Dream Politics in the Poetry of Langston Hughes

This essay explores the use of dreams in Langston Hughes's poetry. The dream, for Hughes, represents a wide array of psychic phenomena ranging from wishes to Utopian visions. By analyzing Hughes's poems "Lament for Dark People," "Hope," "Freedom's Plow," and "Dream" the essay seeks to demonstrate Hughes' concern with the capacity of dreaming and the imagination to overturn structures of race and class oppression. Then essay compares Hughes' Utopian perspective on the power and potential of dreams to the tragic perspective of Freud. It suggests that Hughes, while skeptical of the more self-serving aspects of traditional African American dream interpretation, sought to combine the best of these African American folk methodologies with elements of the philosophical materialism of Marx and Freud. The result is a kind of oneiric materialism that views dreams as immanent, material objects that embody utopian possibilities.