TROPINGS AND GROUPINGS: JAZZ ARTISTRY, ACTIVISM AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN LANGSTON HUGHES'S "ASK YOUR MAMA"

Langston Hughes, in the stanzas of Ask Your Mama, follows the compositional pattern of jazz "interplay and interaction" that are foundational in improvisation. In the poem, such pattern functions in an intertextual context and reveals the wide spectrum of African American cultural memory. The cultural heroes in the catalogues interact with one another, enhancing one another's meaning and place within the tradition and within the larger narrative framework of the poem, thereby creating a polyphonic tapestry united by a common theme. Here, Marcoux comments that Hughes' poetics in Ask Your Mama demonstrate how intertextuality between music and written poetry derives from African antiphony and is an essential part of the ongoing revision and refashioning of black identity. His use of jazz vocabulary and historiography allows him to establish the relationships of the improvisers to their larger tradition.