The Ethnic Avant-Garde

Minority Cultures and World Revolution
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-17352-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 532 g

Reihe: Modernist Latitudes

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West.

Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International.

The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lee, Steven S.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of IllustrationsA Note on TransliterationIntroduction1. Translating the Ethnic Avant-Garde2. The Avant-Garde's Asia: Factography and Roar China3. From Avant-Garde to Authentic: Revisiting Langston Hughes's "Moscow Movie"4. Cold War Pluralism: The New York Intellectuals Respond to Soviet Anti-SemitismAfterword: Chinese Communism, Cultural Revolution, and American MulticulturalismAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyCredits and PermissionsIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Steven S. Lee is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.