- The Ethnic Avant-Garde
There is much to admire in this succinct, highly original, and carefully researched volume. The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution maps out the co-ordinates of the intellectual and aesthetic trajectories traced out by artists such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and the Jewish American poet Moyshe Nadir, who belonged to different ethnic minorities, were involved, with varying degrees of commitment, in avant-garde art movements, and who looked to Soviet art and society for inspiration. But the book is also wise enough to tell a tale of revolutionary pathos, as the revolution's promise of equity is betrayed and American artists, such as Paul Robeson, who witnessed this betrayal, failed to speak the truth about the Soviet Union when they returned to America. It is utterly remarkable that Lee traces the themes of The Ethnic Avant-Garde through to the 1950s and New York intellectuals' response to Soviet anti-Semitism, focussing largely on their rebuttal of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 essay "Réflexions sur la question juive" and the parallels between Sartre's idea of an "authentic" Jew and anti-Semitic ideas that had developed in the Soviet Union, and from there to the perceived promise of Maoism in 1960s and 1970s radicalism, another enthusiasm that ultimately led to disappointment.
One of the most remarkable of the discoveries Lee's assiduous research turned up concerns an account Langston Hughes offered of the reasons Soviet authorities cancelled a film project, Black and White, on the topic of the persecution of Blacks in America. In his autobiography, Hughes suggests that the script, developed under the auspices of the Comintern and MEZHRABPOM, the leading Soviet film trust, reflected Soviet artists' risibly poor misunderstanding of African American society, [End Page 153] and, in particular, African-American speech. Following strenuous efforts at remediating the problems, Hughes explained, the project was shelved. As early as 1989, Michael Scammell had already brought that account into question, pointing out that in his 1954 autobiography Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler claimed that the Soviets canned the project on the basis of geopolitical considerations. On December 6, 1917, shortly after the October Revolution, the US government broke off diplomatic relations with Russia, purportedly because the Bolshevik government refused to honour the debts to America the Czarist government had incurred and declined to commit to the continuance of treaties the Russian government had signed with foreign governments. Throughout the 1920s, the American government refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Soviet government, becoming in time the last of the great powers to do so. By 1931, there were signs that the American resolve on that matter was weakening, and that a political rapprochement between the USSR and the USA was possible. Secret negotiations were taking place with the Soviet Union, and one of the conditions the Americans set for recognition was that the USSR should cease its propaganda among African Americans. As a result, the film on Blacks' lives in America was dropped suddenly. This much, as I noted, has been known since 1989. It is a bit surprising, given the centrality of the discussion of this film project to Lee's book, that The Ethnic Avant-Garde does not mention Scammel's work, nor does his name appear in the bibliography or index. Even so, Lee's meticulousness led him to dig up Georgii Grebner's script, and his painstaking efforts give us a new perspective on Hughes's tale: he asserts the script is far from the disaster the one-time leader of the Harlem Renaissance made it out to be. Hughes certainly knew that. However, explaining as he did the Soviet authorities' cancellation of the film project allowed Hughes to protect the Soviet government from accusations of making concessions to mainstream American interests, while at the same time protecting himself, in a period of growing anti-communism, from being identified as a Communist or a fellow traveller.
One great virtue of Lee's book is its scope. He deals not only with writing by minorities, but...