Langston Hughes / Hurmatlig Dost Longeston Xughez Research

The title comes from a note behind a photo of an Uzbek poet, Respected Friend Langston Hughes, spelled phonetically in the new Uzbek Latin script.

My research on Langston Hughes in Soviet Central Asia is grounded in long-term archival work conducted in U.S. and international collections, including the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Since 2014, I have identified, contextualized, and translated previously unpublished materials related to Langston Hughes’ travels in Central Asia and to lesser-known Central Asian literary figures. My scholarship emphasizes archival recovery, translation, and interpretive framing, and reflects sustained, original research rather than secondary synthesis.

My public scholarship is dedicated to making archival histories of friendship, travel, and cultural exchange accessible to wider audiences. The archival work is published here: Langston Hughes in Turkestan 1932-1933: Poems, Notebooks and Photos (2015)

I use the term Turkestan rather than Central Asia because it reflects the vernacular and historical usage current at the time of Hughes’ travels, referring to the region that included Soviet Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

Interviews & Reviews:

2025

2023

Schomburg Scholar in Residence, Ford Foundation Fellow, Schomburg Center for Black Culture

2022

Silk Road Festival

I spoke with the wonderful writer Aybike Ahmedi about Langston Hughes’s work in Soviet Central Asia for the Silk Road Festival.

Silk Road Festial 2022

1C2389A1-2C29-4C0F-8D7C-B8A3F42304BA_1_201_a

Silk Road Festival with Aybike Ahmedi’s painting

2021

2020

2018

Dissertation completed and still embargoed :)

2017

Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, The City University of New York, IRADAC Dissertation Fellows Program

2016

Langston Hughes in Turkestan 1932-1933: Poems Notebooks and Photos (Lost & Found, 2015) exhibit at The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Institute:

2015

Poetry Foundation

Publisher’s Weekly:

Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos, and Notebooks from Turkestan

Langston Hughes, edited by Zohra Saed. CUNY/Lost & Found, $8 trade paper (60p) ISBN 978-0-9888945-6-3

In 1932, Langston Hughes visited Leningrad to help make a Soviet film about race in America; from there he asked to visit Central Asia, evading his Soviet minders to “make his own path” through the old towns and new literary circles of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The travels have long been known, as has Hughes’s book about them, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, published in Moscow in 1935. But Hughes’s journals and the Uzbek poems about his visit have never been published until now. Saed provides an informative foreword explaining literary politics in Soviet Central Asia under Stalin, and a moving afterword about her family’s flight from Uzbekistan. Hughes’s clipped notes on his travels reveal his views of “minority” life in non-Russian Soviet states, and though he was determined to meet writers and find things out for himself, he did not always see past the Communist Party line: “So rapidly are Uzbeks and Russians mixing,” he wrote in Tashkent, “that in 15 years, one probably can’t tell who is who.” The journals also show—with Saed’s help—the region’s complicated language politics. Hughes’s journey itself may be news to non-scholarly readers, while those who know the story can still learn much from Saed’s editorial work. (Aug.)

Zohra Saed