Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture

Anti-Imperialist Modernism suggests that U.S. multi-ethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labour unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war Popular Front through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades.

The book’s impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity. Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.-Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba.

The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.