Negotiating Socialist Internationalism: Latin America, the Soviet Union, and the Socialist Bloc

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The 1956 Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that featured Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s crimes also marked a new phase in socialist support for the emerging Third World. The Soviet state and its socialist bloc allies pledged ideological and material support in an effort to shape the cultural production of anti-imperialist movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Following the victory of Castro’s forces in the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the latter became a prominent locus of a new socialist internationalist project. In many ways, this was a resumption of an earlier internationalist project during the “proletarian moment” of the 1930s, in which the Soviet Union promoted itself as a guarantor and mediator of a wider platform for cultural exchange between leftist intellectuals and artists around the world.

The cultural transfer between Latin America, the Soviet Union, and (later on) the Second World assumed diverse forms – literary translations, theater and film co-productions, official state visits, and student exchange programs, to name just a few – and, in the process, continually redefined and reconfigured the values and aesthetics of socialist internationalism. While a growing body of scholarship has begun to explore investigate various facets of his encounter, the role of individual actors in this process remains underexplored. Borrowing Shaw and Iordachi’s concept of “socialist mediation,” this panel explores how socialist “intermediaries” in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and the socialist bloc translated, negotiated, and transformed socialist values.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Diego Moschkovich, U of Sao Paulo (Brazil)

Papers

• Cinematic Poetry of Revolution: Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Screenwriting in Soy Cuba - Dasha Prokhorova, U of Pittsburgh

• Socialist Solidarity and Transnational Identity: Letters of Czechoslovak Film Laboratory Technician and His Wife from Cuba, 1963-1966 - Magdalena Matuskova, Clemson U

• The Socialist Intermediary in Latin America: José Mancisidor - Michael Lavery, U of Maryland, College Park

Discussant

• B. Amarilis Lugo de Fabritz, Howard U