Hughes was considered one of the most influential figures in the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement of the 1920s that saw a surge of African American cultural expression in poetry, art, literature, and more across the urban Northeast and Midwest. ... The narrator, an African American, meets an African. ... But the poem demonstrates that these practices could also provide artists in the African diaspora with an indispensable means of understanding, and thereby resisting, that system of exploitation (qtd. in Moglen 1). ... He is contrasting the flatness of his language with the prettiness ...

• Word Count: 2547
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School