Minority Cultures and World Revolution
by Steven S. Lee
- Author(s)
- Steven S. Lee
- Publisher, year
- New York : Columbia University, 2018
- Scope
- 304 p., illustrated, 22.5 cm.
- ISBN
- 9780231173537
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 light on these efforts, ‘The Ethnic Avant-Garde’ makes a 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. Through a collage of cross-ethnic encounters including Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson and Vladimir Tatlin, this publication remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
- Location
- Cabinet 29 - 4 Expanded Space ; Global Art ; Black Art and Culture
- Remarks
- Incl. notes, Bibliography, Index
