The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

3. Recent scholarship on the “black-red thread” includes Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008); William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); David Chioni Moore, “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border,” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (fall 2002); Ani Mukherji, “The Anticolonial Imagination” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2011); James Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). See also Nikhil Pal Singh, “Retracing the Black-Red Thread,” American Literary History 15, no. 4 (2003): 830–40.

4. This tension has been reinforced by one of the key theorists of the avant-garde, Renato Poggioli. According to him, the avant-garde emerged from the alienation brought by modernity, which broke “all the links between artisan and artist, destroyed all the forms of folklore and ethnic culture.” That is, Poggioli circumscribes “ethnic” to premodernity and precapitalism. It serves as the expression of a historical moment in which art was still in harmony with the social. Amid the alienating blows of modernity—in particular, the replacement of patrons by markets—the artist might be tempted to re-create the ethnic, but Poggioli dismisses such efforts as “unrealizable restorations” and “impossible palingeneses.” Instead, the avant-gardist responds to his alienation by looking to the future, by rebelling against all that has gone before (Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968], 121). Recently, Timothy Yu has used Poggioli’s mention of the “ethnic” to posit a link between American ethnic and avant-garde poetry; by Yu’s account, both are expressions of alienation, both seek a “kind of community no longer imaginable within bourgeois culture” (Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009], 5). This useful connection, however, does not unseat Poggioli’s reductive understanding of ethnicity as past-bound and, in a modern context, impossible.

5. Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

6. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 141. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 8–11.

7. Walter Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” New Left Review 48 (March–April 1968): 88.

8. As the tower’s accompanying pamphlet put it, “We assert that the present project is the first revolutionary artistic work which we can—and do—send to Europe” (Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala [Petrograd: Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv NKP, 1920], 3). Katerina Clark notes elsewhere that the revolution provided the Soviet avant-garde with a “trump card” in their “campaign against Paris” (Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995], 36, 141). For more on the axes of Benjamin’s world—Paris-Moscow-Berlin-Naples—see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

9. On the specific features of Tatlin’s Tower, see Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala, 1, and Nikolai Punin, “O pamiatnikakh,” in O Tatline, ed. I. N. Punina and V. I. Rakitin (Moscow: RA, 1994), 16–17.

10. Viktor Shklovskii, “On Faktura and Counter Reliefs,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Zhadova (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 342. I build here on Buck-Morss’s discussion of the competing temporalities of the avant-garde and vanguard: the former sought to “rupture the continuity of time” by any means necessary, while the latter claimed “to know the course of history in its totality” via a “‘science’ of the future.” By Buck-Morss’s account, the Soviet vanguard ultimately prevailed over the avant-garde, but in response, she urges us to engage “in the historical task of surprising rather than explaining the present—more avant-garde than vanguard in its temporality” (Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000], 42–60, 69).

11. Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala, 3–4. See also Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 84–85.

12. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005), 200. Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 39, 69–71. This aim was not unique to the constructivists. In her groundbreaking work on Josephine Baker, Anne Cheng notes the proclivity of modernist architects like Le Corbusier for unadorned, “pure” surfaces, “set off against notions of excessive adornment, inarticulate sensuality, femininity, backwardness.” Cheng proceeds to reveal the connections between modernist surface and racial skin, in part to arrive at a notion of race not confined to individual intent, fixed meanings, or commodification. Likewise I provide an “ethnic” reading of Tatlin’s Tower, albeit with an emphasis not on surface but on time. See Anne Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

13. John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 156, 243n7. Vladimir Tatlin, “Autobiography,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Zhadova (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 264.

14. Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 211. For Babel as the loss of a single divine tongue, see Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10–17.

15. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), 35. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin, 164–65.

16. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 17–25.

17. Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 251.

18. As Perry Anderson points out, Marx himself subscribed to “a complex and differential temporality, in which episodes or eras were discontinuous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves” (Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 [March–April 1984]: 101). See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 158–59. Lenin and Trotsky built on this tradition: as Michael Löwy points out, Trotsky based the notion of “permanent revolution” on Marx’s observations about Germany’s “backwardness” (Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution [New York: Verso, 1981], 12). Of course, Russians were not the only ones seeking to nuance Marxist stagism. In his “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics” (1932), Ernst Bloch notes the urgent need (particularly in the face of fascism) to reconceptualize Marxist revolution to account for “unsurmounted remnants of older economic being and consciousness.” Echoing Trotsky’s “uneven development,” Bloch proposes liberating “the still possible future from the past only by putting both in the present” (Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” New German Critique 11 [spring 1977]: 33). Even the relatively orthodox Georg Lukács allowed that “primitive Utopianism” (lacking “authentic class consciousness”) could be a “factor in the proletariat’s struggle for freedom” (78–79), and that it was important to accept the proletariat’s “diverse stages of consciousness” (80) (Georg Lukács, “Class Consciousness,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971]).

19. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 5.

20. In other words, communists were to support antiracist and anti-imperialist struggles, even if this meant entering into a “temporary alliance” with nationalist movements little interested in Marxism. The aim here was to earn the trust of “oppressed nations” through sensitivity toward “the survivals of national sentiments,” which would put the world’s colonized and exploited on the side of the Comintern. This, in turn, would open additional fronts against global capitalism and, in particular, strip the West of the resources that it extracted from its colonies. See V. I. Lenin, “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm (accessed July 4, 2014). See also Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 129–34.

21. Vladimir Tatlin et al., “The Work Ahead of Us,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Zhadova (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 239.

22. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, ed. and trans. Peter Sedgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 107–9.

23. John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920—First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), 78. See also Milan Hauner, What Is Asia to Us? Russia’s Asian Heartland Yesterday and Today (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 24–28.

24. On Tatlin’s strategic decision to rename his originally planned “Monument to the October Revolution,” see Pamela Kachurin, “Working (for) the State: Vladimir Tatlin’s Career in Early Soviet Russia and the Origins of the Monument to the Third International,” Modernism/modernity 19, no. 1 (January 2012): 24–31.

25. Already by the Comintern’s Third Congress in 1921, Robert Young detects an emphasis on the Soviets’ need for diplomatic recognition from and trade deals with the West. Such emphases heightened after Stalin’s 1924 assertion of “socialism in one country,” which effectively made Soviet state interests synonymous with the world revolution. See Young, Postcolonialism, 144, 149–50.

26. The notion of “utopian surplus” comes from Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 64–65. Against efforts to disassociate the Soviet avant-garde from Stalinism, Boris Groys has argued that the avant-garde was never exactly innocent—not only in its eager embrace of the political vanguard but also in its dreams of “total,” transformative art (Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992]). Gary Saul Morson and Michael Bernstein’s notion of “side shadows” allows for a more conciliatory approach to the avant-garde. Bernstein defines “side shadowing” against “back shadowing,” the tendency of historians to depict events like the Holocaust (his focus) as inevitable. Side shadowing, in contrast, emphasizes the possibility that history could have turned out differently. Thus, rather than dismiss the Soviet avant-garde as doomed to failure or totalitarianism, it is possible to understand it on its own terms, in its own time, and to acknowledge the lost possibilities of paths not taken. See Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

27. Dale Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 5–6.

28. Clark, Petersburg, 52–53.

29. Harsha Ram, “The Poetics of Eurasia: Velimir Khlebnikov between Empire and Revolution,” in Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Madhavan Palat (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 216, 227–28. Ram translates and presents in this piece the manifesto in full.

30. Pound and T. S. Eliot exemplify what Michael North calls the dialect of modernism. This refers to Anglo-American writers like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound using black dialect and racial masquerade to thwart convention, coupled with the ambivalent responses of African American writers who saw this embrace as both restricting and enabling. As many have shown, white modernist interest in blackness bolstered the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement of the 1920s. Of course, the downside of this interest was stereotyping and pigeonholing—blacks cast as the bearers of virility, innocence, and regeneration—and North presents the “competing linguistic motives” of white and black modernisms as ultimately irreconcilable (Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]); see also Alain Locke, “The Negro Poets of the United States,” in Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, ed. William Stanley Braithwaite (Boston: Brimmer, 1926); George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997). On Pound and China, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23–56, and Steven Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39–62.

31. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 129, 131, 147–48. On Paris as a center of the Black Atlantic, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). On the violent underbelly of modernist primitivism, see Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 189–214, and Donna V. Jones, “The Prison House of Modernism: Colonial Spaces and the Construction of the Primitive at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition,” Modernism/modernity 14, no. 1 (January 2007): 55–69.

32. Of course, one could do a lot worse than forward “tolerance, comprehension, and mercy.” As Clifford notes in The Predicament of Culture, this group was later active in the Nazi resistance as well as in postwar institutions like UNESCO (139–40). On the other hand, surrealism’s tendency to keep the Other at a distance is discussed in Martine Antle, “Surrealism and the Orient,” Yale French Studies 109 (July 2006): 4–16. For 1930s, Comintern-inspired efforts to remedy surrealism’s complicity with imperialism, see Adam Jolles, “The Tactile Turn: Envisioning a Postcolonial Aesthetic in France,” Yale French Studies 109 (July 2006): 17–38.

33. Aleksandr Shevchenko, “Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, Its Potentials, Its Achievements,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking, 1988), 45. On Tatlin’s alliance with the neoprimitivists, see Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 47.

34. Natal’ia Goncharova, “Preface to Catalogue of One-Man Exhibition,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking, 1988), 58, 60. Likewise, the Slavophile movement sought to turn this relegated status into a source of strength: the “ahistoricity of Russian life” as allowing “Russia to maintain intact the purity of its inner being” (Boris Groys, “Russia and the West: The Quest for Russian National Identity,” Studies in Soviet Thought 43 [1992]: 189, 193). See also Hauner, What Is Asia to Us, 21–24; Peterson, Up from Bondage, 57–58; Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 31–32. On Russia as “semi-Oriental” in the European imagination, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), and Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

35. Shevchenko, “Neoprimitivism,” 49.

36. Jane Ashton Sharp, “Beyond Orientalism: Russian and Soviet Modernism on the Periphery of Empire,” in Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind Blakesley and Susan Reid (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 120. As Boris Groys colorfully puts it, “If Rousseau indulged in dreams about Native Americans [indeitsakh], German philosophy about Indians [indiitsakh], Gauguin about Polynesians, Picasso about Africans, etc., then the Russian intellectual proved to be a centaur composed of Rousseau and the Native American, Schopenhauer and the Indian, Picasso and the African (and this was the actual situation of the Russian avant-garde, with its interest in icons, masks, Russian broadsheets [lubku], etc.). In his own ‘otherness’ the Russian recognized the dream of European philosophy, in himself was the realization of this philosophy’s ideal” (Boris Groys, “Rossiia kak podsoznanie zapada,” in Utopiia i obmen [Moscow: Znak, 1993], 251).

37. Jane Ashton Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5–7, 32. On the applicability of Said’s criticism to Russia, see Adeeb Khalid, “Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism,” Kritika 1, no. 4 (fall 2000): 691–99; Nathaniel Knight, “On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid,” Kritika 1, no. 4 (fall 2000): 701–15; and Maria Todorova, “Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul?” Kritika 1, no. 4 (fall 2000): 717–27. For more on the Russian avant-garde’s engagement with the Caucasus and Central Asia, see Michael Kunichika, “The Penchant for the Primitive: Archaeology, Ethnography, and the Aesthetics of Russian Modernism” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007), and the documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art, DVD, directed by Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev (2010; Desert of Forbidden Art LLC, 2011).

38. Harsha Ram, for instance, notes the often ambivalent and hostile stance of Russian authors toward Asia—Asia as a source of both temptation and terror in the “imperial sublime” of Russian literature. See Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Likewise, as Dale Peterson makes clear, 1920s discourses of “Eurasianism”—articulated by Russian émigrés in Eastern Europe and increasingly prominent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia—combined “cultural relativism and Russian hybridity” with “the heavy tread of a missionary nationalism.” Though several Eurasianists embraced the Bolshevik Revolution from afar, they did so for nationalist rather than internationalist ends, anticipating, as Peterson suggests, Stalin’s “socialism in one country” (Peterson, Up from Bondage, 144–51).

39. Aleksandr Blok, “Skify,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, ed. S. A. Nebol’sin (Moscow: Pravda, 1971), 3: 244-45. These literal translations are my own.

40. Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 230–32, 265n38. The limits of such proclamations and, in particular, of Soviet nationalities policy are discussed in the following. On Blok’s endorsement of the revolution, see his January 1918 essay “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” where he writes, “Remake everything. Build it so that everything will be new; so that our false, dirty, dull, deformed [bezobraznaia] life will be a just, clean, happy, and beautiful life” (Aleksandr Blok, Rossiia i intelligentsia [Berlin: Skify, 1920], 14; emphasis in original).

41. Blok, “Skify,” 246. Though, interestingly, in “The International,” it is the reactionaries who are portrayed as cannibals and (in the Russian version) vampires.

42. For more examples of Russian modernism’s apocalyptic embrace of the East, see Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 221–30, and David M. Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). For more on the Scythian literary movement, see Clark, Petersburg, 52–53.

43. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 158.

44. Within this tradition, Asia often assumes an “exotic” and utopian quality, far removed from the spheres of Western power. See Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xii.

45. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 49–55; Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 73–74; Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 172–73. However, these accounts also emphasize the benefit of McKay’s Moscow visit to his literary output.

46. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ikon” as a variant of “icon” but indicates its usage only in reference to religious depictions. Reinforcing his identification with Russia and Russians, McKay (like many other foreign visitors) adopted a Russian alias during his stay in Moscow—the sexually indeterminate “Sasha,” which Gary Edward Holcomb uses to reread the author through the lens of queer black Marxism. For instance, after connecting McKay’s “black iconography” in Russia to the “mystical aura” that his autobiography imparts to Lenin, Holcomb suggests that “in coming close to becoming a black Lenin, McKay forms a kind of ecstatic sexual union with the Communist leader” (Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007], 42–43).

47. To be sure, Blok and Khlebnikov were more interested in “Asiatic Russia” than in Byzantine Orthodoxy. However, Orthodoxy did play a role in Russian avant-garde painting: Tatlin himself drew from icon traditions—for instance in his 1911 Sailor (Self-Portrait)—while Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square was intended to be hung in room corners, just as icons were. See Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 47–49; Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Hampshire, U.K.: Lund Humphries, 2008), 142–46. Interestingly, Groys provides a Freudian reading of Black Square as referencing the “blackness of some cosmic ur-vagina [kosmicheskoi pra-vaginy]” that serves to bridge East and West (Groys, “Rossiia,” 247–48). This seems to buttress Holcomb’s assertion of the McKay ikon’s ecstatic, indeterminate sexuality in Moscow.

48. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator, 1978), 144–47; Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia (Chicago: Johnson, 1964), 78. Haywood probably means rubashka, the Russian word for “shirt.”

49. For instance, an ad in the July 8, 1933, issue of the leftist Harlem Liberator proclaimed “A Pushkin Bust in Every Negro Home!” and described the poet as both a “famous revolutionary Negro” and “the Father of Russian literature.” The newspaper offered discounted home-size busts (“shipped to Harlem Liberator from Moscow by Langston Hughes”) as a subscription premium.

50. Woodford McClellan, “Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925–1934,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26, no. 2 (1993): 371–90. For a broader survey of blacks in Russia—from postrevolutionary romance to perestroika-era bigotry—see Maxim Matusevich, “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society,” African Diaspora 1 (2008): 53–85.

51. Alaina Lemon, “Sympathy for the Weary State? Cold War Chronotopes and Moscow Others,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 4 (2009): 859.

52. Anatoly Lunacharsky, “The Eastern Bogey,” trans. Bessie Weissmann, New Masses, November 1926, 13.

53. As another example, Andrei Platonov’s Dzhan, written between 1933 and 1935, interweaves local legend with one man’s effort to bring socialism to his Central Asian tribe. As in many of Platonov’s works, the novel presents a world that exists independently of humans and human knowledge, and revolutionaries whose grasp of language and socialism can be described as crude, rudimentary, and primitive. As Thomas Seifrid notes, “Like the primitivists, Platonov saw the precultural as fertile ground for new meanings, and both he and they canonized crudity as a source of aesthetic deformation” (Thomas Seifrid, “Platonov, Socialist Realism, and the Avant-Garde,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], 240).

54. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 73. Both McKay and Benjamin also met Vsevolod Meyer- hold briefly.

55. Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 22–23; Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 104, 129.

56. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 209.

57. Ibid., 209, 211–12, 217–18; Benjamin, “Moscow,” 24.

58. Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 51, 126. On the “Surrealist Map of the World,” see David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 169–76.

59. Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 134.

60. Benjamin, “Moscow,” 31–32.

61. Ibid., 26, 32, 34; Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 123. For a discussion of the lacquer box as a merging of modern (consumer) and premodern fairy tales, see Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 223–24. For a more recent instance (set in a dystopian end-of-history future) of Lenin juxtaposed with icons, see the film Children of Men, DVD, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2006; Universal City: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007).

62. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 222. Indeed, by the time of Benjamin’s arrival, the political and artistic headiness of Moscow was already on the wane. “Socialism in one country” had been declared two years earlier, Stalin was consolidating power, and the Soviet avant-garde found itself increasingly embattled. On the roles of loss and affect in Benjamin’s disruptive temporality, and for traces of Benjamin’s Moscow in post-Soviet Moscow, see Jonathan Flatley, “Moscow and Melancholia,” Social Text 19, no. 1 (spring 2001): 75–102.

63. Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2005), 102. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (New York: Verso, 1995), 145, 229–30n116.

64. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 395.

66. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 184.

67. Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 210.

68. Benjamin, “Paris,” 79; Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 403.

69. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 225, 245; Walter Benjamin, “Johann Jakob Bachofen,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 12, quoted in Löwy, Fire Alarm, 63, 76. There is ongoing disagreement about what constitutes a dialectical image. Buck-Morss writes there can be innumerable dialectical images in the form of everyday commodified objects and profane texts, the critic’s task being to reveal the suppressed ur-historical utopian content in each. Eli Friedlander, on the other hand, argues that there can be only one dialectical image, which is “a dimension of reality made recognizable,” an alternative, unified, redeemed reality. From this perspective, everyday commodified objects are merely “elements which will go into the construction of the dialectical image.” However, Friedlander adds that while identifying such elements are preconditions for the ultimate recognition of the dialectical image, such work “never has a direct relation to the emergence of the image,” which he likens to Proust’s involuntary memory. I prefer Buck-Morss’s understanding, since from a methodological perspective, it is much more portable and seems not incompatible with the total, singular image that Friedlander describes. See Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 249–50; Eli Friedlander, “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,” boundary 2 35, no. 3 (2008): 3, 4, 24.

70. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 150; Friedlander, “The Measure of the Contingent,” 12. Likewise, Peter Bürger asserts that Benjamin’s exposure to avant-garde works led to his concept of allegory, which also creates constellations of past and present. Indeed, in “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin calls allegory the canon of dialectical imagery in the seventeenth century (replaced by nouveauté in the nineteenth). However, Bürger argues that, unlike allegory, which can produce an infinite number of meanings, the dialectical image’s tie to redemption (specifically, socialist revolution) grounds it in objective meaning—in both the sociohistorical and “mystico-theological” senses (Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], 68–69; Benjamin, “Paris,” 86). See also Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 241.

71. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 150. To be sure, Osborne’s disruption of progress does not necessarily gel with every branch of the historical avant-garde. Of course, the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti sought to negate the past through progress, though as pointed out in chapter 1, he also sought to “swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.” Soviet constructivism likewise emphasized progress, though as Christina Kiaer has shown, in his advertising collaborations with Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko was able to incorporate Benjaminian wish images of the past. See Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 175–82.

72. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 242. Buck-Morss here refers to the secular Jewish messianism lurking in Benjamin’s thought, something I discuss in chapter 4. Poggioli acknowledges the avant-garde’s attraction to prehistory but argues that this in fact serves “avant-garde antitraditionalism, precisely because the avant-garde can evaluate archaic traditions better than official art and conservative criticism can” (The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 55). That is, for Poggioli, the avant-garde can rebel against immediate traditionalism (represented by official art and conservative criticism) via archaic traditions—an arbitrary distinction that strains to preserve his notion of avant-garde antitraditionalism.

73. Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 104. This association becomes less far-fetched in light of Joseph Brodsky’s more recent description of the Soviet flag as “a scarlet, Janissary’s-cloaklike banner” combining “a star and the crescent of Islam” beside a “modified cross” (Joseph Brodsky, “Flight from Byzantium,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986], 429).

74. This was particularly true during the Cold War, as I discuss in chapter 4. See Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12, 15, 26–46.

75. Emerging from the notion of universal human time and progress, Fabian’s “denial of coevalness” refers to the tendency of anthropologists to “place the referent(s) of anthropology in a time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” “Ironically, the supposedly radical break with evolutionism propagated by Boasian and Kroeberian cultural anthropology had little or no effect on” evolutionist epistemology. “True, culturalism proclaimed ‘history’ a domain irreducible to natural history. It relativized human, cultural time and left universal time to biological evolution. With that the Enlightenment project was in fact ignored and relegated to the natural sciences. Practically, concentration on cultural configurations and patterns resulted in such overwhelming concern with the description of states (albeit ‘dynamic’ states) that the eighteenth-century élan in the search for a theory of universal human progress was all but abandoned. In sum, functionalism, culturalism, and structuralism did not solve the problem of universal human Time; they ignored it at best, and denied its significance at worst” (Fabian, Time and the Other, 20–21, 31). For an overview of Boas, see George W. Stocking Jr., “Basic Assumptions of Boasian Anthropology,” in The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 1–20.

76. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 164. On the assimilationism of Boas and Park, see Christopher Douglas, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 70. David Luis-Brown presses this point by arguing that both Boas and Park embraced a version of hybridity tied to intermarriage. That is, they both took on nativism “by imagining a racially homogeneous nation,” and this latent racialism was “at odds with their broader strategy of proposing a shift from race to culture in social scientific theory” (David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States [Durham: Duke University Press, 2008], 205–11). On the Chicago school’s latent Orientalism, see Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

77. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14–23; Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 28–30.

78. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 178.

79. Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Atlantic Monthly 174, no. 2 (August 1944): 67.

80. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (summer 1994): 439. For other overviews of Soviet nationalities policy, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

81. See, for instance, Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 118; Erika Sunada, “Revisiting Horace M. Kallen’s Cultural Pluralism: A Comparative Analysis,” Journal of American and Canadian Studies 18 (2000): 57. For considerations of Kallen that highlight the gap between his “cultural pluralism” and late twentieth-century multiculturalism, see Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1998), 37; John Higham, “Multiculturalism and Universalism: A History and Critique,” American Quarterly 45, no. 2 (June 1993), 205; David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 92–94; and Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 87.

82. Horace Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” Nation 100, no. 2590 (February 25, 1915): 217, 219. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

83. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 64–65; John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 208; Werner Sollors, “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 261–62.

84. Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, ed. A. Fineburg (New York: International, 1934), 5–13. Further references appear parenthetically in the text. For background on Stalin’s gripe with Otto Bauer’s notion of “cultural-national autonomy,” see Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 32. For connections between Bolshevik and Wilsonian calls for “self-determination,” see Arno J. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 342–43, 380–83. According to Mayer, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were a response to the writings of Lenin and Trotsky.

85. V. A. Tishkov, Rekviem po etnosu (Moscow: Nauka, 2003).

86. In both the 1915 and 1924 versions, Kallen writes that a redistribution of wealth would abolish America’s “dualism if the economic dualism of rich and poor were the fundamental one.” The original article adds, “It happens merely that it isn’t” (193), while the republication reads, “It happens, so far, that it doesn’t seem to be” (Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States [New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998], 81).

87. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 17–18. For a counterview, see Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 103.

88. As one additional, 1930 resolution on the “Negro question” elaborated, blacks constituted an “oppressed nation” and as such demanded land redistribution from white landowners to black farmers, the right of self-determination, and the “establishment of the State Unity of the Black Belt”—that is, the consolidation of “artificially split up and divided” blacks into a single governmental unit. This would make it impossible for the region’s “fairly sizable white minority” to claim a majority anywhere and meant the erasure of all preexisting state and local borders; see The 1928 and 1930 Comintern Resolutions on the Black National Question in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Revolutionary Review, 1975), 30. The Black Belt’s contours can be found in Soviet ethnographic maps that divide the United States into two main nationalities, “Americans,” who fill most of the country, and “Negroes,” who cover the Southeast. See Bol’shoi sovetskii atlas mira (Moscow: Nauchno-izdatel’skii institut, 1937). On African American participation in formulating the Black Belt thesis, see Haywood, Black Bolshevik, 227–34, and Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 91–93.

89. Horace Kallen, Frontiers of Hope (New York: Liveright, 1929), 446. Further references are given parenthetically in the text. See Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

90. For more on Jewish overrepresentation among the Bolsheviks, see Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 175. However, Slezkine goes on to suggest that many Jewish Bolsheviks were drawn to revolution precisely as a means of breaking from their roots.

91. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 14.

92. Langston Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934), 40; Olivier Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 119–21; Adeeb Khalid, Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 61–62.

93. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 9, 273–308.

94. This is not to say that Wright and Kallen were naive. In addition to expressing his admiration for Soviet nationalities policy, Wright’s 1944 essay also described his beating at the hands of white communists and decision to leave the party. By then he was well attuned to the “horror” that accompanied the “glory” of Soviet-inflected communism. See Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Atlantic Monthly 174, no. 3 (September 1944): 54. See also Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), 52. Kallen himself became a fierce critic of Stalinism and in 1937 cosponsored the pro-Trotsky Commission of Inquiry into the Truth of the Moscow Trials; see Sidney Hook, “Memories of the Moscow Trials,” Commentary 77 (March 1984): 58. On the Jewish Autonomous Region, see Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland; An Illustrated History, 1928–1996, ed. Bradley Burman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On the Soviet Korean deportation, see Michael Gelb, “An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans,” Russian Review 54, no. 3 (July 1995): 389–412.

95. Yuri Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (winter 1996): 834.

96. See ibid., passim; Clark, Petersburg, 212–23; and Mika Lähteenmäki, “Nikolai Marr and the Idea of a Unified Language,” Language and Communication 26, no. 3 (2006): 285–95; N. Ia. Marr, “Iafeticheskii Kavkaz i tretii etnicheskii element v sozidanii sredizemnomorskoi kul’tury,” in Izbrannye raboty, tom 1, ed. V. B. Aptekar’ (Leningrad: GAIMK, 1933), 120–21, quoted in Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr,” 838, and in Lawrence Thomas, The Linguistic Theories of N. Ja. Marr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 53.

97. N. Ia. Marr, “Chem zhivet iafeticheskoe iazykoznanie?” in Izbrannye raboty, tom 1, ed. V. B. Aptekar’ (Leningrad: GAIMK, 1933), 177, quoted in Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr,” 832. Of course, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing Europe” involves not simply decentering the West but also an expansion of the Marxist tradition: enfolding historical slippages and disruptions (e.g., the persistent belief in gods and spirits) into the universal history of abstract labor. As will be seen, Marr’s Japhetic theory turned “New Theory of Language” does just this.

98. N. Ia. Marr, “Iazyk i myshlenie,” in Izbrannye raboty, tom 3, ed. V. B. Aptekar’ (Leningrad: GAIMK, 1934), 111–12, quoted (with a slightly different translation) in Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr,” 843. The emphasis here on manual language is important, since, according to Marr, before the advent of class differentiation, “people spoke with their hands during the course of many tens of thousands of years.” Oral speech was originally the provenance of ruling-class shamans, and Marr seemed to envision his unified socialist language as a return to speechless, manual language. See Thomas, The Linguistic Theories of N. Ja. Marr, 99, and Yuri Slezkine, “The Fall of Soviet Ethnography, 1928–38,” Current Anthropology 32, no. 4 (1991): 478. On the problematic alignment of Marrism and Marxism, see Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr,” 841–44; Lähteenmäki, “Nikolai Marr,” 286–89; and Clark, Petersburg, 217–20.

99. N. Ia. Marr, “Znachenie i rol’ izucheniia natsmen’shinstva v kraevedenii,” in Izbrannye raboty, tom 1, ed. V. B. Aptekar’ (Leningrad: GAIMK, 1933), 235–36. After noting the shared aims of the October Revolution and Japhetic theory, Marr here advises archaeologists and linguists to “assist Soviet power in its task of preserving cultural treasures of past epochs and distributing them between nations from all stages of development—Soviet power’s task of carefully transplanting these treasures into a new economic-cultural construction” (247–48).

100. Soviet ethnographers shared Boas’s hostility to biological racism and, as Hirsch has shown, defined themselves against German racial science and in dialogue with Soviet nationalities policy (Empire of Nations, 266). However, they took issue precisely with Boas’s purported emphasis on the simultaneity of cultures. According to a (largely favorable) review of his Mind of Primitive Man (1911, translated into Russian in 1926), “Boas’s objection against the view of ethnologist-evolutionists hits a bit off the mark: maintaining, as a counterweight to unilinear evolution, the convergence of cultures, that is, the development of similar forms along different paths, the author does not note that, with this, he does not refute that which he wants to refute—that some peoples advance more along the path of cultural development, and others less so. The quantitative unevenness of the cultural progress of different peoples nevertheless remains a fact” (S. Tokarev, review of Um pervobytnogo cheloveka, by Franz Boas, trans. A. M. Voden, Etnografiia 1 [1928]: 133). Tokarev here anticipates Fabian’s criticism of culturalism, namely, its failure to address the problem of time (see note 75).

101. Marr, “Iafeticheskii Kavkaz,” 101, quoted (with a slightly different translation) in Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr,” 839. Accordingly, Hirsch notes that in response to Soviet nationalities policy’s blend of primordialism and evolutionism, “Soviet ethnographers conceived of natsional’nosti [nationalities] as ethnohistorical groups whose origins could be traced back to the ‘prehistorical era’—but whose members were united in the present through a shared cast of mind” (Empire of Nations, 295).

102. Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 153.

103. For an intimate portrait of Marr as both generous and domineering, brilliant and tautological, see Ol’ga Mikhailovna Freidenberg, “Vospominaniia o N. Ia. Marre,” Vostok-Zapad 3 (1988): 181–204.

104. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient, 127. See also Clark, Petersburg, 215.

105. Tolz makes this provocative claim by noting that one of Said’s mentors, the Egyptian scholar Anwar Abdel-Malek, studied in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. See Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient, 57, 91, 100–101, 114–18, 142, 171. Interestingly, Fabian concludes his Time and the Other by asserting the Other’s coevalness, by refusing the opposition of tradition and modernity—similar to Marr, though Fabian (equipped with a more sophisticated brand of Marxism) would likely disagree with Marr’s evolutionism. “What are opposed, in conflict, in fact, locked in antagonistic struggle, are not the same societies at different stages of development, but different societies facing each other at the same Time…the ‘savage and the proletarian’ are in equivalent positions vis-à-vis domination.” Still, at one point, Fabian wonders if world revolution and, in particular, Soviet ethnography might “construe a different Other than the capitalist world market.” Marr’s theories, coupled with Tolz’s study, suggests that this was indeed the case. See Fabian, Time and the Other, 155, 156, 159.

106. Walter Benjamin, “Problems in the Sociology of Language,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 73–75, 85–86. See also Clark, Moscow, 201–2.

107. Clark, Petersburg, 217, 221. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient, 62. Nataliia Azarova, “Khlebnikovskaia teoriia zaumi i politika edinogo iazyka,” Russian Literature 67 (2010): 273–89. For the persistence of these visions, note the resonance of both Marr and Khlebnikov in the work of the contemporary Kazakh writer and politician Olzhas Suleimenov. See Harsha Ram, “Imagining Eurasia: The Poetics and Ideology of Olzhas Suleimenov’s AZ i IA,” Slavic Review 60, no. 2 (summer 2001): 289–311.

108. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 42–60. Again, Boris Groys has influentially contested the widespread notion that avant-gardism was antithetical to Stalinist culture (see note 26). Even recognizing the possible continuity between the two, however, few would dispute that the iconoclastic cultural experimentation of the 1920s was sharply curtailed by the 1930s.

109. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient, 165–67. Stalin’s postwar turn is discussed in chapter 4. “Promethean linguistics”—language as “the ultimate vehicle for the transformation sought by revolution”—comes from Clark, Petersburg, 208.

1. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10–17. Many thanks to Scott Millspaugh for this tip.

2. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” trans. R. W. Flint, http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto (accessed July 4, 2014). David Burliuk et al., “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton, 51–52 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

3. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). On the connections and distinctions between Italian and Russian futurism—the first more “Europeanizing and urban,” the second more “primitivist and anti-imperialist”—see Harsha Ram, “Futurist Geographies: Uneven Modernities and the Struggle for Aesthetic Autonomy; Paris, Italy, Russia, 1909–1914,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, 313–40 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

4. Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 23.

6. Ibid., 10, 35–36.

7. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”; Anna Lawton, introduction to Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, 12. The Hylaeans used archaism and primitivism to distinguish themselves from the Italian futurists (18), much as Goncharova and the neoprimitivists used Asia to distinguish themselves from Western painters. The Hylaeans, who renamed themselves cubo-futurists in 1913, were thus natural allies of the neoprimitivists, and the two groups overlapped and frequently collaborated with each other (14).

8. Vel, “Khlebnikov—osnovatel’ budetlian,” Kniga i revoliutsiia, no. 9-10 (1922): 25, quoted in Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 28.

9. Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Trumpet of the Martians” (1916), in Lawton, Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, 103–6. Emphasis in original.

10. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.”

11. Markov, Russian Futurism, 152, 182. See also Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 153.

12. Kiaer writes that Mayakovsky “invokes Africa in typically colonialist terms as an uncivilized Eden that is powerless to resist the encroaching bourgeois civilization,” namely, the drinking of tea. However, she adds that the poet’s implicit tie between the revolution and Africa (both subject to bourgeois corruption) “indicates that for him, ‘primitive’ Africa is a positive term” (Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005], 155). The possibility of a positive primitivism is explored further below.

13. Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, ed. Bengt Jangfelt, trans. Stephen Rudy (New York: Marsilio, 1997), 225–30.

14. These recollections were likely written during Rivera’s 1956 return to Moscow. See David Elliott, ed., Mayakovsky: Twenty Years of Work; An Exhibition from the State Museum of Literature, Moscow (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 71. Similar recollections by Rivera are quoted and cited in S. Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970), 62. For the logistics of Mayakovsky’s time in Mexico, see William Harrison Richardson, Mexico Through Russian Eyes, 1806–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 129–30.

15. Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: Norton, 1990), 247. Many thanks to James Smethurst for this tip.

16. Lawton, introduction to Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, 13. Accordingly, as Perloff notes, one of Mayakovsky’s credos from 1913 was that “the word, its outline and its phonic aspect determine the flourishing of poetry” (The Futurist Moment, 157).

17. To be fair, four years after the New York reading, Williams was able to summarize the basic gist of Mayakovsky’s “Black and White.” See Mariani, William Carlos Williams, 247.

18. As Markov writes, Mayakovsky’s postrevolutionary writings were all connected to his prerevolutionary development, “when his poetic system took shape. When a certain simplicity of syntax and diction came later, during the Soviet time, it was not really a change, but an inevitable ripening of what had already grown to fruition” (Russian Futurism, 315–16). See also Jakobson, My Futurist Years, 236–37.

19. Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Orion, 1970), 399.

20. V. V. Mayakovsky, “Nashemu iunoshestvu,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 8 (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1958), 15. This, the epigraph’s, and the following translations are my own, except where otherwise noted.

21. Mayakovsky both drew inspiration from the American poet and regarded him as a competitor. For a comparison of these poets’ outsized bodies in relation to, respectively, American democracy and revolutionary Russia, see Clare Cavanagh, “Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the Body Politic,” in Rereading Russian Poetry, ed. Stephanie Sandler, 202–22 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

22. Mayakovsky, “Nashemu iunoshestvu,” 16.

23. Dm. Moldavskii, Maiakovskii i poeziia narodov SSSR (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1951), 24. A 1983 volume similarly praised Mayakovsky’s “spirit of international unity and brotherhood” and interpreted “To Our Youth” as showing how the Russian language could advance “all-national [obshchenatsional’noi] Soviet pride” (K. V. Aivazian, ed., Maiakovskii i literatura narodov sovetskogo soiuza [Yerevan: Izdatel’stvo Erevanskogo universiteta, 1983], 5, 16).

24. Edward Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (New York: Paragon, 1988), 205. Lawton, Introduction to Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, 46. On the many competing factions of Soviet writers and artists in the 1920s and 1930s, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Clark, Petersburg.

25. Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America, trans. Neil Cornwell (London: Hesperus, 2005), 64, 74, 76. Further references are inserted parenthetically in the text. The “Mac” hypothesis comes from Cornwell’s introduction to his translation (xv).

26. Greenblatt, of course, defines wonder as that which is “apart and yet utterly compelling,” as “all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed.” In early discourses surrounding the New World, the wonderful typically gives way to—but is never completely overshadowed by—the marvelous, which suggests apprehension and possession. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

27. V. V. Mayakovsky, “Meksika,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 7 (Moscow: Gos. Izdat. Khudozh. Lit., 1957), 42; for the Chekhov connection, see 477n.

28. Mayakovsky, “Meksika,” 43. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956), 27–38. Many thanks to Mark Goble for this tip.

29. Mayakovsky, “Meksika,” 45.

30. Ibid., 45, 48. For more on “Mexico,” see Brown, Mayakovsky, 276.

31. Mayakovsky would have thus disputed notions that Rivera contradicted himself in his combinations of the modern and premodern—for instance, in his Detroit Industry murals (1932–1933), the automobile stamping press resembling the Aztec goddess Coatlicue; see Rubén Gallo, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 15–17.

32. This reading of Mayakovsky’s anti-imperialist exoticism draws from David Luis-Brown’s recuperation of primitivism in his study of African American and Latin American writing. According to him, primitivism (in its “alternative” rather than “residual” or “dominant” forms) can upset “the terms of racialist discourses by calling for the forging of alliances among workers and people of color from different nations” (David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States [Durham: Duke University Press, 2008], 149–50, 170, 175).

33. V. V. Mayakovsky, “Bruklinskii most,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 7 (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), 85, 87. For more on Mayakovsky’s mixed views of the United States, as well as his conciliatory take on “the relics of olden days,” see Charles A. Moser, “Mayakovsky’s Unsentimental Journeys,” American Slavic and East European Review 19, no. 1 (February 1960): 86.

34. Dovid Katz, “The Days of Proletpen in American Yiddish Poetry,” introduction to Proletpen: American Rebel Yiddish Poets, ed. Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub, trans. Amelia Glaser (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 20; Ruth Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117, 130; Moser, “Mayakovsky’s Unsentimental Journeys,” 92.

35. The Frayhayt interview is collected in Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 374–75. Frayhayt editor Shakhno Epstein’s 1930 account of Mayakovsky at “Nit Gedaige” is quoted in Vasilii A. Katanian, Maiakovskii: Khronika zhizni i deiatel’nosti (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1985), 312; V. V. Mayakovsky, “Kemp ‘Nit gedaige,’” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 7 (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), 88–91. Underscoring his immersion into immigrant New York, Mayakovsky also had an affair with a Russian émigré (the daughter of Mennonites who had fled the revolution), which, after his departure, resulted in the birth of a daughter.

36. R. M. Iangirov, “Marginal’nye temy v tvorcheskoi praktike LEFa,” in Tynianovskii sbornik: Piatye Tynianovskie chteniia, ed. Marietta Chudakova, 223–48 (Riga: Zinatne, 1994); Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 75.

37. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “How I Made Her Laugh,” in My Discovery of America, 109–10.

38. More specifically, Spartak/Spartacus was published by the group Rezets (Chisel), which the journal proclaimed as “the sole group in America of Russian proletarian writers.” Of course, in Moscow, “proletarian writers” referred to the protosocialist realist opponents of LEF, but as one Rezets member later admitted, the group “knew very little about the Soviet literary landscape. In their vocabulary ‘proletarian’ meant generically Soviet.” Estraikh, In Harness, 74.

39. Katz, “The Days of Proletpen,” 20; Kemrad, Maiakovskii v Amerike, 203–7.

40. V. V. Mayakovsky, “Amerikanskie russkie,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 7 (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), 80–82. In a subsequent reading of the poem back in the Soviet Union, “the word tudoi came out especially funny: for a few seconds [Mayakovsky] stretched the final ‘oy’ and even pronounced it with a light howl [zavyvanie]” (P. I. Lavut, Maiakovskii edet po soiuzu [Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1978], 16). This manic emphasis (“tud-OY!”), which brings to mind Jerry Lewis, suggests that Mayakovsky was mimicking and perhaps mocking Yiddish-accented Russian.

41. Mayakovsky, “Amerikanskie russkie,” 82.

42. Mayakovsky, “How I Made Her Laugh,” 110–13.

43. V. V. Mayakovsky, “Domoi!” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 7 (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), 489n.

44. Lavut, Maiakovskii edet po soiuzu, 17; Iangirov, “Marginal’nye temy ,” 299.

45. Mayakovsky, “Domoi!” 488–89n. On the poem’s redaction as part of a tendentious turn, see Brown, Mayakovsky, 302.

46. William Harrison Richardson, “The Dilemmas of a Communist Artist: Diego Rivera in Moscow, 1927–1928,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 3, no. 1 (winter 1987): 55, 58–62.

47. Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2000), 477, 485–86.

48. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 259.

49. Lawrence Venuti, “Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, 177–202 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

50. I draw here from Brent Hayes Edwards’s own use of translation gaps—specifically between Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté’s French and George Padmore’s English renderings of a 1933 “Negro World Unity” manifesto—to articulate “an ideological ‘language’ of black internationalism.” I do something similar with Mayakovsky and Hughes—though using this encounter to shore up a Moscow-centered ethnic avant-garde rather than a Paris-centered black internationalism. See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 281–82.

51. V. V. Mayakovsky, “Blek end uait,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 7 (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), 20.

52. Lydia Filatova, “Langston Hughes: American Writer,” International Literature, no. 2 (1933): 106–7.

53. In his own work on Hughes and Mayakovsky, Ryan James Kernan dismisses Filatova on precisely these grounds. However, though Kernan discusses in favorable terms Mayakovsky’s possible influence on Hughes, he notes only in passing Filatova’s recommendation that Hughes look to Mayakovsky as a model. The fact that she made this recommendation suggests that she was not simply toeing the line of the Comintern or Soviet state, despite her reference to the “national form, socialist content” formula. Indeed, Mayakovsky was not officially enshrined by the state until 1935. Beyond this quibble, Kernan’s reading of Hughes’s translations culminates with the last lines of “Syphilis,” the original of which reads as follows: “Odni govoriat— / ‘tsivilizatsiia,’ / drugie— / ‘kolonial’naia politika.’” Hughes translates this with hardly any changes: “Some call it— / civilization. / Others— / colonial policy.” Kernan asserts that Hughes reverses the original order of “civilization” and “colonial policy,” which is not the case. See Ryan James Kernan, “Lost and Found in Black Translation” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2007), 166–72, 191–92; and Ryan James Kernan, “The Coup of Langston Hughes’s Picasso Period: Excavating Mayakovsky in Langston Hughes’s Verse,” Comparative Literature 66, no. 2 (spring 2014): 229, 233.

54. V. V. Mayakovsky, “Sifilis,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 7 (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), 26, 27–28, 29.

55. Langston Hughes, “Syphilis” [1933], folder 66, box 5, Langston Hughes Collection, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk University, Nashville.

56. Mayakovsky, “Blek end uait,” 22.

59. Langston Hughes, “Black and White” [1933], folder 66, box 5, Langston Hughes Collection, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk University, Nashville.

60. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Black and White,” trans. Ettiene Karnot and O. Polenova, New Masses, February 1933, 21.

61. Kernan, “Lost and Found in Black Translation,” 489.

62. John Patrick Leary, “Havana Reads the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and the Dialectics of Transnational American Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 47, no. 2 (2010): 137–38, 139, 143; Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 11, 13–15.

63. Accordingly, David Luis-Brown notes that Hughes’s writings on Africa and Mexico are marked by the “romanticization of nonwhite cultures” but one that “produces transnational affinities between groups who would otherwise tend not to view each other as part of a shared political project” (Waves of Decolonization, 163).

64. Hughes, “Black and White.”

65. Leary, “Havana Reads the Harlem Renaissance,” 138.

66. There is no indication that Hughes had anything but admiration for Mayakovsky, as well as for his critic and cotranslator Filatova. In his autobiography, he remembers her as “a very bright young woman…who wrote brilliant critical articles” and “spoke English very well.” She was on the train station platform when he departed Moscow for China. See Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Hill and Wang, 1956), 197, 230.

67. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 282. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty’s endorsement of one-to-one translations (e.g., between Hindus and Muslims via poetry and fiction) in which “codes are switched locally, without going through a universal set of rules” (Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 85–86).

68. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 261. Further references are inserted parenthetically in the text.

69. Langston Hughes, “Cubes,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, 175–76 (New York: Random House, 1994). Many thanks to Paula Rabinowitz for bringing “Cubes” to my attention. For a reading of the poem as both a critique and embrace of European modernism, see Seth Moglen, “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso,” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (fall 2002): 1189–1205. Similarly, Kernan provides a wonderful, focused reading of “Cubes” vis-à-vis the French avant-garde and, in particular, Mallarmé. See Kernan, “Lost and Found in Black Translation,” 209–25.

70. Langston Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934), 27.

72. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 174–80. The descendants of one of these settlers include the prominent Russian Africanist Lily Golden and her daughter, the Russian television personality Yelena Khanga. See their autobiographies, Lily Golden, My Long Journey Home (Chicago: Third World, 2002), and Yelena Khanga and Susan Jacoby, Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family, 1865–1992 (New York: Norton, 1992).

73. Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 93–94, 134–36.

74. Eisenstein quoted in Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (London: Tauris, 2003), 122. As Nesbet elaborates, “Central characteristics of Eisenstein’s Mexico were the coexistence of all things and times on a single plane, the punctuation of this plane by the savage thrills of bullfighting and other sacrifices and the ecstatic opening up of individual interiors into all surface” (122). Masha Salazkina elaborates further: in Mexico Eisenstein sought “a dialectical pattern involving a synthesis of all present stages of development.” This synthesis, in turn, led to a philosophy of history that rejected “linear evolutionary development” in favor of “continuing shifts backward and forward” (Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 73, 150–63).

75. Eisenstein quoted in Salazkina, In Excess, 143.

76. As Salazkina notes, Eisenstein associated sexual experimentation with both proletarian revolution and “prelogical primitive structures” (In Excess, 128–35). This crossing of time and sexuality suggests that Eisenstein strove for what José Esteban Muñoz has identified as “queer futurity,” a desire-laden, alternative temporality emerging from “a perception of past and future affective worlds” (José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity [New York: New York University Press, 2009], 25–28). Salazkina additionally dispels avant-garde masculinism by noting ¡Que viva México!’s clear references to the works of Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo (In Excess, 74–80).

1. Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 111–13; Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 37–38. Joseph Stalin quoted in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 7.

2. One frequently cited exception to this is the Filipino American author Carlos Bulosan. On the fraught history of Asian America and pre-1960s leftism, see Him Mark Lai, “Historical Survey of the Chinese Left in America,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1976), 63–80; Renqiu Yu, To Save China, to Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Josephine Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007); and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

3. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Happy New Year! Happy New Lef!” in Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, ed. Anna Lawton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 267.

4. On Tret’iakov as a Soviet cultural ambassador—traveling both East and West and combining cosmopolitanism and patriotism—see Clark, Moscow, 30–41.

5. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 150–51; Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1999), 334–41; Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (New York: Verso, 1981), 75–85. For Trotsky’s criticism of Stalinist policy on China, see his Problems of the Chinese Revolution, ed. and trans. Max Shachtman (New York: Pioneer, 1932).

6. Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (London: Tauris, 2003), 117.

7. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 28–32. Sergei Eisenstein, “To the Magician of the Pear Orchard,” in S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, Volume III, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 67, quoted in Clark, Moscow, 201.

8. Sergei Tret’iakov, Roar China (New York: International, 1931), 8. Further references appear parenthetically in the text.

9. Devin Fore, introduction to October 118 (fall 2006): 4–5; Sergei Tret’iakov, “O p’ese ‘Rychi, Kitai!’” in Slyshish’, Moskva?!, ed. G. Mokrusheva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965), 159, quoted (with a slightly different translation) in Natasha Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography: The Plays of Sergej Tret’jakov,” SEEJ 31, no. 3 (autumn 1987): 395; Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 69, 81.

10. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books), 223, 229–31, 233, 234–235. For more on the Tret’iakov-Brecht connection, see Clark, Moscow, 50–67.

11. Maria Gough, “Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October 101 (summer 2002): 64.

12. Hal Foster thus criticizes the belatedness of Benjamin’s lecture, since 1934 spelled (quite literally, as will be seen) the death knell of avant-garde projects like Tret’iakov’s. See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 275n4. However, Gough responds that Benjamin was perfectly aware of this and that the lecture can be read as his protest against socialist realism; as an expression of his enduring hope for “an alternative, operativist model of left cultural production and materialist criticism—the path not taken by the Soviet Union but one that could nevertheless, he might have hoped, anticipate a worthier future” (Gough, “Paris,” 83).

13. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (fall 1984): 93–94.

14. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Happy New Year!” 267.

15. Leah Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” October 118 (fall 2006): 137–38. For more on the cultural and political landscape of the late 1920s, particularly the avant-gardists’ struggle for relevance and official support, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The ‘Soft’ Line on Culture and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy, 1922–1927,” Slavic Review 33, no. 2 (June 1974): 267–87.

16. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” 103. For more on the factographers’ gradual embrace of iconic and documentary representation, see also pp. 95–99.

17. Sergei Tret’iakov, “What’s New,” in Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, ed. Anna Lawton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 270.

19. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Biografiia veshchi,” in Literatura fakta, ed. N. F. Chuzhak (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 70.

20. Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography,” 390–91.

21. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Ot fotoserii k dlitel’nomu fotonabliudeniiu,” Proletarskoe foto 4 (1931): 20, quoted in Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” 108.

22. Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” 144.

23. Ibid., 134; Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (fall 2006): 176–78.

24. Sergei Tret’iakov, Rychi, Kitai! (Moscow: Ogonek, 1926), 3.

25. Ibid., 3–4. This and the following translation are my own and, as far as I can tell, are the first translations of “Roar, China!” the poem.

27. Accordingly, another of Tret’iakov’s Chinese works, Den Shi-khua, was what he called a bio-interview—a biography of one of his Chinese students but told from the student’s point of view. Speaking with MoMA founder Alfred Barr in Moscow in 1927, he described it as “the most realistic and most intimate account of life in China.” See Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” 141.

28. Tret’iakov, “What’s New,” 269–70.

29. Tret’iakov’s inclusion of Chinese corpses suggests his alignment with what Joseph Entin has identified (in his study of 1930s American writing and photography) as “sensational modernism.” This refers to the use of “arresting and frequently disorienting images of bodily harm, sexual aggression, or racial prejudice to make palpable the unacknowledged forms of discrimination that give shape to conventional modes of seeing and representing the dispossessed.” As Entin specifies, sensational modernism “departs from conventional social documentary” by subverting “the possibility of sentimentalizing and simplifying the socially inferior figures” it depicts. Tret’iakov forwards precisely this aim through his negative portrayals of the Westerners seeking corpse photos. Accordingly, though his strictly American focus does not reveal this, several of Entin’s “sensational modernists”—e.g., Richard Wright, members of the New York Photo League—looked to Moscow for inspiration. See Joseph Entin, Sensational Modernism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 27, 36.

30. Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 223.

31. Walter J. Meserve and Ruth I. Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!: Documentary Drama as Propaganda,” Theatre Survey 21 (1980): 4. Apparently Walter Benjamin did not see the play, but he reports in his diary seeing a model of its set at Meyerhold. See Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 57.

32. Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 198.

33. Ibid., 197–98; Tret’iakov, Roar China, 10. In their capacity as official visitors to the USSR, these Chinese students were apparently off-limits as potential actors.

34. Tret’iakov, Roar China, 10.

35. Tret’iakov, “O p’ese ‘Rychi, Kitai!’” 157.

36. Ibid., 158–59.

37. Scholars have recently traced and debated Tret’iakov’s various phases as an artist through the 1920s—from agitation to literature of fact to operativism—but central to all of them is this effort to transform reality. Elizabeth Astrid Papazian suggests that, given its overt political thrust, Roar China the play should not be considered an example of the literature of fact, but that it instead emerges from Tret’iakov’s earlier, agitational phase. However, she herself notes continuities between Tret’iakov’s agitational and literature-of-fact phases—the latter, according to her, beginning the year before Roar China’s Meyerhold debut. See Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 23–37. According to Papazian and Maria Gough, Tret’iakov’s interest in the literature of fact later gave way to operativism, which involved the active participation of artists in the communities they depicted (e.g., Tret’iakov at the kolkhoz). Gough writes, “The operativist transcended the factographer’s earlier valorization of the ‘little report’ over the belles lettrist…moving on instead to differentiate between two different kinds of reporters—the merely informative journalist on the one hand, and the operative writer on the other, who participates directly in the ‘life of the material’ in an organizational capacity: ‘To invent an important theme is novelistic belles letters,’ [Tret’iakov] explained, ‘to discover an important theme is reportage,’ but ‘to contribute constructively to an important theme is operativism’” (Gough, “Radical Tourism,” 168). However, Fore contends that operativism was in fact central to, rather than a departure from, factography. He defines “operativity” as factography’s “claim not to vertically reflect reality…but to actively transform reality” (Fore, introduction to October, 3–4).

38. Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography,” 395.

39. On factography and montage, see Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 39–40. Potemkin and Roar China debuted within four days of each other in Moscow in January 1926. For more on the connections between the film and play, including structural and thematic similarities, see Lars Kelberg, “Eisenstein’s Potemkin and Tret’iakov’s Rychi, Kitai!” Scando-Slavica Tomus 23 (1977): 29–37.

40. “A Director’s Way with ‘Roar China!’” New York Times, November 2, 1930, X2.

41. Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography,” 395–96; Alaina Lemon, “Sympathy for the Weary State? Cold War Chronotopes and Moscow Others,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 4 (2009): 838. For more on the play’s contrasting character depictions, see B. Rostotskii, “Dramaturg-agitator,” in Tret’iakov, Slyshish’, Moskva?!, 230–32. After praising the satirical, sarcastic takes on the Westerners, this essay notes that “nevertheless, Tret’iakov’s foremost success consists of the rich, authentic dramatic effect in portraying the oppressed world” (231). As Rostotskii elaborates, these portrayals managed to present the Chinese as a unified mass without dissolving individual identities.

42. Similarly, Robert Crane notes that the naturalistic presentation of the Chinese “left many old stereotypes unchanged” and “underlined the perceived difference in the historical progress of the Soviet and Chinese nations” (Robert Crane, “Between Factography and Ethnography,” Text and Presentation, 2010, ed. Kiki Gounaridou [Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010], 50.)

43. Accordingly, Bertolt Brecht’s pro-Soviet play Measures Taken (1930) featured European characters agitating in China while wearing masks to pass as Chinese. As Katerina Clark writes, the mask here functions to downplay race and forward a “transnational identity”: “At the point when the agitators put on their masks, they do not so much become Chinese as opt for total commitment to the Soviet model” (Clark, Moscow, 57). In Clark’s book we also find a nice counterpoint to the naturalistic acting in Roar China—the 1935 Moscow performances of the Chinese actor Mei Lanfang, which helped inspire Brecht’s “first published formulation of his theory of alienation” (192).

44. Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 86–95. For instance, Lye notes how authors like Jack London and Frank Norris linked leftist criticisms of monopoly capitalism to the exclusion and, indeed, evisceration, of Asian populations.

45. Fritz Blockl, “Chinese Roar on Broadway,” Chicago American, November 1, 1930, X2; Roar China program, “Silver” box 19 (13th season, 1930–1931), Theatre Guild Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University. “Bequest of Langston Hughes” is stamped inside the first program, dated November 3, 1930.

46. Lynn Mally, “The Americanization of the Soviet Living Newspaper,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1903 (February 2008): 30–40. “Cultural Front” comes from Michael Denning’s seminal volume by the same name. To be sure, one of Denning’s arguments is that Popular Front culture was not bound to the Soviet Union, though he himself acknowledges Meyerhold’s influence on the American Living Newspaper. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1997), 368–69. The fears of red-baiting having long passed, it seems safe now to delve deeper into such influences, as I’m doing here with Roar China.

47. Lawrence Langer, The Magic Curtain (New York: Dutton, 1951), 248–49. For more on Biberman, see James Lorence, The Suppression of “Salt of the Earth”: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 47–50.

48. Meserve and Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!” 8. The actor numbers have been counted from Theatre Guild Program: Roar China (New York: National Program Publishers, 1930), 8, 10.

49. “Making China Roar,” New York Times, October 19, 1930, 116; Herbert Biberman to Ol’ga Tret’iakova, May 20, 1962, in Tret’iakov, Slyshish’, Moskva?!, 166. Roar China “not only enabled Tsiang to earn fifty dollars a week, but also introduced him to the possibility of using drama as a vehicle to motivate political action” (Floyd Cheung, introduction to And China Has Hands, by H. T. Tsiang [New York: Ironweed, 2003], 10).

50. Leon Dennen, “‘Roar China’ and the Critics,” New Masses, December 1930, 16; Myra Page, “‘Roar China’—A Stirring Anti-Imperialist Play,” Daily Worker, November 15, 1930, 4.

51. Biberman to Tret’iakova, May 20, 1962, 167.

52. “New Plays in Manhattan,” Time, November 10, 1930; J. Brooks Atkinson, “The Play,” New York Times, October 28, 1930, 31.

53. “Roar China!” script, 1–6, Theatre Guild Collection, Beinecke Library.

54. As Crane suggests, the Moscow production’s use of “butchered Russian” arguably had the effect of “relegating the Chinese characters to the stereotyped speech used to represent Asians for years” (“Between Factography and Ethnography,” 48–50).

55. Gilbert W. Gabriel, “Roar China,” New York American, October 28, 1930. He adds that, nonetheless, the Asian actors “are fine to watch and wonder about” and that their roles are “interestingly acted.” There is some indication that Biberman tried to get the actors to speak unaccented English. One reporter, sitting in on a rehearsal, objects to Biberman’s demand that the Asian actors “express emotions in the accent and cadence—or lack of accent and cadence—that we use, emphasizing the words that we emphasize.” See Louis Sherwin, “Stage Art of Occident, Orient Fused in Chinese Play Here,” New York Evening Post, October 15, 1930.

56. Gilbert Swan, “Roar China,” NEA Syndicate, November 1930. Biberman to Tret’iakova, May 20, 1962, 167. For instance, as Anne Cheng has shown in her discussion of Flower Drum Song’s film adaptation, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical forwards an Americanism that is “at once reproduced and disturbed by the racialized bodies solicited to articulate its desires.” That is, Asian American performance in the film has an unmasking effect; it “reveals Americanism to be a performative phenomenon” (Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 59). The Asian American performances in Roar China apparently lacked such nuance, geared as they were to portraying China and condemning imperialism rather than the more subtle task of engaging American assimilationism. Unfortunately, it remains unclear whether many Asian Americans were in the audience as well as on stage. I have found one glowing review in The Chinese Students’ Monthly: “Not once in my life have I experienced so much anguish in a theater as I did in attending this play last night,” wrote the anonymous reviewer, who described the execution scene as such: “It was tremendously pathetic and was so human and real. I felt it—and it hurted [sic] me badly” (“Roar China,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 26, no. 1:126–27).

57. Biberman to Tret’iakova, May 20, 1962, 170.

58. “A Director’s Way,” X2.

59. J. Brooks Atkinson, “When the Guild Is Good,” New York Times, November 9, 1930, X1; “New Plays in Manhattan,” Time, November 10, 1930.

60. Page, “Roar China,” 4; “A Director’s Way,” X2.

61. Biberman to Tret’iakova, May 20, 1962, 168.

62. George Lipsitz, “Herbert Biberman and the Art of Subjectivity,” Telos 32 (1977): 180.

63. Foster, The Return of the Real, 172–74.

64. Meserve and Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!” 4, 6, 8, 9.

66. Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde, 225.

69. Meserve and Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!” 10.

70. Langston Hughes, “Roar, China!” Volunteer for Liberty 1 (September 6, 1937): 3.

71. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Hill and Wang, 1956), 206.

72. Hughes, “Roar, China!” 3.

73. For documentation of Tret’iakov’s execution by firing squad, see V. F. Koliazin, ed., “Vernite mne svobodu!”: Deiateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii—zhertvy stalinskogo terrora (Moscow: Medium, 1997), 46–68.

74. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 332–34. See also Lorence, The Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” 65–147.

75. Paul Jarrico and Herbert Biberman, “Breaking Ground,” in Salt of the Earth, ed. Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt (New York: Feminist Press, 1978), 169–70.

76. Masha Salazkina, “Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map,” October 139 (winter 2011): 97–116. As Salazkina points out, neorealism’s emphasis on transforming reality “recapitulates almost exactly the Soviet factographic notion of realism” (108).

77. Lipsitz, “Herbert Biberman and the Art of Subjectivity,” 178; Lorence, The Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” 197–98.

78. Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” in Salt of the Earth, ed. Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt (New York: Feminist Press, 1978), 148.

79. Ibid., 153. Further emphasizing Salt of the Earth’s avant-gardist credentials, David E. James notes its Brechtian didactic structure, which “finally differentiates the film from classic realism.” For instance, “each stage of its progressive unfolding of a vision of sexual equality is a little dramatic lesson that the men must learn before going on to the next stage, like Brecht’s idea of the Lehrstücke, a ‘learning play,’ whose ‘task is to show the world as it changes (and also how it may be changed)’” (David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005], 124). As noted, Tret’iakov was Brecht’s Russian translator and collaborator, opening the possibility that this didactic structure was not only Brechtian but Tret’iakovian as well.

80. Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” 147.

81. Herbert Biberman, Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 44–46.

82. Benjamin Buchloh traces factography’s demise to 1931, the year that one of Tret’iakov’s colleagues, Aleksandr Rodchenko, photographed the construction of the White Sea Canal. This was one of Stalin’s most ambitious and inhumane undertakings, with over 100,000 losing their lives because of poor working conditions. However, Rodchenko chose to emphasize monumentality rather than fragments and limited perspectives, and, as a result, his photos portrayed working conditions only as ideal. Buchloh writes, “While it is undoubtedly clear that at this time Rodchenko did not have any other choice than to comply with the interest of the State Publishing House if he wanted to maintain his role as an artist who participated actively in the construction of the new Soviet society (and we have no reason to doubt this as his primary motive), we have to say at least that by 1931 the goals of factography had clearly been abandoned” (Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” 117). The implication here is that a faithful adherence to factography would have revealed the horrors of the canal’s construction.

83. Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 68–75.

84. Lipsitz, “Herbert Biberman and the Art of Subjectivity,” 175. To add insult to injury and despite several key victories, the union depicted in Salt of the Earth faced endless legal battles and merged with a rival, anticommunist union in 1967. See Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 355–58.

85. Biberman to Tret’iakova, May 20, 1962, 172–73.

1. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1:259; David Chioni Moore, “Local Color, Global ‘Color’: Langston Hughes, the Black Atlantic, and Soviet Central Asia, 1932,” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (winter 1996): 61.

2. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Hill and Wang, 1956), 113–21; Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (New York: Vintage, 2005), 137–41. Further references to both works are inserted parenthetically in the text. See also David Chioni Moore, “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border,” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (fall 2002): 1115–1135.

3. Arguably Koestler here deploys the rhetoric of colonialism—the Soviet Union as “backward,” “Asiatic,” and unfit for Marxist revolution. See Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 110–16; William Pietz, “The ‘Post-Colonialism’ of Cold War Discourse,” Social Text, no. 19/20 (autumn 1988): 62–65; and Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 40–48. However, as noted in the introduction, notions of “backwardness” and “Asianness” were also used to further the revolution, albeit more so in the 1920s than the 1930s.

4. Co-Operating Committee for Production of a Soviet Film on Negro Life, Project Summary, n.d., box 12, folder 6, item 11; W. A. Domingo, Bon Voyage Invitation, 31 May 1932, box 12, folder 3, item 8, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

5. “On Way to Soviet Union to Make a Photoplay,” Liberator, July 1, 1932, 6.

6. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 1:248, 251. Statement by McNairy Lewis et al., 22 August 1932, box 2, item 2, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers; “Say Race Bias Here Halted Soviet Film,” New York Times, October 5, 1932. The accuracy of these rumors is discussed later in the chapter.

7. Langston Hughes, “A Negro Sees the Soviet Union,” Harlem Liberator, September 16, 1933, published also as Langston Hughes, “Moscow and Me: A Noted American Writer Relates His Experiences,” International Literature, no. 3 (July 1933): 60–66.

8. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 76–79; emphasis in original.

9. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 8, 77, 102–3, 113–15.

10. According to Glenda Gilmore, Hughes “conceded he had written the sparse dialogue” for this fourth version, which is written in clean American English with occasional instances of dialect. See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008), 140–41.

11. “Black and White” Script, n.d., box 2, item 3, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, 29, 31.

12. With its lack of character development and abrupt scene transitions, the English-language version is indeed marked by “defects of the plot and continuity,” unlike the more cohesive, realized Grebner version. This raises the question of why Junghans did not simply use Grebner’s version, and the reason seems to be creative differences, to which Grebner refers in his notes. See RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 86, 93, 101. According to a report by Louise Thompson, on July 25, 1932, a meeting (with Hughes present) was held by Mezhrabpomfil’m to discuss the two versions, and a “large section” of the studio’s officials preferred Grebner’s. The report adds that this version was “full of inaccuracies regarding American life” without elaborating what they were. I do so in the following. See Report on Film Cancellation, n.d., box 2, item 4, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers.

13. I draw here from Svetlana Boym’s distinction between “reflective” and “restorative” nostalgia in her The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

14. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 22–23.

15. RGALI, f. 2014, op. 1, ed. khr. 61, l. 4.

16. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 76; RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 6, 26, 73, 115; RGALI, f. 2014, op. 1, ed. khr. 61, l. 3, 4. Emphasis in original. Grebner apparently maintained his commitment to accuracy throughout his career. A 1966 Soviet film encyclopedia hails him for his “careful selection of facts” as well as his “efforts to achieve artistic completeness through the maintenance of historic truth” (Kinoslovar’ v dvukh tomakh [Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1966], 382). On the substantial printed materials about Africans and African Americans available in Moscow at the time, see Ani Mukherji, “The Anticolonial Imagination” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2011), 111–12.

17. Grebner adds, “What remains unchanged is just the curly hair and characteristic ‘Negro’ facial constitution (in the end, not so rare even among representatives of the Caucasian race).” Interestingly, Grebner here exchanges one biological essentialism for another but also suggests that African physical characteristics need not be seen as exclusive. By “Caucasian,” Grebner refers to Soviet nationalities located in the Caucasus, such as Armenians, Chechens, and Georgians. See RGALI, f. 2014, op. 1, ed. khr. 61, l. 4. For tensions between African Americans and Soviet essentialism—for instance, Moscow’s tendency to use individuals like Claude McKay and Paul Robeson to represent blacks worldwide—see Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 48, 208–11, 242–51.

18. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 1–6. As Joseph Entin has shown, this combination of avant-gardist shock and social concern appeared in interwar America in the form of “sensational modernism,” as seen, for instance, in the work of the New York Photo League’s 1930s photos of Harlem. See Joseph Entin, Sensational Modernism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 107–40. When Black and White was canceled, the (predominantly Jewish) League released a statement in support of Mezhrabpom, with which it was affiliated. See “Apropos Soviet Negro Film,” New Masses, November 1932, 28.

19. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 7, 87, 111, 115.

20. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 17.

21. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 37. On the international reception of the Scottsboro case, see James Miller et al., “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys,” American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001): 387–430.

22. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 17, 28, 101–2. See also Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 67–154, and Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 112–46.

23. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 115.

24. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 428.

25. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 70.

26. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–34.

27. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 22–23; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 188–89; Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in Napier, African American Literary Theory, 28, 30.

28. Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). On the multiple, flexible notions of black authenticity, see J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 1–23. For a more radical, Benjaminian reading of Du Bois’s sorrow songs chapter, see Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 131–57. According to Flatley—and arguably in line with various theories of the avant-garde—Du Bois’s treatment of the songs resists the notion of autonomous culture and also points to instances of the past redeemed in the present.

29. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Napier, African American Literary Theory, 51.

30. See the discussions of Soviet Orientology (Tolz) and nationalities policy (Hirsch) in the introduction. For more on Wright’s “movement from fear to relative faith on the subject of African-American folk culture, movement fueled mainly by Communism,” see William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 164–65, 170–78.

31. A key dissenting voice is Andreas Huyssen, who defines avant-gardism as eliminating the division between high art and mass culture. Accordingly, both Mayakovsky and Tret’iakov sought (and, in Mayakovsky’s case, attained) mass appeal; they weren’t opposed to mass culture per se but to mass culture tainted by market forces. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

32. James Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–30.

34. Michael Gold, “Notes of the Month,” New Masses, February 1930, 3, quoted in Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 107.

35. Ibid.; Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 185. For another variation of “Gimme That Old Time Religion,” with lyrics about the Scottsboro trial, see Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 105. Gold could also embrace jazz as long as it “belong[ed] to the Negro race” and not Tin Pan Alley. See Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 110.

36. Lawrence Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest,” New Masses, May 1933, 15.

37. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 38.

38. Du Bois anticipates his own turn to the left when he writes, “Such a double life, with double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism.” However, at this point he was not ready to abandon religion, detecting a “deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart” (ibid., 156, 158).

39. L. Filatova, “Negritianskaia literatura,” in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, tom 7, ed. A. V. Lunacharsky (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1934), 662–65. Filatova detects and celebrates a connection between Paul Laurence Dunbar’s use of dialect and that used by Hughes and Brown (652–54).

40. Arnold Rampersad, “Langston Hughes and His Critics on the Left,” Langston Hughes Review 5, no. 2 (fall 1986): 38.

41. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 25, 52, 87. Providing support to Grebner’s depiction and choice of music, Gellert writes in April 1931, “The Negro preacher differs little from the white one. He is a pompous, fat-headed, blow-hard parasite, prating meaningless platitudes about ‘de Lawd an’ his By an’ By Kingdom.’” Gellert then provides what he calls “the Negro’s version of Joe Hill’s ‘Pie in the Sky,’” though the two are similar only in their riffs against religion. See Lawrence Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest,” New Masses, April 1931, 6.

42. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 88.

43. Ibid., l. 21, 24, 25. Emphasis in original.

44. Ibid., l. 55. This and subsequent translations are my own.

46. Ibid., l. 101–2.

49. Ibid., l. 103, 106.

50. At one point, Vorbi likens Brooker’s case to the 1913 Beilis trial, in which a Jewish man was accused of murdering a Christian boy in Kiev. According to Vorbi, the persecution of Brooker for violating “the honor of a lady” is akin to the pogromist accusation of “blood libel,” only on an “American scale [masshtabe]” (ibid., l. 37).

51. Likewise (though not nearly as innovative as the Vertov), the hit 1936 film musical Tsirk—in which a white American woman with a half-black baby finds refuge as a Soviet circus performer—concludes with a Russian lullaby that is sung in the multiple languages of the USSR to the accompaniment of national embellishments. For instance, a Jewish man singing in Yiddish is accompanied by a klezmer stylization, and a black man singing in American-accented Russian is accompanied by a blues horn. Interestingly, the half-black baby was played by the child of Lloyd Patterson, a member of the Black and White group who stayed behind in Moscow to work as a set designer, marrying a Russian woman. See Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, “Reclaiming ‘Д. Паттерсон’ (J. Patterson), Child Star in Grigori Alexandrov’s Circus: A Reconstructive History,” Sound Historian 8, no. 2 (2002): 61–72. On the careers of actor Wayland Rudd and writer Homer Smith, two other members of the Black and White group who remained in Moscow, see Mukherji, “The Anticolonial Imagination,” 166–91.

52. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 101.

53. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 9. However, Katerina Clark has shown that even amid Stalinist centralization, Moscow remained “a center for a transnational intellectual milieu,” with, for instance, the African American icon Paul Robeson giving Marcel Granet’s La pensée chinoise to Sergei Eisenstein as a birthday gift in 1935. Ultimately, however, Clark traces Moscow’s failure to remain a nexus of world culture in the face of state terror, even as she deftly blurs the boundaries between Stalinism and Western modernism. See Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 25.

54. Indeed, African American delegates to the 1928 Comintern Congress heatedly debated the prospects of a “Negro Soviet Republic” in the American South, the majority noting the complications posed to the Black Belt thesis by industrialization and migration. For a re-creation of this debate, marked heavily by American and Soviet party factionalism, see Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 69–78.

55. Woodford McClellan, “Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925–1934,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26, no. 2 (1993): 383–84; Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 175; Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 146.

56. Although Cooper lobbied Vyacheslav Molotov, not Stalin. See Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 175; McClellan, “Africans and Black Americans,” 383. From the American side, Hughes biographer Faith Berry quotes in full an August 1932 State Department memo emphasizing Cooper’s role in the film’s cancellation. See Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (Westport, Conn.: Hill, 1983), 168–70. For the Dnieprostroi visit, see Soviet Travel Itinerary, n.d., box 1, folder 21, item 1, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers.

57. Report on Film Cancellation, n.d., box 2, item 4, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers. Presumably they read the English-language Junghans script stored among Thompson’s papers.

58. Otto Katz to Louise Thompson, November 8, 1932, box 9, folder 21, item 6, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers. For other failed Mezhrabpomfil’m projects from the 1930s, see Katie Trumpener, The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of Germany, 1930– (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

59. Indeed, this very charge was leveled against Hughes after his participation in the Hollywood musical Way Down South (1939), which celebrates happy slaves and kind masters.

60. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2:216.

61. Ibid., 218–19.

62. Ibid., 216–17.

63. Ibid., 218–20, 260.

64. B. A. Gilenson, Sovremennye negritianskie pisateli SShA (Moscow: Znanie, 1981), 39–40.

65. This bibliography lists a select few Russian translations of African American authors, including works by Du Bois, Hughes, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry (ibid., 64). Wright and (more briefly) Ellison are, however, among the many more authors discussed by the Soviet critic.

66. Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines African American “signifyin(g)” as “essentially, a technique of repeating inside quotation marks in order to reverse or undermine pretended meaning, constituting an implicit parody of a subject’s complicity.” See Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 240, quoted in Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 191. For connections between “signifyin(g)” and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “double-voiced discourse,” see Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110–13, and Peterson, Up from Bondage, 191–94.

67. Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 34–36, 43–45. On the founding of the ANLC, see Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 46–49.

68. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator, 1978), 144–47; Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 47, 53.

69. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 58, 64–65. Fort-Whiteman was sensitive to black particularity, but in ways that diverged from the Soviet line. As Baldwin notes, in Moscow in 1924, he expressed surprise and dismay about the use of “caricatured faces of Negroes” in Russian ads, writing to the Comintern, “Though there be no anti-Negro feeling behind it, the results are the same.” He also objected to the Comintern’s very use of the term “Negro,” stating that this collapsed together the “many distinct black races on the African continent.” See Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 47, 65–66.

70. Louise Thompson to Mother Thompson, July 4, 1932, box 1, folder 24, item 4, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers. Later, Hughes and another invitee were advised to cable Fort-Whiteman in Moscow with questions, and a June 11 press release promoting the film listed him as a coscenarist. See Louise Thompson to Langston Hughes, March 10, 1932, box 12, folder 7, item 12, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers; Louise Thompson to Langston Hughes, May 10, 1932, box 12, folder 7, item 12, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers; Homer Smith to James Ford, April 28, 1932, box 12, folder 3, item 8, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers; Press Release to The Amsterdam News, June 11, 1932, box 12, folder 6, item 11, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers; RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. khr. 2, l. 25. Grebner makes no other mention of Fort-Whiteman, suggesting that his involvement with the script was limited.

71. Louise Thompson to Mother Thompson, August 24, 1932, box 1, folder 24, item 4, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers. See also Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 144–47.

72. Harvey Klehr, Jon Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 218–27. The firsthand account of Fort-Whiteman’s Hughes criticism is taken from the disillusioned autobiography of Robert Robinson, an autoworker who lived in the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1975. See Robert Robinson, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis, 1988), 361.

73. Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 140, 154. For other accounts of the Fort-Whiteman tragedy, see Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 70; Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 272–73n44; Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 179–83; and Mukherji, “The Anticolonial Imagination,” 192–94.

74. Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 444.

1. Indeed, Freeman is the central figure in Daniel Aaron’s foundational study of this scene, a figure who can certainly be described as an ethnic avant-gardist. According to Aaron, “The epic films of Eisenstein, the productions of Meyerhold, the poetry of Mayakovski projected the socialist vision in images that Freeman could accept.” The Soviet avant-garde convinced him that “one could be an artist and a revolutionary…without violating artistic integrity.” As I discuss later, Alan Wald’s own seminal studies on the American literary left have subsequently enfolded Jewishness into this mix of socialism and avant-gardism. See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 138. New Masses editor Michael Gold is now typically regarded as an advocate of “proletarian” and socialist realist literature, but he too was drawn to the Soviet avant-garde, for instance, the theater of Meyerhold. See William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 112–13.

2. Based on David Bergelson’s “Three Centers” article (1925); see Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 78–79.

3. Ibid., 71; Ruth Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 113–14, 155. See also Dovid Katz, “The Days of Proletpen in American Yiddish Poetry,” introduction to Proletpen: American Rebel Yiddish Poets, ed. Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub, trans. Amelia Glaser (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 7–8. As Katz writes, another such publication was the literary magazine Yung kuznye (Young Forge), founded in 1924 (18–20).

4. Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan, 130.

5. Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Estraikh, In Harness, 168–74.

6. Liberal pluralism was Kallen’s cultural pluralism but stripped of its essentialist “natio,” territorial emphasis, and curious compatibility with Soviet nationalities policy. Added to the mix was the conviction that formal equality and cultural recognition would eliminate racism. On the other hand, socialist internationalism, which in the 1920s encompassed the Comintern’s coordinated world revolution and anti-imperialist policies, quickly came to mean simply allegiance to Moscow and adherence to Soviet nationalities policy. As Slezkine puts it, within the USSR “internationalism” came to mean “close ties among Soviet nationalities.” See Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (summer 1994): 443. Lending further credence to this liberal pluralism versus socialist internationalism divide, Perry Anderson writes that Stalin’s dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 led to the postwar bifurcation of internationalism—with a capitalist variety forming in the West against a communist variety in the East. See Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (March–April 2002): 15–16, 18. For a Western “internationalism” that has sought to sidestep state interference, see Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

7. For example, in 1947 the Soviet Union submitted to the United Nations “An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America,” an NAACP petition edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. As Mary Dudziak has shown, Moscow’s airing of America’s dirty laundry helped win the passage of civil rights reforms. In turn, several Washington officials sought to bring the plight of Soviet Jews before the UN, and during Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States, Dwight Eisenhower “himself expressed the concern of American Jewry about the position of their brethren in the USSR.” See Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12, 15, 26–46. For more on Jim Crow as America’s “Achilles’ heel” on the world stage, see Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 126. See also Yaacov Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 133, 151–53.

8. For connections between African American and Jewish American liberal anticommunism, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 169–204. Greenberg subsequently traces how this black-Jewish consensus fell apart, which is also the focus of Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). As I demonstrate, the subjects of this chapter—unlike Greenberg’s and Sundquist’s—did not necessarily take liberal pluralism as a given, allowing us to revisit forgotten, discredited alternatives to this model.

9. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2:216–17.

10. Ibid., 1:30; Langston Hughes, Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest, ed. Faith Berry (New York: Citadel, 1973), 87.

11. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 216, 260. For other accounts of Jewish American ties to the Soviet Union, see Estraikh, In Harness, 70–101; Katz, “The Days of Proletpen,” 4–22; and Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 217–50, 256.

12. David A. Hollinger, “Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Instead of Avoided or Mystified,” Jewish Quarterly Review 4, no. 4 (fall 2004): 595–602; reprinted in David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 154–65; quote from p. 162.

13. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 175. Further references appear parenthetically in the text.

14. Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 180. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

15. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 52. Emphasis in original.

16. Slezkine’s sweeping observation neglects, for example, the theme of familial devotion in Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930). Indeed, while Gold changed his name from Itzok Granich, in doing so he “affirmed his Jewish background” rather than broke from it, as Wald points out (Trinity of Passion, 184). On the other hand, one clear aim of Jews Without Money is to distance Jewishness from “huckstering.” See Michael Gold, Jews Without Money (New York: Liveright, 1930).

17. In line with the “Jewish Revolution” against Jewishness, Wald also provides portraits of Jewish American communist writers who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, their war novels challenging “the popular idea that twentieth-century Jewish American culture primarily carries forward the ‘ethic of mentshlekhkayt.’” However, Wald ultimately assigns blame for literary intragroup violence to “the bitter contradictions of the Popular Front” rather than Jewish familial strife. See Wald, Trinity of Passion, 22, 28, 45.

18. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 264. “Avant-garde of the world” comes from Marci Shore’s account of Polish Jews who embraced Soviet communism and the tragedies that ensued. See Marci Shore, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (New York: Crown, 2013).

19. Estraikh, In Harness, 39, 41.

20. Haia Friedberg, “Lissitzky’s Had Gadîa’,” Jewish Art 12/13 (1986–1987): 294.

21. Ruth Apter-Gabriel, “El Lissitzky’s Jewish Works,” in Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, ed. Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987), 104.

22. Ibid., 113. Many thanks to Dan Blanton for the Book of Daniel connection.

23. Abram Efros, “Aladdin’s Lamp,” in Semyon An-sky, The Jewish Artistic Heritage: An Album, ed. Vasilii Rakitin and Andrei Sarabianov (Moscow: RA, 1994), 10, 11, 15.

24. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 396; Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 403; Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2005), 67.

25. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 160. See also Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 64–75.

26. Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Dover, 2003), 229–30. The play was staged by Kultur-Lige, a Yiddish cultural organization that embraced political and aesthetic radicalism amid the power vacuum of the Russian Civil War. See Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, 52–57. Kultur-Lige members included El Lissitzky, as well as the poet Peretz Markish, who might be described as the Soviet Jewish Mayakovsky. As Amelia Glaser shows, Markish’s expressionist Yiddish poetry, which drew from Russian futurism, combined religious imagery with modernist experimentation to advance a revolutionary, anticapitalist vision of the Ukrainian marketplace. See her translation and reading of his stunning The Mound (1921), Amelia M. Glaser, Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 120–27, 134–40.

27. Katz, “The Days of Proletpen,” 12.

28. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 275, 297. Despite his emphasis on 1948, Slezkine notes that “the campaign to cleanse the Soviet elite of ethnic Jews began as early as May 1939 when, in an apparent attempt to please Hitler, Stalin put Molotov in charge of Soviet diplomacy and ordered him to ‘get rid of the Jews’ in the Commissariat of External Affairs” (301).

29. “Despite all that the Bolshevik governments have done, in their better years, to combat these prejudices, enmity towards Jews was almost unabated…. The simple-minded communist often looked upon the Jews as the last surviving element of urban capitalism; while the anti-communist saw them as influential members of the ruling hierarchy” (Isaac Deutscher, quoted in S. Levenberg, “Soviet Jewry: Some Problems and Perspectives,” in The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, ed. Lionel Kochan [London: Oxford University Press, 1972], 42).

30. “Podlye shpiony i ubiitsy pod maskoi professorov-vrachei,” Pravda, January 13, 1953, 1.

31. Most of the JAC’s leadership was executed in August 1952. See Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, trans. Laura Esther Wolfson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

32. “Further Arrests Expected in ‘Plot’ of Soviet Doctors,” New York Times, January 14, 1953, 1.

33. Peter Meyer, “Soviet Anti-Semitism in High Gear,” Commentary 15 (February 1953): 120. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), in which anti-Semitism figures centrally, apparently lends credence to the Stalin-Hitler connection. However, Arendt does not at all anticipate Soviet anti-Semitism, faulting the USSR for its “arbitrariness of terror,” “not even limited by racial differentiation” (6).

34. Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: Free Press, 1990), 176–91.

35. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 330.

36. This applied even to Jewish Americans serving Soviet intelligence: from 1948 to 1953, “the Soviet espionage network had to be completely revamped because most of the agents (including the highly successful atomic spy Semyon Semenov, who had ‘controlled’ both the Cohens and the Rosenbergs) were Jews” (ibid., 304).

37. See, for instance, the anticommunist pamphlet by Arthur Schweriner, How Far Shall We Go? (New York: Veritas, 1935), which discourages young Jews from embracing the USSR. The war somewhat reversed such anti-Soviet sentiment among Jewish Americans owing to the Soviet-American alliance as well as the JAC’s outreach efforts.

38. The best available explanation of Soviet anti-Semitism came from Solomon M. Schwarz, a Vilna-born Menshevik who left Russia in 1921 and settled in New York in 1940. His The Jews in the Soviet Union (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1951) draws from Soviet periodicals (in both Russian and Yiddish), as well as Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings on “the national question” to conclude that the Bolsheviks had always sought Jewish assimilation. Schwarz briefly discusses anticosmopolitanism as the culmination of this assimilation project. The shortcomings of this framework are made evident in the following, although, to its credit, this still-cited book anticipated the worst of Soviet anti-Semitism by a year.

39. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego: Harcourt, 1982), 173, quoted in Nathan Abrams, “A Profoundly Hegemonic Moment: De-Mythologizing the Cold War New York Jewish Intellectuals,” SHOFAR 21, no. 3 (spring 2003): 68; Irving Howe, “New York in the Thirties: Some Fragments of Memory,” Dissent 8 (summer 1961): 248.

40. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 265; Irving Howe, Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953–1966 (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 118.

41. Lionel Abel, “New York City: A Remembrance,” Dissent 8 (summer 1961): 255, quoted in Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York: Free Press, 2000), 57.

42. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005), 126–47.

43. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Partisan Review 6 (1939): 34–39. Greenberg’s separation of avant-gardism and socialist realism has been forcefully contested by Boris Groys in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). While the avant-garde advanced an experimentalism missing in socialist realism, the two (at least in their interwar Soviet iterations) undoubtedly shared transformative political aims. For a comprehensive account of the New York Intellectuals and their politics, see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

44. Many of the Jewish American communist writers discussed by Alan Wald remained Soviet defenders even after the Doctors’ Plot and, as a result, became increasingly marginal. Note the CPUSA-sponsored journal Jewish Life, which, in the wake of 1956, lost three-quarters of its readers. It was reborn in 1958 as Jewish Currents but continued to follow a pro-Soviet course until 1967. In New York’s Yiddish-speaking world, Frayhayt (the parent of Jewish Life and Jewish Currents) also maintained a pro-Soviet bent through the 1950s, suffering many defections to Forverts after 1956. Editors of these publications would later admit to their naïveté regarding the Soviet Union. See Joseph Berger, “Jewish Currents Magazine and a Longtime Adversary Decide to Merge,” New York Times, April 13, 2006; Wald, Trinity of Passion, 205–8; Katz, “The Days of Proletpen,” 12.

45. Daniel Bell, “Reflections on Jewish Identity,” in The Winding Passage (Cambridge, Mass.: Abt, 1980), 321.

46. Jewish American writers to the left of the New York Intellectuals underwent a similar turn. See, for instance, Amelia Glaser, “From Jewish Jesus to Black Christ: Race Violence in Leftist Yiddish Poetry,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 34, no. 1 (spring 2015). On the other hand, for a survey of leftist Jewish American writing struggling to grasp the perceived failures of radicalism and to resist the postwar order, see Alan M. Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 216–49.

47. Irving Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated,” Commentary 2 (October 1946): 361, 363.

49. Subsequent parts were published in Commentary in 1948. The entire essay was then published as Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948).

50. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 26–27. Further references appear parenthetically in the text.

51. More recent calls for a “new cosmopolitanism” have effectively defended Sartre’s blend of internationalism and French nationalism, with David Hollinger asserting, “The human need for solidarities smaller than the species…is primal” (David A. Hollinger, “Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way,” Constellations 8, no. 2 [June 2001]: 238).

52. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 293–94.

53. Howe, A Margin of Hope, 256.

54. Harold Rosenberg, “Does the Jew Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play About Anti-Semitism,” Commentary 7 (January 1949): 12; emphasis in original. Further references appear parenthetically in the text.

55. Sidney Hook, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” Partisan Review 16 (May 1949): 477–78. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

56. As Slezkine puts it, “in the Mecca of rootless cosmopolitanism”—that is, the United States—“the existence of secondary loyalties is a constituent part of the political arrangement…. To become good Americans, Jews were to become the Chosen People again” (The Jewish Century, 322–23).

57. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 35.

58. Hook, “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” 464. Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews, 173.

59. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 298.

60. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking, 1954), 66. Recent scholarship has affirmed this date as the cutoff for the Soviet Jewish avant-garde; see Estraikh, In Harness, 60–63. Moss places the cutoff even earlier—the Soviet state’s takeover of Kultur-Lige in 1921 (Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, 269–79).

61. Elias Schulman, The Fate of Soviet Jewry: The Jews in the Soviet Union; Soviet-Yiddish Literature, 1918–1948 (New York: Jewish Labor Committee, 1958), 19.

62. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “A New Use for Yiddish,” Commentary 33 (March 1962): 267.

63. Howe and Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 67. Schulman criticizes Feffer more directly, noting his “book of petty attacks against Yiddish literature abroad” (The Fate of Soviet Jewry, 26).

64. Estraikh, In Harness, 111–12.

65. Note, for instance, condemnation of Stalin’s chief propagandist Il’ia Erenburg, now lauded for coediting (with Vasilii Grossman) The Black Book, a comprehensive account of the Holocaust commissioned by the JAC. See H. Leivick, “Who Are the Guilty?” in A Decade of Destruction: Jewish Culture in the USSR, 1948–1958 (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1958), 27, and Schulman, The Fate of Soviet Jewry, 32. A concerted Jewish American effort to rescue Soviet Jews began in 1964, with the first meeting of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, precursor to the extant (though recently renamed) National Conference on Soviet Jewry. See William W. Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979).

66. For similar downward spirals, see Marci Shore’s moving accounts of Polish Jewish communist poets, The Taste of Ashes and Ashes and Caviar: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

67. Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America” [1940, 1946], in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950), 7.

68. On the moral and political underpinnings of The Liberal Imagination, see R. P. Blackmur, “The Politics of Human Power,” in The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique, 32–42 (New York: Harcourt, 1955). Interestingly, Trilling’s outlook on culture is not only liberal; it bears some affinity to Trotsky’s writings on literature, for instance the latter’s critique of the Soviet bureaucracy’s heavy-handed literary preferences: “[The bureaucracy] prints books according to its own choice. It sells them also by compulsion, offering no choice to the reader. In the last analysis the whole affair comes down in its eyes to taking care that art assimilates its interests, and finds such forms for them as will make the bureaucracy attractive to the popular masses” (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? trans. Max Eastman [New York: Pioneer, 1945], 185). Trilling went on to author an extended meditation on authenticity—according to him, a unity of being, as opposed to sincerity, which rests on the divide between the internal self and external self—and its shifting presence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. In light of the geopolitical implications that I am attaching to the term, it seems fitting that, at one point, he notes its Greek roots (“authenteo: to have full power over; also, to commit a murder”) and suggests that these violent, forgotten denotations “bear upon the nature and intention of the artistic culture of the period we call Modern” (Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971], 131).

69. Sidney Hook, “Messages,” in A Decade of Destruction, 37.

70. For more on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton Bernstein (New York: Pantheon, 1968); Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); and Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Postwar American Hegemony (New York: Routledge, 2002).

71. U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Communist Aggression, Special Report No. 2: Treatment of the Jews Under Communism (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1954), v.

73. “Russian Accuses West of Racism,” New York Times, January 21, 1954, 9.

74. Lionel Trilling, “The Forbidden Dialectic,” in Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings, ed. Gregory Freidin, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: Norton, 2010).

75. This tie between the United States and liberal pluralism was later spelled out in Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963), a sociological study by New York Intellectual Nathan Glazer and future U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. For connections between this work and Glazer’s neoconservative turn, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 177–80.

76. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 310. Along similar lines, two years later Stalin published an article in Pravda explicitly debunking Nikolai Marr’s “New Theory of Language” (discussed in the introduction). Against Marr’s utopian quest for a unified socialist language, Stalin asserted that language was irreducible to class and instead bound to nationality—which, he asserted, existed “incomparably longer than any base or any superstructure.” See Yuri Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (winter 1996): 858–59.

77. Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 448–49.

78. The Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East had only retained around 18,000 Jews by World War II. See Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland; An Illustrated History, 1928–1996, ed. Bradley Burman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 69.

79. Slezkine presents Soviet anti-Semitism as this catch-22: “Those who claimed a separate Yiddish culture were ‘bourgeois nationalists’; those who identified with Russian culture were ‘rootless cosmopolitans’” (The Jewish Century, 298). From this latter perspective, the fact that so many “cosmopolitans” had assumed Russian or revolutionary surnames only underscored their perfidy. See, for instance, Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union, 358. These “Russians of Jewish descent or, as far as the Party’s Agitprop was concerned, Jews who claimed to be Russians in order to appear Soviet” were the primary targets of Soviet anti-Semitism (Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 300–301). However, one could be guilty of both nationalism and cosmopolitanism when expressions of Jewish difference gestured to non-Soviet branches of the Diaspora. For example, see E. Koval’chik, “Bezrodnye kosmopolity,” Literaturnaia gazeta, February 12, 1949, which attacks an encyclopedia entry on Jewish literature that “lists Soviet writers side by side with the arch contemporary businessmen of America, Palestine, and other countries.” Cited in Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union, 217n41.

80. Harrison Salisbury, “Jewish Writers in Soviet Active,” New York Times, July 26, 1956, 5; Harry Schwartz, “Yiddish Writer Hailed in Russia,” New York Times, March 8, 1959, 12. See also Sholom Aleichem, Istorii dlia detei (Moscow: Gos. izdat. detskoi lit., 1956); Sholom Aleichem, Zakoldovannyi portnoi (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1956); Sholom Aleichem, Schast’e privalilo! (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1959); and Sholom Aleichem, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1959).

81. Maurice Samuel, The World of Sholom Aleichem (New York: Knopf, 1947), 184–85, quoted in I. A. Serebrianyi, Sholom-Aleikhem i narodnoe tvorchestvo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1959), 9.

82. Serebrianyi, Sholom-Aleikhem, 7–9.

83. For a far more balanced view of Sholem Aleichem (via Gogol and Gorky), see Glaser, Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands, 106–9.

84. Seth L. Wolitz, “The Americanization of Tevye or Boarding the Jewish Mayflower,” American Quarterly 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 527.

86. Irving Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” Commentary 38 (November 1964): 74.

88. Irving Howe, A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (New York: Horizon, 1963), 211.

90. Akin to Howe’s revolutionary take on Sholem Aleichem, World of Our Fathers makes socialism central to Jewish American immigrant life. For the consequent marginalization of this work in Jewish American studies, see Tony Michels, “Socialism and the Writing of American Jewish History: World of Our Fathers Revisited,” American Jewish History 88, no. 4 (December 2000): 521–46. Howe’s Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon, 1957) and “The Culture of Modernism” (1970) present a Trotskyite approach to literature—literature as hostile to ideology but also as emerging from socioeconomic base. Note, for instance, Howe’s and Trotsky’s identical dismissals of symbolist poetry. See Irving Howe, “The Culture of Modernism,” in Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 18–20; Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 234–36.

91. Howe, A World More Attractive, 108.

92. Ibid., 109; emphasis in original.

93. Howe, A Margin of Hope, 257. On Howe, Baldwin, and Ellison, see John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 203–24, and Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

94. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 43; Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 278.

95. The New York Intellectuals’ allegiance to Washington was basically announced in the 1952 Partisan Review symposium “Our Country and Our Culture,” with Irving Howe declaring, “Between the inadequate democracy of the capitalist world and the total repression of the Stalinist world there is the difference between life, however afflicted, and death” (Irving Howe, “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19 [September–October 1952]: 577).

96. Jonathan Karp, “Performing Black-Jewish Symbiosis: The ‘Hasidic Chant’ of Paul Robeson,” American Jewish History 91, no. 3 (March 2003): 76. On Robeson’s 1935 visit to Moscow (organized by Sergei Eisenstein), see Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 191–92.

97. Paul Robeson Jr., “How My Father Last Met Itzik Feffer,” Jewish Currents 35 (November 1981): 5; cited in Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews, 115–16.

98. Karp, “Performing Black-Jewish Symbiosis,” 77.

99. Quoted in Robeson, “How My Father Last Met Itzik Feffer,” 4.

1. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose Vital Center (1949) had helped articulate the postwar liberal consensus, ominously painted the new world order: “The fading away of the cold war has brought an era of ideological conflict to an end. But it has not, as forecast, brought an end to history. One set of hatreds gives way to the next. Lifting the lid of ideological repression in eastern Europe releases ethnic antagonisms deeply rooted in experience and in memory. The disappearance of ideological competition in the third world removes superpower restraints on national and tribal confrontations. As the era of ideological conflict subsides, humanity enters—or, more precisely, re-enters—a possibly more dangerous era of ethnic and racial animosity.” For Schlesinger, the takeaway was that America had to overcome its own ethnic and racial divides and unite as a nation. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1991), 11–12. See also Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

2. Accordingly, while David Hollinger shared Schlesinger’s view on the need for national unity, he rejected the notion of post-Soviet nationalism as the result of primordial antagonism. Aware of Moscow’s promotion of ethnic particularism, he concluded that “when the extravagantly universalist Soviet polity itself—the instrument, ostensibly, for all humankind’s eventual liberation—weakened at the end of the 1980s, the only cultural adhesives strong enough to mobilize collective action were ethnic.” Hollinger drew from the Soviet collapse the lesson that, in order to survive, the United States should not set expectations so high but promote a “democratic polity with universalist and egalitarian aspirations less extravagant than those of the Soviet state.” See David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 138–39.

3. Quoted in Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America, 151.

4. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 36–39.

5. Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7–8, 85–88.

6. See the discussion of Kallen in the introduction. For the debate surrounding him and Bourne, see Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, 87; Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America, 37; Hollinger, Postethnic America, 92–94; John Higham, “Multiculturalism and Universalism: A History and Critique,” American Quarterly 45, no. 2 (June 1993): 205; Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 118; and Werner Sollors, “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 265. See also David Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” American Quarterly 27, no. 2 (May 1975): 142.

7. According to Kymlicka, U.S. multiculturalism, with its emphasis on civic as opposed to minority nationalism, provided an excuse “to strip national minorities of their separate public institutions and rights of self-government. We see this trend in Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, and Russia.” However, as Kymlicka himself acknowledges, he refers here to a specific kind of multiculturalism, which he derives from Hollinger—“cosmopolitan multiculturalism” (“based on individual rights”), as opposed to “pluralist multiculturalism” (based on “permanent and enduring” groups). See Will Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism in the International Arena,” Dissent 45 (fall 1998): 74, 79.

8. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 41–58.

9. Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (September–October 1997): 44.

10. Nikhil Pal Singh, “Cold War Redux: On the ‘New Totalitarianism,’” Radical History Review 85 (winter 2003): 177.

11. I draw here from John Roberts’s use of “revolutionary pathos” to refer to the “cultural memory of loss and defeat” associated with the historical avant-garde and the subsequent subordination of art as a vehicle for social and political change. For Roberts, this pathos enables the contemporary avant-garde (specifically the Russian art–activist collective Chto Delat’?) to resist “the opposing routes of ‘social effectivity’ and aesthetic sublimity” and to instead articulate “the possibilities of new forms of life (yet) to come.” See John Roberts, “Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant-Garde,” New Literary History 41, no. 4 (autumn 2010): 724, 728, 729. It should be noted that, in Russian, “pathos” (pafos) holds both positive and negative connotations: it can be used to describe both passionate enthusiasm and false sentimentalism.

12. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text, no. 9/10 (spring–summer 1984): 188; Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso, 2002), 45; Christopher Leigh Connery, “The World Sixties,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Christopher Leigh Connery and Rob Wilson (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2007), 97; Robin D. G. Kelley and Betty Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1, no. 4 (fall 1999): 24.

13. Christopher Leigh Connery, “The End of the Sixties,” boundary 2 36, no. 1 (spring 2009): 187.

14. Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” 188–89. See, for example, Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 304. Such reports are complicated in the following. Of course, gender inequality persisted and continues to persist long after 1949. See Delia Davin, “Gendered Mao: Mao, Maoism, and Women,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, ed. Timothy Cheek, 196–218 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

15. Mao Tse-Tung, “On Contradiction,” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm (accessed July 4, 2014).

16. Richard Wolin describes “Contradiction and Overdetermination” as an “extended commentary” on the Mao piece. See Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: May ’68, French Intellectuals, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 122. For more on the similarities between the two essays, see Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” 191–92, and Guo Jian, “Resisting Modernity in Contemporary China: The Cultural Revolution and Postmodernism,” Modern China 25, no. 3 (July 1999): 346–47. It should be noted that the Althusser piece does not reference Mao but can readily be seen as an effort to complement “On Contradiction.” For instance, whereas Mao relies on readings of Lenin and Stalin, Althusser goes back to Marx and Engels themselves to critique economic determinism.

17. As Connery writes, the concept of contradiction, “widely thought to be the most important component of Maoism and to be the essence of Mao’s original contribution to Marxist thought, is essential to a praxis-oriented project.” While recognizing the dominant view that Maoism ultimately undermined the global left, Connery also asserts the allure of Chinese revolutionary practice as offering a “powerful language of world-making. One could begin from nowhere, from a situation, like Mao’s peasants, that was ‘poor and blank,’ and reconstruct humanity again, from anew. That sense of beginning was powerfully felt in Detroit, the Sierra Maestre, in Guinea, and in the ghetto of Oakland” (Connery, “The World Sixties,” 97–98, 102).

18. Grace Lee and James Boggs offered a more nuanced application of the Cultural Revolution to the Black Power struggle, one critical of the Panthers. See Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 140–42, and Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 194–95.

19. Kelley and Esch, “Black Like Mao,” 8, 21–26, 31–37; Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, 94–98; Mao Tse-Tung, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 8–12, 33, 52.

20. Fred Ho, “The Inspiration of Mao and the Chinese Revolution on the Black Liberation Movement and the Asian Movement on the East Coast,” in Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans, ed. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 160. See also Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). On the persecution and decline of Asian American leftism in the 1950s, see Him Mark Lai, “Historical Survey of the Chinese Left in America,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1976), 72–75; and Renqiu Yu, To Save China, to Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 179–97. For an example of continuity between generations of Chinese American communists, see Gordon H. Chang, “The Many Sides of Happy Lim: Aka Hom Ah Wing, Lin Jian Fu, Happy Lum, Lin Chien Fu, Hom Yen Chuck, Lam Kin Foo, Lum Kin Foo, Hom, Lim Goon Wing, Lim Gin Foo, Gin Foo Lin, Koon Wing Lim, Henry Chin, Lim Ying Chuck, Lim Ah Wing, et al.,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1 (2010): 70–98.

21. Fred Ho and Steve Yip, “Alex Hing, Former Minister for the Red Guard Party and Founding Member of I Wor Kuen,” in Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, ed. Fred Ho, Carolyn Antonio, Diane Fujino, and Steve Yip (San Francisco: Big Red Media and AK Press, 2000), 289.

22. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 142–48, 162. As Lowe notes, Julia Kristeva viewed the Chinese language as “a system of codes within which one can read about an earlier, tonal, pre-oedipal society” (149). Here we find echoes of Nikolai Marr as well as Sergei Eisenstein. As discussed in the introduction and chapters 1 and 2, however, the difference is that Marr and Eisenstein did not simply romanticize the past but sought to harness non-Western cultures and languages for historical arrest and world revolution—all the while eschewing the West’s “denial of coevalness.”

23. The first quote comes from W. E. B. Du Bois’s poem “I Sing to China” (written on the occasion of his 1959 visit), which Mullen presents as an example of “Afro-Orientalism” (Afro-Orientalism, 41). The second quote comes from Elaine Brown’s memoir, specifically, her account of Huey Newton’s impressions during their 1971 visit to China (A Taste of Power, 302).

24. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 210–11; Connery, “The World Sixties,” 101; Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 140–41. Elbaum notes the inconsistencies of Maoism within China, which hindered its ability to consolidate Third World movements. Accordingly, as Fred Ho recounts, the most prominent Asian American radical group, I Wor Kwen (which in 1978 transformed into the League of Revolutionary Struggle) “had immense admiration and took much inspiration from China.” However, “we didn’t follow it blindly and actually had certain differences and disagreements with the CCP, including around nuclear energy, the prohibition of trade unions and other positions” (Fred Ho, “Fists for Revolution,” in Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, ed. Fred Ho, Carolyn Antonio, Diane Fujino, and Steve Yip [San Francisco: Big Red Media and AK Press, 2000], 11).

25. Frank Chin et al., “An Introduction to Chinese- and Japanese-American Literature,” in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed. by Frank Chin et al. (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974), xxv.

26. Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Knopf, 1980), 87.

27. For a reading of Kingston that emphasizes U.S. imperialism and anticommunism, see Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 63–64, 92.

28. Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Atlantic Monthly 174, no. 3 (September 1944): 54.

29. As Cheng elaborates, the root cause of racial melancholia is the formation of a dominant white identity in relation to the simultaneously avowed and disavowed racial subject. She illustrates this through another example from Kingston, namely, the hypochondriac narrator in The Woman Warrior. See Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–20, 65–102. See also David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

30. In addition to the distinction between the two words, I prefer “revolutionary pathos” over, say, “revolutionary melancholy” because of the latter’s evocation of what Walter Benjamin called left-wing melancholy—a term he used to criticize leftist poets whose seemingly anticapitalist verses in fact served to transpose “revolutionary reflexes” into “objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be supplied for consumption.” As Wendy Brown elaborates, “left melancholy is Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present.” However, as both Brown and Jonathan Flatley note, Benjamin was not opposed to melancholy per se, so long as it connected past losses to present politics. See Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” Screen 15, no. 2 (summer 1974): 29; Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (fall 1999): 20; Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 64–65. Alan Wald identifies something akin to revolutionary pathos in his recent study of Cold War–era “Communist literary modernism.” Combining psychoanalysis, existentialism, and Theodor Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” Wald traces a postwar modernism defined not by formalism but by “contentism”—that is, the experiences and perceptions emerging “in the liminal space between devotion and disillusion.” Wald describes this content as a “felt texture” made up of the communist past’s “unquiet dead.” See Alan M. Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 303–4.