Description
Book SynopsisExamining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors - and on twentieth-century American debates about race, this book remaps black modernism, that reveals the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism.
Trade Review“A blockbuster study of the Soviet Union’s significance for African American literary and cultural self-fashioning in the twentieth century, researched with an unusually daunting prodigiousness and conceived with a truly geopolitical theoretical intelligence. In attending to questions of travel, of political identities-in-formation, and of subjectivity’s ever-changing subject,
Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain locates a dialectic of displacement in which an imaginary and actual elsewhere—in this case none other than post-revolutionary Russia—furnishes a space to rearticulate crucial aspects of social and cultural life at home.”—Eric Lott, author of
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class“A significant book that introduces the Soviet Union to the ‘Black Atlantic’ model of modernism. By examining the works of writers such as Du Bois, McKay, Hughes, and Robeson, the author explains the impact of the Soviet Union on African Americans. This kind of analysis is new—and vital—to literary studies.”—Gerald Horne, author of
Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists“In
Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain, Kate A. Baldwin has presented the hitherto ignored Soviet response to African American intellectuals and cultural workers. This is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual and political range of African America in the twentieth century.”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Demand for a New Kind of Person: Black Americans and the Soviet Union, 1922-1963
1. “Not at All God’s White People”: McKay and the Negro in Red
2. Between Harlem and Harlem: Hughes and the Ways of the Veil
3. Du Bois, Russia, and the “Refusal to Be ‘White’”
4. Black Shadows across the Iron Curtain: Robeson’s Stance between Cold War Cultures
Epilogue: The Only Television Hostess Who Doesn’t Turn Red
Notes
Bibliography
Index
