Comintern aesthetics / edited by Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Glaser, Amelia, editor.

Lee, Steven S., editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communist International--Influence.

Communist International.

Literature--History and criticism.

Literature.

Communism and literature--History--20th century.

Communism and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (588 pages)

Place of Publication:

Toronto ; Buffalo ; London : University of Toronto Press, [2020]

Summary:

Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern advanced not just the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including those 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 continued, even after its demise in 1943. Tracking these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures the failure of a Soviet-centered world revolution, but also its enduring allure in the present. 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Chronology: Comintern Aesthetics – Between Politics and Culture

Editors’ Note

Introduction: Comintern Aesthetics – Space, Form, History

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

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

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

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4875-3064-1

1-4875-3063-3

OCLC:

1121593611