Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War by Benjamin Balthaser (review)

On 8 November 1931, the New York Times published an anonymously authored piece titled, "Ills of Cuba Laid to Our Policy Over There." Reporting on a lecture delivered by Cuban editor, lawyer, and ethnomusicologist/anthropologist Dr. Fernando Ortiz to the Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America, this provocatively titled article focused specifically on the vexed question of US intervention. Just three months prior, on 14 August, Cuba had survived a failed rebel attempt by student groups, organized labor, and middle-class professionals to overthrow President Gerardo Machado, who had initially promised his constituents that he would make the Caribbean nation—via open markets, large-scale public works programs, and political neutrality—a "Switzerland of the Americas." While Machado had begun his tenure in 1924 with high public opinion and popular support, by 1931 Cuba's fifth president was beset with allegations of corruption and tarnished by his dictatorial abuses of power, which involved the state-sanctioned expulsion of university student protestors and included the use of secret police (the "Porra") as a means of violently suppressing in-country dissent. As the Cuban president's fortunes continued to fade, US interest in the region increased, albeit under the auspices of a progressive agenda and political reform. Ortiz, who had previously allied himself with Machado, was at the time vice president of a key rebel delegation. Without hesitation, he warned against such involvement, stressing that what Cubans wanted was not intervention but an end to intervention. Ortiz then clarified, stating that the current Cuban government, despite public scandal over corruption, had maintained power due to the implicit and explicit support of the United States.

In the context of the Great Depression and the contemporaneous rise of fascism on the world stage (in Italy, Germany, and Spain), Ortiz's self-deterministic call for non-intervention and his focus on Cuba may appear little more than a historical footnote. However, as Benjamin Balthaser's wide-ranging Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War makes clear, such calls reflected transnational engagements between Cuban intellectuals and US audiences. These engagements, indicative of anti-imperial longings and often affixed to revolutionary ideas of nationhood and belonging, were integral to cultural productions that have been largely ignored because they fail to comply with dominant understandings of literary modernism and the Popular Front. At stake in Anti-Imperialist Modernism is a productive and comparative "rethink[ing of] the intersecting histories of cultural modernism and the Popular Front" (32) via the works of authors, artists, and intellectuals such as Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, Josephine Herbst, Carlos Bulosan, Emma Tenayuca, D'Arcy McNickle, C. L. R. James, and Orson Welles. Such rethinking engenders a re-envisioning of transnational turns and anti-imperialist critiques that have strategically been forgotten due to New Criticism periodization, which privileges an apolitical consideration of form, and Cold War politics, which consistently characterized the United States as an idealized space of tolerance and democratic virtue.

Consisting of an introduction and six chapters, Anti-Imperialist Modernism is decidedly cartographic in its re-envisioning of the decades before, during, and after World War II. Balthaser's analyses of 1930s-1950s literature, film, newspaper reportage, and photography reflect and refract the global dimensions of a shifting world order marked by anti-racist/anti-imperialist movements at home and abroad. From Cuba to California, from Haiti to the Soviet Union, and from Harlem to Hollywood, Anti-Imperialist Modernism takes seriously the extent to which "African American, Native American, Asian American, and Mexican American literatures" were linked by "shared lineages of empire and transnational racial affiliations" (32). Of particular note is the author's triangulated analysis in chapter 1 of Odets, Hemingway, and Hughes, which converges on Cuba and accentuates a cohesive political affinity among authors normally considered independently of one another. Also significant is...