AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 10. Number 2. May 2026 Pp.159-179
Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication
Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication
Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication
Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
This article explores Langston Hughes’ use of prostitution narratives in the three poems Natcha (1926), Harlem Night Club (1926) and Success (1934) as spaces of social protest in the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance. It uses a hybrid theoretical method of Stephen Greenblatt’ New Historicist term Social Energy Circulation and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s’ Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This study suggests that black women’s prostitution and performance work are not moral issues, but as survival strategies, reveal the intersectionality of race, gender, class and labour in urban black communities of the Harlem Renaissance era. The study contributes to the reassessment of African American literary history, by acknowledging that the Harlem Renaissance is not just about refined cultural expressions, but also the crudity of black lives in Harlem, to the project of Black feminist literary criticism in theorising the agency of black women under multidimensional systems of oppression, and to modernist poetics by showing how vernacular form and conceptual metaphor operate together as political critique. The study discusses conceptual mappings like LOVE AS GOODS, BODY AS COMMODITY, RHYTHM AS FREEDOM AND CONSTRAINT, SENSORY CONSUMPTION AS SEXUAL ENCOUNTER, MUSIC AS SPELL OR INVITATION and STAGE AS MARKET in these poems. Hughes revalue the community-shamed prostitutes and labour performers as interpretive imperatives that the cultural politics of racial uplift and respectability of the Harlem Renaissance exclude, and prosodical forms to make readers access the sex work scenes. The mappings are social cognition about censorship, value and survival, that disrupt respectability. The analysis shows vernacular poetics and metaphors work together for subversion.
Zaidawi, I. R., Ismail, M.Z. & Noor, R. (2026). Prostitution Narratives as Social Subversion in Selected Langston Hughes’ Harlem Renaissance Poems. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 10 (2): 159-179.
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Issa Radhi Hammadi Zaidawi. He holds an M.A. in English Literature from the College of Arts, Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is a lecturer in Misan University, College of Basic Education, English Department, Iraq. His research interests include poetry and poetics, social/political English poetry modern and postmodern English poetry, and African-American poetry.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0332-9242
Dr. Muhd Zulkifli Ismail: Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1370-5910
Rohimmi Bin Noor: Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9066-6636