From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds by Rossen Djagalov (review)

In this innovative and meticulously researched book, Rossen Djagalov sets out to map the vast field of cultural engagements between the Soviet Union and the decolonizing countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. More often it seems as if he is uncovering a new world, heretofore hidden in plain sight by disciplinary silos, language barriers, and ideological myopia. With a focus on institutions that facilitated myriad forms of transnational contact and collaboration, Djagalov provides a fresh perspective on the intertwined cultural output of the Soviet Union and the Third World – which, following the historian Vijay Prashad, he defines not as a geographical "place" but rather as an emancipatory "project" that coalesced around common goals of decolonization, political self-determination, and the drive to build "socially just societies" (P. 5). Djagalov brings to the foreground "the shared histories between Soviet-aligned networks and postcolonial studies" (P. 21) and makes the case that these connections were deliberately cultivated by Soviet-led institutions and the individuals who passed through them. The resulting study, which prompts a reconsideration of the internationalist dimensions of Soviet culture as well as a reinterpretation of classic works of postcolonial literature and cinema, has a great deal to offer scholars and students of Soviet literature, Soviet history, global and transnational history, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature and film studies.

The material is arranged both chronologically and by medium, with the first three chapters dedicated to literature and the last two to film. Institutions serve as the main stage of interactions and mutual influence between representatives of the Second and Third Worlds, whose ranks included not only writers and filmmakers but also translators, researchers, revolutionaries, and political leaders – often with a great deal of overlap between these categories. Djagalov traces the rise and fall of this phenomenon with emphasis on two main waves of activity: the internationalism of the 1920s and 1930s, and the Cold War peak of the 1950s and 1960s. Early on, the Comintern and the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, along with literary organizations such as Proletkult, RAPP, and eventually the Soviet Writers' Union, formed a "force field" that pulled anticolonial writers into the Soviet "orbit" (Pp. 32–64). Meanwhile at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), a generation of revolutionaries mingled with denizens of the Soviet Union's own "East," who went on to comprise the national intelligentsia and political leadership of their respective home republics. Later, under Khrushchev, the scale of the project expanded, as the Soviet-led Afro-Asian Writers' Association and Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and Latin American Film provided a global platform for promoting new works, articulating political and aesthetic goals, and conferring prestige, while publication outlets like Progress Publishers and the journals Foreign Literature and Lotus formed conduits for the multidirectional exchange of literatures in translation. As Djagalov points out, many of these institutions and the connections they fostered were short-lived: they lost momentum in the Brezhnev era, unraveled during perestroika, and eventually, with the Soviet Union's breakup, were subsumed by the forces of globalization and neoliberalism.

Yet in spite of its brief lifespan, Djagalov argues, this world of "cultural networks and interfaces" (P. 4) had an outsize impact on the development of a transnational body of literature and cinema that directly shaped postcolonialism as we know it. Chapters 3 and 5 contain a "structural analysis" of key texts and films, intended not only to highlight similarities in content but also to uncover the "typological affinities and genetic contacts" that lie beneath (P. 5). We are introduced to the "solidarity documentary" (Pp. 173–209), the "supply chain narrative," the "railway narrative," and the "international solidarity/foreign-utopia topos," along with its sub-categories, the "Russian topos" and the "Soviet topos" (Pp. 114–132). An astounding number of works...