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Steven C. Tracy, distinguished professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, has been awarded an honorary credential from Central China Normal University in Wuhan, China in recognition of his “outstanding contribution” to the university’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Tracy has been recognized as a “distinguished scholar, a dedicated overseas colleague and a cultural ambassador” at the university, where he has visited regularly since 2009, contributing to the institution’s academic progress and cultural exchanges.

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Tracy has taught, lectured, performed and delivered papers at conferences in China, publishing a half dozen papers in Chinese journals. The Chinese translation of his first book, “Langston Hughes and the Blues,” is now expected to be released this after a lengthy delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Thirty-five years after it was first published in English, Tracy’s book chronicling how the poet, author and playwright incorporated the blues genre of music into his poetry, is also being re-released, thanks to fresh critical acclaim.  

Professor Tony Bolden, editor of “Langston Hughes Review,” calls the work a “classic.”

Noted scholars in African American studies Arnold Rampersad, formerly of Stanford University, and Robert Butler, formerly of Canisius College, have written review essays of Tracy’s research that appears in Foreign Language and Literature Research 1 (2021). 

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Rampersad, Langston Hughes’ biographer, wrote of “Langston Hughes and the Blues,” “I found myself learning an immense amount from a book by a younger scholar extraordinarily equipped to deal with the matter of the full impact of the blues on Langston Hughes.”  

Overall, Rampersad judges that Tracy’s work as critic, editor and performer on Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and others demonstrates “acute sharpness of the intelligence, his almost incomparable (certainly among scholars of American and African American culture) store of hard knowledge of music and musical productions, his fine training in American literature, and our great good fortune in having him as a resource as we move forward with the long, difficult, and often dangerous business of trying to understand ourselves, what we stand for, and the increasingly enigmatic world in which we move.” 

Butler calls Tracy “the foremost authority on how African American folk art and music have profoundly influenced American culture and also shaped both Black and mainstream American literatures.” Butler asserts bluntly, “Steve Tracy’s work is not simply extremely valuable; it is necessary.”