered far outmeasure any endured during the colonial period.” These everyday dramas form the loam of this collection. As the reality of (post)colonial violence becomes clear throughout the text, Hughes has organized the collection in a way that points toward a theory of third world solidarity, Black diaspora, and class consciousness that is significant for the times we find ourselves in today: how does this state of permanent war waged on us by capitalist overseers end? And what does that look like for actual human lives? The linkages between rising fascism in Europe and authoritarian generals in Latin America make themselves known via corrupt military officers and bureaucrats who run the modes of production. In these stories, setting emerges as the dominant element, and the lives of individual characters are enthralled to the brutalities of colonial conditions, extractive economics, and wealth accumulation.

Case in point, the island of Cuba is described as “plow-shaped” with “sugar mills, shaped like war-clubs.” Mexico appears as a world where revolutionary violence mutates into a power grab by military lieutenants disguised as a paranoid search for moral purity. The stories demonstrate the ways in which the ideal vision of revolutionary fervor can encounter corruption, leading to abuses of power disguised as overzealous allegiance to a just cause. In Germán List Arzubide’s “The Prisoners,” soldiers bed down for the night and notice a group of Indian men brought in and executed. When the narrator questions the lieutenant’s motives for killing the seemingly innocent men, the lieutenant reasons that the men seemed suspicious for standing by the side of the road, “and suspicious-looking people, we shoot.” This line of questioning arouses the lieutenant’s suspicion, implying that he himself might be next on the lieutenant’s list. The narrator proclaims that “the revolution makes you hard-hearted.” The initial revolutionary spark gives way to a stark reality: who will govern?

Revolution is an ever-present theme, whether it’s a revolution for independence or a communist revolution. There’s “The Communist,” Luis Felipe Rodriguez’s story of intergenerational field laborers, the youngest of whom begins to build his willed sense of affiliation with all workers, as his grandfather protests, “after all our sweat and troubles and hopes, the last of the Medels—who’ve always been peaceful working peoples—should turn out to be a communist. God help us! What things go on in this world!” In Juan de La Cabada’s “Story, Bed, and Bedbugs,” a character declares “I’m a worker, comrade, and I know the capitalist system was to blame for it all.” A major reason this collection went unpublished in the US for nearly a century was its clear leftist, socialist stance. While Lieber placed several stories from the collection in magazines like GQ, he feared the collective weight of the stories might rankle the senses of both bourgeois pleasure readers and anti-communist state actors. History substantiated Lieber’s concerns, in a way, as both he and Hughes would be called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy era. Released and redacted documents show that Hughes himself was under FBI surveillance from 1941-1953.

Clearly on the minds of Hughes and these authors, however, is the unification of the workers of the world. The text displays a clear sense of globalization much earlier than one may historicize this phrase. Throughout the texts, it is evident that the fate of the worker on the cane field is tied to the rum one drinks in a speakeasy in Harlem. The collection resonates with Hughes’s translation of the celebrated Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poem “Caña,”

Most stories orbit around these twin demigods of el cañaveral (sugar plantation) and sangre (blood), again centering the discussion on the material conditions of the plantationocene and what it means for the dawning of independence and emancipation of Black people. Widely known for challenging racism in America, too little attention has been given to Hughes’s work towards anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist aesthetics and arguments. One scratches at the seams of the atrocities, both large and small, that keep the plantation economic engine in gear.

In addition to the political fervor of the stories, scenes and characters will often pull on African, indigenous, and syncretic rituals and spiritual practices as emancipatory containers. We might turn again to Fanon, who wrote,

We see this theory at play in Luis Felipe Rodriguez’s “Tintorera’s Last Dance.” Tintorera, a fieldhand, who dances the Lucumí, “that dance which Africa gave to the earth,” in town, after a life spent in the cane fields, begins to curse the cane field and dance furiously until a great fire begins to take over the land. “Before Tintorera’s eyes, as he danced, there would come a vision of that emancipating revolution which had given him his freedom,” Felipe Rodriguez writes, “the fire also danced a symbolic dance in the cane fields, purifying and terrible, older than the sorrows of a troubled people.” In Felipe Rodriguez’s other stories in the collection, we see the author take direct aim at Catholic missionaries as a tool of oppression. As with Hughes’s iconic Weary Blues, we see African-descended modes of spiritual ecstatic artistry infuse figures and characters with the hope of physical, social, and spiritual transcendence from the bare life one experiences day-in and day-out on the plantation and its attendant structures.

Hughes consulted many of the writers in the collection while translating, and, in effect, the translation itself can be seen as an act of solidarity with the writers of Latin America and the places and people of which they write. While it is a shame the collection didn’t make its way into the hands of U.S. audiences until now, the provocations and celebrations of these stories will resonate with writers and thinkers of today. As long as the Earth and its “darker brothers” have been exploited by the racial, imperial capitalism of the plantationocene, there have been artists struggling against the same forces, witnessing the bloodshed, and burning the place down with a furious dance of freedom.