Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn: Rereading Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain

Critics who have read Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Roumain together have been captivated by how their shared politics bridge distances of nation, language, and genre. Still, despite the vivid and sometimes problematic ways that these writers imagined gender and sexuality within the diaspora, there has been little discussion of what they share in this respect. Considering all three writers' conceptions of "black love" (as Guillén terms it) from an intersectional feminist perspective creates new interpretive possibilities for many of their works. Guillén's, Hughes's, and Roumain's intertwined representations of love, sex, pregnancy, and parenthood constitute a resistive response to the physical and psychic threats that white racist and capitalist society has posed to Black lives and especially to Black women throughout the Americas. However, these works also contain counter-revolutionary elements that reflect their patriarchal and heteronormative social context.