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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 histo 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 a distinct form that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where an international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. Chapters explore 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 on 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 Kate Baldwin, Northwestern University:A prodigiously researched, insightful, original and lucid piece of scholarship, Lee's work offers a fresh perspective on the links between avant-garde aesthetics and vanguard politics. Drawing out the connections between a diverse group of writers from Russia, Asia, and America whose work constellated around Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, Lee's scholarship is nothing short of transformative for those seeking new ways of configuring the relationships between ethnicity and cultural production between the wars
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