The Sense of Humanity and the Quest for Social Horizontality in Hughes’ I, Too

Establishing a sense of the self in an oppressive regime is a complex process where one swings between the dichotomy of the self versus the other. The social denial of the oppressed subject of all his civic, social, and even human rights begets exigent questions which cannot be answered unless the sense and position of the self vis-à-vis the sense and position of the other are established. Resisting oppression, ergo, becomes an insisting need, which requires an adequate medium. Having no access to institutional forms of discourse, African-American writers resorted to literary discourse to express resistance of oppressive ideologies and practices acted upon them by the white community. This paper, hence will discuss the ways in which Langston Hughes resists oppression through the medium of literary discourse.