The Ethnic Avant-Garde

Provocative and wide-ranging.

A highly engaging exploration.

Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State University:
Lee's brilliant book not only redefines 'ethnic literature' but also fundamentally alters our sense of the political promises and aesthetic possibilities of 'the avant-garde.' It is essential reading for students and scholars of twentieth-century literature and culture.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University:
A dazzlingly original, ambitious book that challenges us to reconsider the relationship between politics and artistic experimentation during a complex, contradictory, and intriguing period in the history of the United States and the Soviet Union. Lee draws astute and surprising insights into literature, art, modernism, revolution, and the fraught, never-ending struggle to counter racism around the globe.

Dale E. Peterson, Amherst College:
Beautifully written, deeply researched, and constantly engaging, The Ethnic Avant-Garde restores the allure of Moscow as the beacon of political and perceptual revolution in the early Soviet period. The aspiration to conjoin the socialist vanguard and the cultural avant-garde in an international alliance was engraved in the border-crossing works of activist intellectuals who sought to link indigenous roots to vertiginous upheaval. Steven S. Lee truly understands the pathos and promise of this global experiment.

Kate Baldwin, Northwestern University:
A prodigiously researched, insightful, and lucid book, Lee's work offers fresh perspective on the links between avant-garde aesthetics and vanguard politics. His scholarship is nothing short of transformative for those seeking new ways of configuring the relationships between ethnicity and cultural production between the wars.