Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a quintessential blues narrative composed for the twenty-first century. The film embodies perspectives commonly found in blues-oriented expression, including songs, autobiographies, and interviews, not to mention Black fiction and poetry that thematizes and/or reflects blues-oriented music and blues criticism as well. But before academic scholars considered blues worthy of analysis, Langston Hughes wrote critically and creatively about blues music and the suffusion of its principles throughout much of Black expressive culture. In fact, he first observed a blues performance in his early teens, well before Mamie Smith’s recording “Crazy Blues” (1920) launched the classic blues era. So while Hughes and Coogler are chronologically separated, they are historically connected through their conceptualizations of blues aesthetics. Of course, Coogler has cited Amiri Baraka’s classic study Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) as part of his filmic research. However, Hughes wrote the book’s blurb, and his writings served as a foundation for Baraka’s work. More fundamentally, Hughes’s views on blues, jazz, gospel, and soul anticipated Coogler’s multipronged premise: that blues is the foundation of modern popular music; that blues described Black people’s peculiar experiences, viewpoints, values, and tastes; and that blues reflected a “kinetic philosophy” (Baraka’s term) and a related worldview at variance with conventional Western aesthetics and racial capitalism, respectively. Where much of Black popular culture fetishizes ultra-capitalist values, several characters in Sinners prioritize nonmaterial desires, especially joy. Pleasure holds particular significance in blues philosophy, and this prominent theme in Sinners recurs throughout Hughes’s oeuvre: his first novel is titled Not Without Laughter (1930). Hughes also anticipated Coogler’s critique of exploitation—one of many examples being the opening line in his 1940 poem: “Note on Commercial Theatre”: “You’ve taken my blues and gone—.”

We are seeking critical and creative submissions, including poems and visual art, for this special issue. We are especially interested in essays that examine Sinners through a Hughes-inflected blues framework. We encourage thematic, ideological, and other sorts of explorations between Hughes and Coogler. Most important, how can examining these two artist-intellectuals coextensively enhance our understanding of both? And since Coogler’s perspective is compatible with those of many Hughes-adjacent novelists, poets, and playwrights who wrote or came of age during the blues era (e.g., blues, gospel, jazz)? Is there a sense in which Sinners posits, however implicitly, a significant peculiarity in blues-inflected Black thought? In other words, are there ways that the emotional power and insight that Coogler illustrates is also manifested in other mediums of Black art, including literature and/or other art forms? Would interpreting Sinners in tandem with Black writers whose sensibilities were shaped, though in varying degrees, by blues, gospel, and/or jazz enrich our understanding of these artists? Or perhaps point to new connections and/or previously ignored historical trajectories? Might such explorations render ignored developments, implications, and/or ramifications more evident, more noticeable, more legible? For this reason, essays may be approached from a variety of foci and disciplines, and topics may include but are not limited to the following questions:

Some of Hughes’s earliest publications highlight dancing as a preferred expression of joy in blues culture. In a 1926 essay, Hughes recollects a performance he witnessed at age five or six by the legendary duo of Bert Williams and George Walker: “George Walker, the beautiful brown girls, the crowded theater, the applause, the laughter…. the people affect me.” Hughes also memorialized the freestyling and splendor of Black social dancing in poems, including “Negro Dancers” (1925) and “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 A. M.),” and in his novel Not Without Laughter (1930), which illustrates how racial stigmas comprise part of the backstory of blues history. In Hughes’s novel, Aunt Harriett suffers painful consequences for dancing to blues music. And much of Hughes’s playwriting, especially his musicals and gospel plays in the 1950s and early 1960s, provide apposite material. Using Jaqui Malone’s Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (1996) as a reference frame, how does Coogler’s depiction of blues-based dancing and/or Black bodies generally interface with Hughes’s writing? How can we better appreciate these artist-intellectuals by pairing them with each other, notwithstanding their historical separation by a century? Are there other artists, writers, and/or scholars whose works might facilitate such critical analysis?  

Hughes’s unbridled enthusiasm for Harlem’s rent parties is a well-known topic among poets and Hughes scholars. But considering the storyline in Sinners, it is noteworthy that rent parties are historically related to juke houses. In Katrina Hazzard-Donald’s classic study Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (1990), she states that rent parties were part of “the jook continuum.” When Black southern migrants settled in large cities, “the jook manifested itself in …the rent party.” And in Sinners, of course, the story revolves around Smoke and Stack’s attempt to open a jook joint in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, after returning from Chicago, another city where rent parties featured blues-oriented dancing and music. Considering Hazzard-Donald’s research, then, how might Hughes’s writings about rent parties, especially in The Big Sea, but also his collection of rent party cards contextualize, frame, or otherwise facilitate a discussion of Sinners?

According to dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz, “[B]lack expressive cultures value the process of signification over the signified, the performance of spirituality over scriptural exegesis, talking by dancing over talking about dancing.” Hughes and Coogler both highlight dancing as a mainstay of blues aesthetics. Likewise, blues artists in some areas “did not think of themselves as blues singers”; they associated their songs with specific dance rhythms. Sinners depicts dancing and other activities in the jook, but it also “performs” and stimulates “dancing” albeit through its soundtrack. And Hughes celebrated Black dancers in some of his earliest poems, including “Negro Dancers” (1925) and “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 A. M.).” Later in his career, however, Hughes directed his attention to writings, especially his gospel plays, that could potentially stimulate “the process of signification,” which Hughes termed “singing,” “foot-patting,” and “hand-clapping,” much like his favorite blues and jazz musicians. How might a kinetic approach to Hughes and Coogler provide new models to coextensively examine performance, pleasure, and critical thinking?   

Coogler has described Sinners as “cinematic gumbo,” an homage to his grandmother and other women elders in his family who were known for their exquisite gumbo dishes. Yet we should understand that Coogler’s comment exemplifies an important principle in blues logic. Unlike conventional Western aesthetics, blues people delighted in employing contrast and contrariety in various aspects of their expression—oftentimes “just for the funk of it,” to borrow a line from Funkadelic—especially in music making. On other occasions, contrariety was used as a mechanism to facilitate creativity. In Hughes’s work, contrasts may appear in class-based and ideological divisions in sectors of Black America, as with his call-and-response poems “Low to High” and “High to Low,” which illustrate class divisions in mid-twentieth century Harlem. But this precept was used in numerous ways. As Duke Ellington once told Roebuck “Pops” Staples, “You play gospel in a blues key.” In Sinners, contrariety is evident in the sacred-secular conflict between Sammy and his father. The contrasting worldviews of the twin protagonists Smoke and Stack provide another example. However, Coogler’s pairing of blues with the filmic genre of horror deserves critical attention. “I took some things,” states Coogler, “that might seem disparate … but I think they go very well together.” Several historical analogues come to mind here; but since Sinners pays homage to Delta blues, the artists’ use of new technology, that is, playing the electric guitar seems apposite because the instrument was not initially part of blues culture. Does Coogler’s use of horror recall, evoke, or analogize Muddy Waters’s decision (and the decisions of other blues artists) to adopt the electrical guitar for the express purpose of emphasizing blues sounds and qualities in new, exciting ways after he migrated to Chicago?

Another variation of contrariety in blues involves its ability to stimulate pleasure and express criticism simultaneously. As strange as it may seem, blues artists often envisioned their music in moral terms. Sincerity, honesty, true—these words routinely appear in interviews with blues artists and in their autobiographical accounts. Similarly, blues narrators typically demonstrate a predisposition for discrediting evil, although the “shade” is often expressed ironically and/or couched in sexual terms or animal imagery. As Clyde Woods points out, blues artists “channel folk wisdom … [to] critique … individuals and institutions with humor and resolution rather than world-weariness or resignation.” Does Sinners provide pleasure and social criticism simultaneously? And if so, what is the pleasure? What is the criticism? And what are some of the ways that Coogler achieves this feat?

Evil forces in horror films have aligned with mythologies that normalize racial, gendered, sexual, and/or class inequities. By contrast, blues artists expressed a contrarian (think: anti-colonial) view during Jim Crow. As Hughes writes in “Note on Commercial Theatre,” both the people and the music are “Black and beautiful,” an outrageous statement in 1940. Considering the penchant for irony, inversion, and signification in blues logic, what are the artistic implications of Coogler’s experiment? What happens theoretically when horror is situated in a Black artist’s blues paradigm? How might a blues-inflected worldview align with horror in twenty-first century America? What is Coogler suggesting here?  

Just as blues narrators typically express perspectives of the proverbial underdog, so blues-inflected Black writings (e.g., fiction, plays, poetry) demonstrate unparalleled insight into forms and sources of wrongdoing, especially systemic sorts. To varying degrees, such writers convey in language the principles and perspectives that blues-oriented musicians express through sound. And while Hughes was first and foremost in this regard, an essay that puts Coogler’s Sinners in conversation with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) seems especially promising. What happens to juke houses, dives, bars, honky tonks, and nightclubs when blues-oriented Black women artists (think: Blanche Calloway, Arizona Dranes, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Dinah Washington, Esther Phillips, Barbara Lynn) are spotlighted? And how might Walker’s novel interface with Sinners? How are unapologetic expressions of Blackness (mis)read and/or (mis)interpreted? How might Coogler’s criticism of the music industry frame discussions about Tharpe?

Or somewhat similarly, how might Coogler’s criticism apply to Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard?

Countless writers have been inspired by Black musicians, but musicians are rarely inspired by writers. Hughes is thus a rare exception: Clarence Horatius Big Miller's album Did You Ever Hear the Blues?  (1959) is comprised of eleven song lyrics composed by Hughes. What sorts of insights might unfold within a collaborative study combining musicology and/or ethnomusicology with literary and/or historical scholarship?

Hughes the wrote liner notes for blues musician Josh White's album. He also wrote an essay about Memphis Minnie, the Black woman blues artist who was an early, and largely unacknowledged, pioneer of the electric guitar. In what ways do Hughes’s essays on blues interface with Coogler’s twenty-first century depiction of blues aesthetics? And how are issues of gender and sexuality represented herein?   

Are there ways in which Hughes’s painstaking work in African American folklore, encapsulated in his book, The Book of Negro Folklore (1949), can enrich our readings of Sinners?  

In a 1941 essay, Hughes emphasizes the unique capacity of the blues to grapple with contemporaneous problems: “the Blues are today songs, here and now, broke and broken-hearted, when you’re troubled in mind and don’t know what to do and nobody cares.” Thus the necessity of “chasing the blues away” while dancing. But is there a sense in which Sinners functions as a “today” story that analogizes Hughes’s blues statement?

In “Note on Commercial Theatre,” Hughes addresses dual concerns about the music industry’s exploitation and erasure of blues musicians. Similarly, in an interview with Amy Goodman, Coogler states: “the industry would say, ‘Hey, this Black person’s song, we’re going to put that in one category.’ Back then, it might have been called ‘race records.’ “And then, this other white musician, we’ll invent a new genre to keep a separation here of these groups of people. Maybe we’ll call that ‘bluegrass,’ or we’ll call it ‘country,’ or we’ll call it ‘rock ‘n’ roll.’” Given the conclusion of Hughes’s poem (which is available online), how should we characterize interconnections between Hughes and Coogler, notwithstanding their different mediums?  

That the major conflict in Sinners involves blues people in “the jook” versus twin forces of evil—namely, vampires and the Klan—dovetails with a specific trajectory within African American literary history. Insofar as film is literature, Coogler’s narrative elaborates upon a long line of Black writings, especially in fiction, poetry, and drama, that critically examine particular aspects of racial capitialism, while drawing from elements of the blues ethos. Several of August Wilson’s plays are prime examples, and perhaps his American Century Cycle can be approached somewhat similarly. Additional examples include Gayl Jones, whose storyline in Corregidora (1975) seems to prefigure recent events in American politics, and Jayne Cortez, who not only led her own band but wrote powerfully and insightfully about autocratic tendencies in the post-Civil Rights period. Finally, a passage in Baraka’s poem, “World War 3 Even Your Muse Will Get Killed!” (1982), reads: “I keep seeing / Nazis.” Baraka also made a similar observation in 2009. What would an essay examining Sinners in tandem with Black blues writings reveal?

A truism among grassroots artists and activists who have worked effectively, particularly in the African diaspora, is that while historical studies bear great significance, cultural resistance should also prioritize current issues where the stakes are usually higher and more difficult to address. Black writers with divergent viewpoints—Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, Stephen E. Henderson, Sherley Anne Williams, to name a few—have expressed similar perspectives on this point, though in different ways. Others such as James Baldwin and more recently poet Yolanda Wisher have characterized blues as liberatory. The blues scholar Clyde Woods makes a somewhat similar point: “The lyrics of the blues often describe problems and offer possible solutions.” Coogler’s readvancing of blues aesthetics spotlights its distinguishing characteristics, but it also raises questions. As his title implies, stigmas attached to blues were pointed and unavoidable. Even in the late 1960s, for instance, Black music fans pressured B. B. King to play soul. Yet Coogler suggests that blues music is special. How did this shift occur? And what are the implications of Coogler’s retooling of the blues at this historical juncture?

Woods’s comment regarding “solutions” is related to another element of blues aesthetics: the predilection to create and/or re-present aesthetic and/or ideological alternatives to the status quo to grapple with contemporaneous problems. Can we reasonably interpret Sinners as an allegorical commentary on twenty-first century America?

Similarly, how does Coogler’s blues vision compare with Hughes’s? Consider an analysis that combines Woods’s scholarship with Steven C. Tracy’s in Langston Hughes and the Blues (1988). Additionally, William Barlow’s much neglected Looking Up At Down : The Emergence of Blues Culture (1989) may well be helpful. How does his view of blues artists as rebels interface with Coogler’s and Hughes’s views?

Which contemporary artists exemplify salient principles and values characteristic of blues music? The Southern Soul Movement is certainly notable. But there are more immediate examples, including blues guitarist-singer Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, who is from Clarksdale, Mississippi, incidentally, and Gary Clark Jr. Blues music has continued to attract Black audiences and young Black musicians, especially in Southern areas. Yet we might also consider Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu, Kirby, or Evan Nicole Bell. Badu has even characterized her aesthetic as “neo-funk,” and, of course, blues music is the foundation of funk. How can we better understand the recordings and performances of these artists by situating our analyses within a blues-inflected framework?

According to Coogler, “[Annie] is a conjure woman who has a lot of experience, you know, with hoodoo and mysticism, and she’s trying to, you know, lean on that knowledge to figure out exactly what they’re dealing with.” Annie thus embodies a particular sort of Black women’s organic intellectualism in which thinking and sensuality are not binary opposites but rather complementary human processes. Are there ways in which Coogler’s portrayal of this aspect of Black women’s history is compatible with Katrina Hazzard-Donald’s research in Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System? Similarly, how does Coogler’s representation of Black women’s spirituality compare with previous representations? Consider, for instance, noted Black woman filmmaker Julie Dash’s representation of African-derived spirituality through her character Nana Peazant.

In a similar vein, are there reductive aspects of Coogler’s film? What would a Black feminist and/or Black queer reading of Sinners look like?

And what about Coogler’s vampires? What do they symbolize and/or signify? Scholars may find Jerry Rafiki Jenkins’s work helpful in The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction (2019). And how does Coogler’s depiction of vampires compare with those of Black women writers such as Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez, and Nicole Givens Kurtz? Consider Robin R. Means Coleman’s work in Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2022) and John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart’s collection, Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms: Essays on Gender, Race, and Culture (2009).

Blues history reveals an acceptance of a wide range of Black women’s bodies and complexions. In Sinners, Annie, Pearline, and Mary arguably represent such a range. However, Black women often formed a majority of blues singers’ audiences, which suggests that Coogler’s blues riff also illuminates, however concomitantly, the subject of blues women’s pleasures and desires. In this way, Sinners arguably invokes neglected histories of Black women. As Sherley Anne Williams suggested in her 1982 collection, Some One Sweet Angel Chile, which anticipated Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1999), Bessie Smith’s sexual appeal extended to both genders. More to the point, blues narrators included plus-sized Black women in their erotic desires. Does Sinners and/or blues history help us better understand body positivity; and if so, how?

An early scene in Sinners depicts a Black congregation. Hughes greatly admired the culture and aesthetics of Black Baptist churches and viewed their activities as artistic models. He wrote gospel plays and all the songs for his album: Tambourines to Glory by Langston Hughes and Jobe Huntley (1958). In Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem, the religious scholar Wallace Best illuminates this aspect of Hughes’s work, deftly contextualizing Hughes’s achievements and contradictions. However, Hughes’s view of Black church aesthetics as a model raises a largely ignored question: What can scholars learn aesthetically from Hughes in this historical moment? Rather than focusing solely on conventional textual analyses, perhaps his plays can be revisited as prospective models to imagine forms and/or frameworks to channel liberatory impulses in resonant styles? Are there ways to create hybrid textuality? Work that blends creativity and criticism, work that makes us think and want to move our bodies and/or laugh all at the same time? Would such an exploration of Hughes embody a new intellectual model?

In a 1963 comment that prefaces Black Nativity—what Hughes calls a “gospel song-play”—he states his belief that “the first plays” in Black literary history “grew out of the churches.” In this respect, Hughes’s artistic ideas analogize those of Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka who has famously argued that Nigerian drama began as ritual. And in Sinners, Coogler advances a somewhat similar idea in a scene that depicts a guitar player. Of course, scholars have examined Hughes’s influence on the development of African and Caribbean literatures, noting his achievements as well as his contradictions. But since the words “churches” and “ritual” suggest bodily, oral, and aural expression not signified in language, the meanings and contexts of these practices may not readily apparent or legible in postmodernist literary and cultural theory. Using instead early chapters of Samuel A. Floyd Jr.’s The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (1995) as a reference frame (consider also Teresa L. Reed’s The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music), how might an essay explore the possibility of conceptual, stylistic, thematic, or other connections between these artist-intellectuals?

To what extent do Zora Neale Hurston’s writings interface with Sinners? Consider Mules and Men (1935), The Sanctified Church (1981), and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which depicts a blues singer as well as comical folklore that signifies on multiple frequencies.

For poetry scholars, Sterling D. Plumpp’s Blues: The Story Always Untold (1989) may provide a very useful parallel to Coogler’s premise. Based in Chicago, Plumpp was born in Mississippi, and several of his collections reflect styles and viewpoints compatible with those in Sinners. Other potential discussions might include Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995) as well as Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly: poems (2005) and Leadbelly: A Life in Pictures (2007).

A similar exploration might involve James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” How does Baldwin’s fictional treatment of the blues ethos coincide with Coogler’s vision? What are the protagonist Sonny’s values? What is his artistic objective? What is the meaning and function of his music? And how do the answers to these questions dovetail with similar answers to questions about Sinners? Conversely, a discussion of Sinners alongside Baldwin’s novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), or his play, The Amen Corner (1954), may also be intriguing.

According to Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad, Hughes regarded “the American principle of freedom of speech” as a thin line that separated the US from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. And since he witnessed the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper and visited Japan a few years earlier during its period of dictatorship (he was followed and told to leave the country), Hughes developed an informed perspective on extreme right-wing uses of state power against citizens. “Klansmen and Storm Troopers are brothers under the skin,” he writes in 1945. Additionally, Hughes similarly characterized Jim Crow as “confederate democracy,” and in a 1945 essay, he warned: “We had better consider that problem now.” Given the nation’s current drift toward autocracy, are we witnessing an almost nation-wide rebirth of Confederate attitudes? And if so, does Sinners call for a broader understanding of, and/or different approaches to, Southern Studies?

Are there ways that Hughes’s writings from Spain interface with Coogler’s representation of Jim Crow in Sinners? And if so, what are the implications? Are there ways that Hughes’s reports from Spain analogize Coogler’s blues narrative?

In 1934, threats from right-wing extremists drove Langston Hughes out of Carmel, California. He wrote about his experience in "The Vigilantes Knocked at My Door." How might Hughes's columns, written between 1937 and 1945, here and/or abroad, interface with Coogler's theme of racial terror?

Are there ways that Hughes’s play Don’t You Want to Be Free? (1938) is dialogic with Sinners?

Considering Hughes’s warning and Coogler’s portrayal of racial terror, are there scholars whose writings seem especially helpful for this project? At least one blues scholar has examined blues aesthetics within a Fanonian perspective. But consider Woods’s notion of blues epistemology to examine “the continuous crisis in the Delta and African American attempts to create a new regional reality based on cultural freedom and economic and social justice.” Or perhaps Carol Anderson’s work in White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016)?

By the same token, if Sinners allegorizes the rise of Neo-Confederate policy and ideology, are there neglected political or philosophical writings that scholars might reimagine as Coogler reimagined the blues? What does “the jook” symbolize politically, and how might such symbolism relate to the conclusion of Hughes’s “Note on Commercial Theatre”? Or to Billie Holiday’s line: “God bless the child that’s got his own”?

The late philosopher Charles Mills’s notion of the racial contract seems analogous to Sinners. His observations about US politics and postmodern theory (that it tends to be muckraking, not radical) appear to be accurate as well. Would it be possible to examine Sinners in a philosophical framework?

In 1955, Hughes reacted to the racial terror of Emmett Till’s lynching by composing and publishing a poem titled “Mississippi—1955” and subtitled “(To the Memory of Emmett Till)” in African American newspapers. Similarly, in 1931, Hughes traveled to Alabama to inquire about the Scottsboro Boys. And, of course, Coogler represents racial terror fictionally in 1932. But considering Hughes’s 1945 warning, how can we utilize the values and principles in blues to create or provide spaces where people and personalities “that might seem disparate” can find common ground?

Of course, Coogler posits “the jook” as such a site—and by logical extension, similar Black vernacular venues. But considering the capacity of blues to blend irresistible pleasure with clear-eyed social critique, perhaps we might also explore the musicologist Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.’s notion of Black community theaters in Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip Hop (2004)? Whether in fields, churches, nightclubs, bars, parks, playgrounds, or living rooms, Black folk created venues through “communal rituals in the church and the undocumented house party culture.” How does Ramsey’s concept help illuminate Coogler’s achievement? Is it possible to pair Ramsey’s notion of theater with Hughes’s? And to what extent might we utilize their ideas to gather, edutain, and thereby address present-day sociopolitical issues?