Africanizing Jesus Christ: Langston Hughes’s “Angels Wings” and “Christ in Alabama” and Countee Cullen’s “Christ Recrucified”

Abstract

Among the various moments African Americans underwent for their freedom and equality, Harlem Renaissance plays an important role. It is an intellectual and cultural revival of black arts and literature centered in Harlem, Manhattan, during 1920s. It is recorded that first ship with twenty captives from Africa crossed middle passage and reached Port Comfort, Virginia in 1619, ushering the era of slavery in New England.  The shady history of three hundred years covers several chapters of excruciating pains and innumerable sufferings of black slaves in the fields. To supply therapeutic comfort to the suffering black community and to make the white readers understand the pain of black people, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, made an attempt to Africanize Jesus Christ in their sonnets. This research article attempts to explicate how Jesus Christ is Africanized in various levels in the three poems viz. Langston Hughes’s “Angels Wings” and “Christ in Alabama” and Countee Cullen’s “Christ Recrucified.”