Song of the South: Transnational Identity in Spain and America When comparing the South to its Northern counterpart, Langston Hughes writes that the South is a “wonderful… upside down” land, a reflection in a stained-glass funhouse mirror (“Dear Old Southland”, Hughes, 83). In his Chicago Defender column, “Dear Old Southland,” Hughes does not limit this definition to the U.S. South and instead allows the word “South” to range across all of the world’s “Souths”, including that of Spain (83). Spain; where, as in America the blues singers sing their blues, the flamenco singers sing their flamenco (“From Spain to Alabama”, Hughes, 352). Spain has shades of the American South, and vice versa. Through this reciprocal identification, Hughes acknowledges that his writing is relevant on an international scale. As a global writer, Hughes assumed a responsibility as a public figure. In addition to writing for those American citizens he was representative of (though did not claim to represent), Hughes was also an artist for and of the globally oppressed. His complicated role as a transnational artist pushed and pulled Hughes’s literary identities from Negro, to…show more content… Although Spain and America are geographically, culturally and politically disparate at the national level, Hughes suggests, by his use of similar patterns of structure and tone as well as by invoking transnational themes of oppression in “Song of Spain” and “Dear Old Southland”, that the two countries are
