“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 ... Read morein 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 “A significant book that introduces the Soviet Union to the ‘Black Atlantic’ model of modernism. By examining the works of writers such as Du Bois, McKay, Hughes, and Robeson, the author explains the impact of the Soviet Union on African Americans. This kind of analysis is new—and vital—to literary studies.”—Gerald Horne, author of Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists “In Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain, Kate A. Baldwin has presented the hitherto ignored Soviet response to African American intellectuals and cultural workers. This is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual and political range of African America in the twentieth century.”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present Show Less