Race and the Shape of Revolutionary Art: Between Avant-Garde and Early Soviet Visual Cultures

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Russia never had a system of African chattel slavery, so its history of racism differs from that of the US or western Europe. It did have a vast empire extending into Central Asia, but after the Revolution, Soviet Russian attitudes toward the peoples of the ethnically different republics of the Soviet Union, paternalistic as they may have been, were not conventionally colonialist; they were shaped, rather, by the scientific-Marxist approaches of new Soviet ethnography and a socialist commitment to anti-racism. Claude McKay, the Jamaican-born queer poet of the Harlem Renaissance and leftist activist who visited Soviet Russia in 1922-23, wrote, “to the Russian, I was merely another type, but stranger…they were curious with me, all and sundry, young and old, in a friendly, refreshing manner” with “none of the intolerable impertinence and often downright affront” of Europeans. This hopeful account of the Russian relation to Blackness as coming into being in the moment of visual encounter, instead of being already scripted, will be tested in the papers on this panel, which explore how representations of Blackness were mobilized in the avant-garde of the late Russian empire, as well as in the early years of the Soviet Union. Papers examine the place of the Black body in Neo-primitivist aesthetics; the imagery of Blackness within Soviet Constructivism and Internationalism; and the Black revolutionary figure’s prominence in Soviet anti-racist propaganda.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Olivia Crough, Harvard U

Roundtable Speakers

• Olivia Crough, Harvard U

• Jonathan Flatley, U of Chicago

• Christina Kiaer, Northwestern U

• Mina Magda, New York U