Red Migrations: Transnational Mobility and Leftist Culture After 1917

Together with a new political, social, and cultural order, the Bolshevik Revolution also brought about a spatial revolution. Changed patterns, motivations, and impacts of migration collided with new cultural forms and aesthetic mandates. Red Migrations highlights the various multidirectional and multilateral transnational movements of leftist thinkers, artists, and writers. The book draws on avant-garde poets such as David Burliuk, Marxist theoreticians such as János Mácza, and "fellow travellers" such as Langston Hughes, revealing how leftists of all stripes were inspired and at times impelled by the Soviet Revolution to cross borders. It explores how the resulting circulation of ideas, aesthetic forms, and individuals not only contributed enormously to the ferment of creative activity in the early Soviet years, but also deeply informed international leftist aesthetics and political practice throughout the twentieth century. The robust and diverse transnational networks created by these circulations are at the centre of this volume. With original archival research and insightful analyses, Red Migrations sheds light on the ideals, aspirations, and disappointments of leftist transnationalism from the 1920s through the 1960s and the aesthetic forms they engendered.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: From Internationalism to Transnationalism Philip Gleissner and Bradley A. Gorski Part I: Forms 1. "How They Do It in America": Cultural Arbitrage in Soviet Russia Serguei Oushakine 2. Transnational Theory of the Avant-Garde: János Mácza, Artistic Praxis, and the Marxist Method Irina Denischenko 3. Staging Revolution: Stalinist Drambalet in the German Democratic Republic Elizabeth H. Stern 4. Hegelienkov: Eval'd Ilienkov, Western Marxism, and Philosophical Politics after Stalin Trevor Wilson   Part II: Geographies 5. Guides to Berlin: Exiles, Émigrés, and the Left Roman Utkin 6. "Syphilis, Dirt, and the Frontiers of Revolution": Langston Hughes and Arthur Koestler at the Borders of Disgust Bradley A. Gorski 7. The Intellectual Migrations of the British Communist Ralph Fox during the 1920s and 1930s Katerina Clark   Part III: Identities 8. Revolutionary Violence with Chinese Characteristics: Chinese Migrants in Early Soviet Literature Edward Tyerman 9. The Feeling and Fragility of Modernity: Red Mobility against the Grand Tour in Nikolai Aseev's The Unmade Beauty (1928) Michael Kunichika 10. Blackness in the Red Land: African Americans and Racial Identity in the "Colourless" Soviet Union Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon   Part IV: Communities 11. The "Father of Russian Futurism" in America: David Burliuk and the Russian Voice Anna Arustamova 12. Exilic Experiments in Education: The Multiple Lives and Journeys of László Radványi, pseud. Johann-Lorenz Schmidt Helen Fehervary 13. Haunting Encounters: Reimagining Hermina Dumont Huiswoud's Trip to the Soviet Union, 1930–3 Tatsiana Shchurko 14. Desiring the USSR: Writers from Two Germanys in the Soviet Contact Zone Philip Gleissner

About the Author :
Philip Gleissner is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. Bradley A. Gorski is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University.

Review :
"A visionary and necessary compendium of the multiple ways transnational migration and cultural patterns intersected in and around the Bolshevik Revolution. The 'migrant archive' under consideration here offers a diversity of displacement, not only from Moscow to Leningrad, but from Hollywood to China, from Berlin to Central Asia. With mobility at their center, these captivating chapters provide a breathtaking spectrum of incisive meditations on the way the movement of diverse bodies within networks of cultural exchange provoked not only ideological but also cultural and artistic patterns that inform leftist transnationalism to this day."--Kate Baldwin, Professor of English and Communication Studies, Tulane University "This is a brilliant collection of essays that uses migration to traverse multiple boundaries--for instance, between socialist internationalism and capitalist globalization, western and eastern Marxisms--as well as gender, generational, and racial divides. Together they transform our understanding of leftist aesthetics, opening our eyes to unfettered practices of political commitment and cross-disciplinary scholarship."--Steven S. Lee, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley "This volume makes a momentous contribution to the study of transnational mobility in the twentieth century. Sophisticated, wide-ranging, and inspirational, its scholarship reimagines leftist culture as an evolving swath of practices sustained by both conflict and solidarity, and often shaped by migration and exile. The intellectual currents nurturing this culture are here captured in their complexity, resisting a neat ideological attribution."--Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London