A Critical Summary of 'Walking Backwards into Tomorrow: Poet Langston Hughes, Collective Memory, and the Construction of Historical Consciousness'

Essay from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Nigeria (University of Nigeria, Nsukka), course: B.A. English and Literary Studies, language: English, abstract: The essay explores the importance of a people's historical background, especially the black historical consciousness, the necessary factors which aided the understanding of this past experiences and how these past experiences are pertinent to the understanding of the present and future. The writers of the essay 'Walking Backwards into Tomorrow: Poet Langston Hughes, Collective Memory, and the Construction of Historical Consciousness', in Africa and World Literature, University of Nigeria Journal of Literary Studies, Prof. Ikenna Dieke and Rev Sr Adaoma Igwedibia, opines that the poem 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' aims at evaluating what is meant by black historical consciousness in the poem by looking at the concept as having to do with a broader issue instead of limiting it to just the poet's memory of the past but as a 'collective memory' of the negro spiritual, a theory of history that is closely related to that of Jorn Rusen. This essay discusses different issues in its different paragraphs and those will be discussed in the subsequent paragraphs of this critical summary.