The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic ed. by David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic ed. by David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg Natalia Telepneva Featherstone, David and Høgsbjerg, Christian (eds). The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic. Racism, Resistance and Social Change. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2021. xvi + 287 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £85.00: $130.00. In this collection of articles, editors David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg set out to contribute to a growing body of literature that investigates the impact of the Russian Revolution on black radicals during the interwar period and beyond. As outlined in the introduction, the ambition of the volume is three-fold: to show how black radicals understood and engaged with ideas generated by the Russian Revolution; to recover the history of physical and ideational connections forged among the black left across the Black Atlantic; and to show how these individuals engaged with the Soviet Union. In a helpful introduction that succinctly outlines the state of the field, the editors argue the collection will challenge the notion that Communism was a solely European phenomenon and reassert the 'missing and erased connections of antiracist politics and resistance' (p. 19). The ideas generated by black left intellectuals in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution constitute an important theme in this volume. Most chapters confirm what we already knew, namely that the events of 1917 had a major impact on black radicals who heralded Bolshevism because, as they saw it, it eliminated ethnic prejudice in the USSR. We learn some important details about how Claude McKay, a Jamaican-American black activist, adopted an 'unsentimental view of anti-imperialist struggle' (p. 68) largely, argues Winston James, due to his complex experiences of white proletarian nationalism in interwar London. Mathieu Renault adds to the portrait of American poet and activist Langston Hughes, who celebrated the impact of socialism in Soviet Central Asia, even though he still saw the region from an 'Orientalist perspective' as a 'massive harem' (p. 92). Cathy Begin draws our attention to the specific timing and the inadequacy of the local left in the USA to explain the appeal of Bolshevism, while Marika Sherwood similarly points to the continuous failure of the Left to take seriously the demands of anticolonial activists in post-war Britain. One wonders, however, whether the volume could shed have further light on exactly how these activists and movements, as the editors posit in the introduction, shaped 'Communist practices and ideas' (p. 16). For example, Olga Panova's excellent chapter argues that Soviet literary critics by and large toed the official line in their responses to African American literature. These chapters recover the diversity and originality of these important ideas, but their larger impact is left somewhat obscure. Another theme is black radicals' relationship with the Soviet Union and the Comintern. A number of authors address the developments in the aftermath [End Page 772] of the Sixth World Congress in 1928 — the peak of Soviet support for black liberation. Nigel Westmaas adds important details about the pre-war history of racialism in Guyana; Holger Weiss describes the activities of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers based in Hamburg; and Sandra Pujals describes the work of the Comintern's Caribbean Bureau in the 1930s. The story is a fairly familiar one, as many black radicals who admired and/or worked for the Comintern became disillusioned with the organization by the mid 1930s. Pujals's chapter probably goes the furthest in explaining why the Comintern's project in the Caribbean failed, as it ran up against divergent conceptions of race and local resistance to centrally-imposed bureaucratic structure. A number of chapters reconstruct the 'erased' connections of anticolonial politics across the Atlantic, but several leave the reader wanting to learn more about how these functioned in practice. For example, we learn about the existence of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, but little in terms of how the organization operated to, say, spread the radical messages across the Atlantic. Besides, Africa occupies little room in the volume. As the editors explain in the introduction, such a 'silence' exists because these conversations between Bolshevism and...