Description: Re-examines the relations between African Americans and the Soviet Union from a more transnational perspective and shows how these relations were crucial in the formation of Black modernism.
Review Quotes: "A blockbuster study of the Soviet Union's significance for African American literary and cultural self-fashioning in the twentieth century, researched with an unusually daunting prodigiousness and conceived with a truly geopolitical theoretical intelligence. In attending to questions of travel, of political identities-in-formation, and of subjectivity's ever-changing subject, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain locates a dialectic of displacement in which an imaginary and actual elsewhere--in this case none other than post-revolutionary Russia--furnishes a space to rearticulate crucial aspects of social and cultural life at home."--Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class