The Ethnic Avant-Garde

About this book

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. In radical cultural and political experiments, they reimagined identity and decentred the West. Through a collage of cross-ethnic encounters that include Langston Hughes, Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson and Vladimir Tatlin, this book remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centred lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.