Rossen Djagalov’s From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and Third Worlds is a groundbreaking study of intellectual, sociocultural, political, and artistic networks that have emerged as the result of the Soviet engagement with the literary and cinematic fields in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Using previously unpublished archival materials, personal interviews, photographs, and a variety of critical sources, this monograph investigates how the second and the third world were mutually constitutive. Djagalov’s approach is characterized by depth of analysis of cultural institutions and networks, supported by insightful comparative readings of novels and films. The book makes a compelling argument for the study of this heritage and challenges existing theoretical models of postcolonialism and world literature.The introduction lays out the complex historical and theoretical background of the project and sets out to reconfigure the relationship between Soviet and postcolonial studies. In defining his theoretical approach, Djagalov favors the term “third-worldist,” alluding to Vijay Prashad’s idea of “third world as a project,” and conceptualizes the unity of the cultural field in the formerly colonial countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as “an emancipatory supranational movement on these continents seeking not only national independence, but also the formation of socially just societies” (5). The monograph charts the developments of literary and cinematic fields over three distinct periods: the early Comintern phase and interwar cultural exchanges; the peak phase of second- to third-world engagements from the 1950s to the 1980s, which coincided with the Cold War; and their posthistory in the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, including their role in the emergence of postcolonial studies. The introduction also sets forth a more nuanced definition of cultural contact zones, defining the crucial role of Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus (“inner East”) as sites of engagement with the “outer East.”Chapter 1, “Entering the Soviet Literary Orbit—early 1920s–mid 1950s,” traces the history of internationalism anti-imperialism in the pre-Soviet and early Soviet eras, addressing several international and Soviet cultural institutions and analyzing the reception of Russian literary tradition and the legacy of the revolution in colonial and postcolonial countries. The focal point of this chapter is the Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV), which was established in 1921 and became the site of the first cultural encounters between Soviet, Asian, and African writers. Among KUTV graduates were prominent authors hailing from many countries, including Nâzim Hikmet, Hamdi Selam, Emi Siao, and Jiang Guangci. An outstanding feature of Djagalov’s methodology is its sophisticated balance of institutional and personal histories. In exploring transnational imaginaries, the monograph maps complex political and ideological histories based on institutional archives and official reports, counterbalancing them with personal reception of cultural encounters, as evidenced in memoires and books by KUTV graduates. The chapter concludes with a section “The Interwar Era Soviet Republic of Letters,” presenting a brief chronicle of several key literary organizations that preceded the massive outreach to African and Asian countries in the 1950s.Chapter 2, “Afro-Asian Writers Association and Its Literary Field (1958–1991),” is the most complex one in the book. To reconstruct the history and the ideological outreach of this organization, the chapter explores its constitutive elements: writers’ congresses, the international governing bureau, literary magazine Lotus (published from 1968 to 1991), and the Lotus Prize for Literature (1969–88), which was often seen as the Afro-Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The central part of this chapter is devoted to the 1958 International Writers’ Congress hosted in Tashkent. Among more than two hundred participants who attended the Congress were literary representatives of Asian and recently decolonized African nations, including such prominent authors as Mao Dun, Mulk Raj Anand, Sajjad Zaheer, as well as younger delegates who would become literary and sometimes also political leaders of their countries: Pramoyedya Toer, Ousmane Sembène, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Marcelino dos Santos. Thorough use of archives and rare historical sources allows Djagalov to demonstrate the dual nature of such events: envisioned as ideological showcases with predetermined agendas, they nevertheless resulted in meaningful personal encounters and long-lasting literary influences. Secondly, the chapter discusses the international bureau and its main publishing project: the literary quarterly Lotus, which was published in French, English, and Arabic, and included not only literary works, but also folklore, visual art, literary criticism, and bibliography. Finally, the chapter offers a brief behind-the-scenes history of the Lotus Prize for Literature, uncovering the nuances of the selection process (the list of Lotus Prize winners can be found in the appendix). The chapter also sheds light on several other Soviet and international literary organizations that were constitutive to the development of the literary field and established new patterns of book translation and circulation, rivaling Western genealogies and cartographies of world literature. In particular, Djagalov highlights the geopolitical history of the competitions for literary influence in the recently decolonized states. Another asset of this chapter is the analysis of the Soviet reception of Afro-Asian literature based on archived readers’ letters.Chapter 3, “The Links That Bind Us: Solidarity Narratives in Third-Worldist Fiction,” turns to the discussion of literary texts. The exploration of novels and narrative poems is focused on how these texts “symbolically resolved the tension between the competing imperatives of constructing national communities out of formerly colonial populations, on the one hand, and situating those emerging communities in a wider world, vis-à-vis the West, the USSR, and other colonizing nations, on the other” (114). The chapter identifies several key solidarity tropes, including “the foreign utopia topos” (invocations of international revolutionary struggles that help portray emancipatory movements at home), “the supply-chain narrative” (a popular device in Latin American novels that follow the circulation of goods and money from local producers to corporate headquarters), and “the railway narrative” (a plot device that allows to connect capitals, smaller towns, and deserted railway stations in portraying class struggle and nation building). This chapter adds one more important institutional history—that of Progress Publishing House, which produced translations of Russian literature into various languages, as well as translations of international literature into Russian.Mirroring the organization of the previous chapters, chapter 4 addresses institutional structures of the cinematic field, while chapter 5 delves into analysis of solidarity cinema. The rise and fall of the famed biennial Tashkent Film Festival (1968–88) as the key platform of Soviet engagement with third-world cinema is explored in chapter 4. Drawing on ample photographical evidence, copious archival research, journalistic reports, and personal accounts, the chapter recreates the jovial atmosphere of the festival. This event sought to distinguish itself from other international film festivals by being noncompetitive, inclusive, and uniquely positioned to represent all non-Western cinema united by the motto “For peace, social progress, and freedom of the peoples” (153). The chapter carefully traces the geopolitical tensions that impacted the festival, such as the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, and uncovers the inequalities implicit in its wide geographical scope. For example, while some invitees, including India, Japan, and the Soviet Union, had established cinema industries, many newly independent African countries had few if any films to show and benefited from the Soviet support of their filmmakers. Taking the readers behind the scenes of the Cold War–era film industry, this chapter also discusses Soviet representatives’ travel in preparation to the festival and sheds light on the nuances of Cold War–era international film circulation. The analysis of audience responses leads to some surprising results: inasmuch as these cinemas sought to distinguish themselves from Western European and Hollywood production, common audience tastes had more unity across the political divides; thus, “global popular aesthetic” outweighed the “solidarity aesthetic” (169).Chapter 5, “Brothers! Solidarity Documentary Film,” explores the development of the solidarity aesthetic in documentary film by following the intertwined careers of the prolific Soviet documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen and the influential Danish filmmaker Joris Ivens; it also discusses early works of Chris Marker. Through comparing the films about Spain, China, and Southeast Asia that span decades between the Spanish Civil War until the Vietnam War, Djagalov highlights Karmen’s legacy for world cinema (for example, Karmen’s footage of the Spanish Civil War was used by Ivens and many later filmmakers). Using a comparative reading of films by Ivens, Karmen, and Marker, this chapter establishes several categories of the solidarity trope in cinema, such as: “solidarity at war,” “the visitor film,” “solidarity travelogue.” Through tracing how “solidarity tropes” evolved over decades, this chapter also explains the influential role of the Soviet 1920s avant-garde filmmaking tradition for the development of the Latin American Third Cinema.In conclusion, this book has so much more to offer than can possibly be summarized in a brief review. Djagalov’s scholarship brings a wealth of previously inaccessible data to the fields of postcolonialism, comparative literature, world literature, and translation studies. One can only hope that in the future this project could be developed into a digital platform to document the institutional histories and personal networks central to the development of the global cultural anticolonialism in mid-twentieth century—a crucial albeit often overlooked step in the evolution of the contemporary field of postcolonial studies.