Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963

Kate A. Baldwin

Published by Duke University Press 2002

Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain

Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963

Kate A. Baldwin
Edited by: Donald E. Pease

In the series New Americanists

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822383833

Overview
Contents

About this book

Re-examines the relations between African Americans and the Soviet Union from a more transnational perspective and shows how these relations were crucial in the formation of Black modernism.

Author / Editor information

Kate A. Baldwin is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Reviews

“A blockbuster study of the Soviet Union’s significance for African American literary and cultural self-fashioning in the twentieth century, researched with an unusually daunting prodigiousness and conceived with a truly geopolitical theoretical intelligence. In attending to questions of travel, of political identities-in-formation, and of subjectivity’s ever-changing subject, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain locates a dialectic of displacement in which an imaginary and actual elsewhere—in this case none other than post-revolutionary Russia—furnishes a space to rearticulate crucial aspects of social and cultural life at home.”—Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

“A significant book that introduces the Soviet Union to the ‘Black Atlantic’ model of modernism. By examining the works of writers such as Du Bois, McKay, Hughes, and Robeson, the author explains the impact of the Soviet Union on African Americans. This kind of analysis is new—and vital—to literary studies.”—Gerald Horne, author of Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists

“In Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain, Kate A. Baldwin has presented the hitherto ignored Soviet response to African American intellectuals and cultural workers. This is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual and political range of African America in the twentieth century.”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: The Demand for a New Kind of Person: Black Americans and the Soviet Union, 1922–1963 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 ‘‘Not at All God’s White People’’: McKay and the Negro in Red Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2 Between Harem and Harlem: Hughes and the Ways of the Veil Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
3 Du Bois, Russia, and the ‘‘Refusal to Be ‘White,’ ’’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
4 Black Shadows across the Iron Curtain: Robeson’s Stance between Cold War Cultures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	202
Epilogue: The Only Television Hostess Who Doesn’t Turn Red Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
Selected Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	321
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 360
Illustrations
- Other: 19 b&w photos

eBook

Published: October 17, 2002
ISBN: 9780822383833