During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers
collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to
build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination
and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the
magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed
themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural
and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the
West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde
makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and
art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel
narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of
an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists
cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of
montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow,
where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist
International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit
to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote
Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's
translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to
assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist
play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became
Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian
American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as
Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political
disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing
collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert
Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin,
this work remaps global modernism along minority and
Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of
seeing the world anew.
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