Description
Book SynopsisThe Ethnic Avant-Garde remaps global modernism and interwar literary, political, and art history along minority and Soviet-centered lines. Steven S. Lee details an absorbing collage of writers and artists who cohered around experimental techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption, advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
Trade ReviewA prodigiously researched, insightful, and lucid book, Lee's work offers fresh perspective on the links between avant-garde aesthetics and vanguard politics. His scholarship is nothing short of transformative for those seeking new ways of configuring the relationships between ethnicity and cultural production between the wars. -- Kate Baldwin, Northwestern University Beautifully written, deeply researched, and constantly engaging, The Ethnic Avant-Garde restores the allure of Moscow as the beacon of political and perceptual revolution in the early Soviet period. The aspiration to conjoin the socialist vanguard and the cultural avant-garde in an international alliance was engraved in the border-crossing works of activist intellectuals who sought to link indigenous roots to vertiginous upheaval. Steven S. Lee truly understands the pathos and promise of this global experiment. -- Dale E. Peterson, Amherst College A dazzlingly original, ambitious book that challenges us to reconsider the relationship between politics and artistic experimentation during a complex, contradictory, and intriguing period in the history of the United States and the Soviet Union. Lee draws astute and surprising insights into literature, art, modernism, revolution, and the fraught, never-ending struggle to counter racism around the globe. -- Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University Lee's brilliant book not only redefines 'ethnic literature' but also fundamentally alters our sense of the political promises and aesthetic possibilities of 'the avant-garde.' It is essential reading for students and scholars of twentieth-century literature and culture. -- Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State University A highly engaging exploration. The Russian Review Provocative and wide-ranging. Slavic Review Ambitious, prodigiously researched, and often dazzling. Melus This book is of obvious interest to those studying interactions between Soviet and American culture. Slavists generally can gain much from its international focus, which helps illustrate the enduring relevance of Soviet and Russian culture to the world at large. Indeed, for those hoping to engage a wider variety of students, Lee's framework, rooted not only in American culture but also in contemporary social issues, will be an invaluable resource. -- Emily Wang Slavic and East European Journal The Ethnic Avant-Garde is an unusually imaginative work of cultural history. But its inventiveness is fostered by nose-to-the-grindstone feats of archive digging and cross-cultural translation. -- William J. Maxwell African American Review
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations A Note on Transliteration Introduction 1. Translating the Ethnic Avant-Garde 2. The Avant-Garde's Asia: Factography and Roar China 3. From Avant-Garde to Authentic: Revisiting Langston Hughes's "Moscow Movie" 4. Cold War Pluralism: The New York Intellectuals Respond to Soviet Anti-Semitism Afterword: Chinese Communism, Cultural Revolution, and American Multiculturalism Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Credits and Permissions Index
