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Comintern Aesthetics
Amelia Glaser (Edited by), Steven S. Lee (Edited by)
9781487504656
Hardback, published 11 March 2020
592 pages, 100 b&w illustrations
23.4 x 16 x 4.3 cm, 0.92 kg
"This is the best collection of essays this reviewer has read in recent years. It has been doomed to success by its very conception—an account of the body of cultural production, and especially literature, inspired and in some cases enabled, by the international communist movement." "I would highly recommend this volume not only to specialists in aesthetics and poetics but also to a wider audience interested in deepening its knowledge about international communism in the twentieth century. In broader Comintern literature, I would argue that this volume is positioned well within the connections between the Soviet central machine and the geographically widespread writers, artists, communists, and activists who plugged into Comintern aesthetics."
Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern sought to advance not only the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including fighting against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization’s outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization. Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have persisted, even after the Comintern’s demise in 1943. Tracing these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures both the failure and the enduring allure of a Soviet-centred world revolution. The sixteen chapters in this edited volume examine cultural and revolutionary circuits that once connected Moscow to China, Southeast Asia, India, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, and the Americas. The Soviet Union of the interwar years provided a template for the convergence of party politics and cultural history, but the volume traces how this template was adapted and reworked around the world. By emphasizing the shared Soviet routes of these far-flung circuits, Comintern Aesthetics recaptures a long-lost moment in which cultures could not only transform perception but also highlight alternatives to capitalism – namely, an anti-colonial world imaginary foregrounding race, class, and gender equality.
List of Illustrations Chronology: Comintern Aesthetics – Between Politics and Culture Editors’ Note Introduction: Comintern Aesthetics – Space, Form, History Part One. Space: Geopoetics, Networks, Translation 1. World Literature as World Revolution: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangezi and the Utopian Geopoetics of the Russian Avant-Garde 2. Berlin–Moscow–Shanghai: Translating Revolution across Cultures in the Aftermath of the 1927 Shanghai Debacle 3. India–England–Russia: The Comintern Translated 4. Seeing the World Anew: Soviet Cinema and the Reorganization of 1930s Spanish Film Culture 5. The Panorama and the Pilgrimage: Brazilian Modernism, the Masses, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s 6. Polycentric Cosmopolitans: Writing World Literature in Indonesia and Vietnam, 1920s to 1950s and Beyond Part Two. Form: Beyond Realism-versus-Modernism and Art-versus-Propaganda 7. Culture One and a Half 8. Street Theatre and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Origins of a New Public Art 9. In the Shadow of the Inquisition: The Spanish Civil War in Yiddish Poetry 10. "Beaten, but Unbeatable": On Langston Hughes’s Black Leninism 11. A Comintern Aesthetics of Anti-racism in the Animated Short Film Blek end uait Part Three. History: Beyond the Interwar Years – Afterlives of Comintern Aesthetics 12. The Revolutionary Romanticism of Alice Childress’s "Conversations from Life" 13. When Comintern and Cominform Aesthetics Meet: Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe, 1956 and Beyond 14. Visions of the Future: Soviet Art, Architecture, and Film during and after the Comintern Years 15. Comintern Media Experiments, Leftist Exile, and World Literature from East Berlin 16. Workers of the World, Unite! Coda Contributors
Dominick Lawton
Steven S. Lee
Harsha Ram
Katerina Clark
Snehal Shingavi
Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez and Masha Salazkina
Sarah Ann Wells
Tony Day
Nariman Skakov
Xiaobing Tang
Amelia M. Glaser
Jonathan Flatley
Christina Kiaer
Kate Baldwin
Evgeny Dobrenko
Vladimir Paperny and Marina Khrustaleva
Katie Trumpener
Bo Zheng
Steven S. Lee and Amelia M. Glaser
Index