The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution by Steven S. Lee (review)

Steven S. Lee's The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (2015) presents readers with a comparative study of twentieth-century avant-gardism via an extensive historical description of emergent claims by both Soviet and American poets and artists on "authenticity." Through examples ranging from poetry, theatre, and film, Lee develops a complex portrait of "authenticity" at two critical moments in the twentieth century. The first, which the book's treatment of prewar modernism lays out, argues a cultural authenticity in the era of global capitalist citizenship as a simultaneous turn to aesthetic authenticity. Later in the twentieth century, however, Lee observes how "competing understandings of 'authenticity,'" citing the influence of fifties-era anti-Semitism on political activism and art, "reveal a fork in the road, a choice between Soviet socialist internationalism and American liberal pluralism" (168). The stakes, as Lee observes in the afterword, have to do with the ways nation and culture operate as living archives of action and history, to which literature and art respond and/or collaborate with toward the creation of an efficacious linguistic territory of persons, rights, and materiality. Moving away from critiques of "multiculturalism" as a euphemism for multinational capitalism (neoliberalism), Lee observes that, "while in some contexts multiculturalism does indeed serve global elites, in others it can still provide a language for combating inequality" (183). This highlights Lee's intentions to situate avant-gardism as an innovative activism in both politics and aesthetics that functions within the very schema experimentation disrupts.

As such, Lee begins by locating innovation as an ethnography of sorts, which is significant for the context of transnational politics the eras in question underscore given that ethno-national identification in the twentieth century is both an exigency for universal rights while subsequently serving as the groundwork for the biopolitical liberalism concerned with the objectivity of rights, that is, "multiculturalism." Part of Lee's project, as he states, is to present "nation" and "conceptualism" in a concurrent tradition of self-actualization toward a mosaic context that is undoubtedly undergirded by deep cultural practices, and to "connect this tradition," quoting Lee, "to questions of race and ethnicity" so that we might "unlock the suppressed utopian potential of minority and avant-garde cultures alike—the former as revolutionary and experimental; the latter as inclusive and decolonizing" (2). "The ethnic avant-garde," continues Lee in the introduction, "foregrounds a way of seeing—a 'transnational optic,'" which for the artists studied is motivated by a "potential of avant-garde and minority cultures to level hierarchies and bring art into life—that is, to shatter or open exclusive canons and to dismantle the divide between high and low" (4). In this there is a link to be made into the contemporary era of experimentation, which I address below—one that expands upon transnational study as well as innovative aesthetics by "minority" writers and artists, whether the term refers to racial positionalism, or to a post-/trans-/antinational outsider status.

The concept of minoritarianism works as linchpin between historical and aesthetic production, but rather than rely on ready-made definitions of "revolution," Lee relies on a untranslatable distance between the transnational differences in Soviet and American pluralism to decenter the term and reveal the distinct ways both Russian and American artists were engaged in a project of translating each other. Chapter 1 teases out the ways writers like Mayakovsky, for instance, exoticizes American pluralist landscapes, but in doing so also develops a sense of "preservation" for authentic cultural expression (57). Later, Lee notes the ways Hughes becomes disenchanted with Soviet ethnonationalism through observed failures by Soviet intellectuals to see ethnic difference as materialistically determining.

Lee's analysis in Chapter 2 is grounded in Soviet cultural and linguistic entanglements, pointing to an appreciation of what he underscores earlier as "now-time," a disorientation that not only describes avant-gardism and the aesthetic event, but, as Lee argues, also presents an ontological...