Chapter 5 situates Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue in the context of earlier Russian American travelogues. Like the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Soviet novelist Boris Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov drew on the tradition established by Maxim Gorky of depicting a journey to America as a descent into hell. Nonetheless, the Soviet funnymen had a far lighter touch than their predecessors. The chapter argues that the travelogue can also be read as an adventure story in the vein of director Lev Kuleshov’s 1924 hit comedy "The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks." Lighthearted ethnographers, Ilf and Petrov lingered over the “extra-ideological realities” of the American landscape and made gentle fun of themselves as eager adventurers and participant observers.

Chapter 26 examines Ilf and Petrov’s efforts to apply to the American South the combination of Soviet antiracism and romantic racialism that they brought to bear on their adventures in Black New York. To highlight their unique perspective, it compares the “Negroes” installment of their photo essay with the nearly contemporary photobooks in which teams of American photographers and authors documented the Depression-ravaged region. Drawing on their conversation with a white hitchhiker, Ilf and Petrov depicted American racism as a feature of the “slave-owning psychology” that “infected” a large number, if not all, white people. Nonetheless, they imagined that the “Southern gentleman,” who endorsed lynching, might “suddenly” come to appreciate the humanity of Black Americans. This hope appears grounded in Ilf and Petrov’s own experience of unexpectedly finding something valuable in the democratic relations between people visible everywhere in America, most notably at a presidential press conference.

This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

This chapter argues that Langston Hughes’s 1930s red poetry posits a proletarian-internationalist notion of authenticity, one that attempts to close the cognitive gap between lived reality, on the one hand, and the latter’s spatial, temporal, and structural determinations, on the other. The chapter maintains that two dominant poetics articulate this authenticity, namely, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque. Although each poetics corresponds to a specific set of concerns of the contemporaneous Communist-led Left, both endeavor to unite a fragmented global proletariat using various thematic and formal strategies. Viewed as heuristics allowing us to link Hughes’s radical poetry to the context of Great Depression–era Communism, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque refute the misconception that authenticity was an exclusive feature of the poet’s Black-vernacular work. They also unveil the hopes and fears that defined Hughes’s literary imagination as the possibility of proletarian revolution gave way to war and Fascism.

This chapter tackles the dilemmas of French defense planning in a factious Europe, increasingly divided by ideology, with a French population haunted by the sacrifices of the Great War, and the deep political divisions within France brought to the surface in 1936 with the election of the Popular Front government. A coherent defense scheme proved difficult to agree on in a military roiled by inter- and intra-service rivalries, under the uncertain direction of commander-in-chief General Maurice Gamelin and defense chief Édouard Daladier. As international conditions in Europe deteriorated, France was in a poor posture to surmount them, in the front line against a populous, powerful, and rearming Germany, led by the bombastic and belligerent Hitler. With a Soviet alliance off the table, this left as potential alliance partners a constellation of quarreling Eastern European nations, or Great Britain, in the hands of conservatives whose policy until 1938 was one of “limited liability” in a continental conflict. This situation required France to rely at least initially on its own military forces. One of the arguments of post-war historians was that the Third Republic, and in particular the Popular Front, did little to shore up French defense. In fact, that was not true. While the Maginot Line had absorbed a large share of the defense budget in the 1930s, the Popular Front had expended a great deal of money to modernize the French Air Force and create one of the world’s largest tank armies, despite the risk of capital flight, inflation, and the sacrifice of much of the social agenda of the French left. But defense modernization hit two snags. The first was a lack of government-directed coordination, which joined outmoded plant and industrial practices to put ambitious production quotas out of reach. The second was that this armament upgrade was bestowed on a multifaceted, Balkanized military organization whose leadership lacked a coherent defense vision for inter-arm and inter-service cooperation. It was with a military force that was modernizing in a piecemeal and improvized way that France plunged into war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal both get mixed reviews in song. The Dust Bowl hits the middle of the country, bringing to the fore not only Woody Guthrie and “Sis” Cunningham but also a stable of lesser-known “Dust Bowl Balladeers.” The Harlan County Wars continue in Kentucky, and the balladry proliferates. Sit-down strikes rock Detroit, and their songs resound. “We Shall Not Be Moved” becomes a Spanish-language anthem, and Rafael Hernández Marín sings of Puerto Rico’s Ponce Massacre. Abel Meeropol takes on lynching with his masterpiece, “Strange Fruit,” and Lead Belly damns the racism of the nation’s capital with his “Bourgeois Blues.” The Popular Front resurrects Lincoln as a working-class hero in song, and the fighters of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain march to their own battle tunes. The arenas of musical theater, dance, classical music, and jazz also become battlegrounds with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles, William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Helen Tamiris’s How Long, Brethren?, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?, and John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts. Marian Anderson transforms “America” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Paul Robeson sings a “Ballad for Americans” from coast to coast.

This chapter connects Asian American literature to the revolutionary cultural and political networks associated with the Popular Front and Soviet Union of the interwar years. The chapter begins by noting the relative absence of Asian Americans from these networks through a discussion of Carlos Bulosan, whose writings were forced to navigate constraining Popular Front representations of Asia and Asians. The chapter then turns to the author and actor H. T. Tsiang, whose combinations of realism and exoticism are shown to echo both Soviet socialist realism and Karl Marx’s notion of the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” The latter emerges as a tool used by Tsiang to nuance Marxist revolution: to think beyond the linear revolutionary scheme disastrously applied to China by the Soviet-led Comintern; and beyond the limits of Popular Front literary norms. The result is a flexible, inclusive vision of the interwar international left, one attendant to vernacular histories and traditions.

This essay places Brecht within the context of exile from Nazi Germany, follows him on his journey through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union, and reviews his years in American exile where he joined the German-speaking émigré community in Los Angeles: soon an Enemy Alien. The essay captures Brecht's lived experience of exile as it enters his writing, from his journal entries and correspondence to his numerous poems – which offer sharp insights into the exilic fate, its contemporary dimensions as well as historical antecedents. Furthermore, the essay calls attention to the precarious situation of writers in exile, deprived of publication venues and severed from audiences, and surveys Brecht's own publishing network and its virtual elimination toward the late 1930s. Finally, the essay brings Brecht into contact with other exiles, such as Joseph Roth, Oskar Maria Graf, Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, as well as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and investigates the extent to which the exilic “we” in Brecht's exile poetry – suggesting a community of exiles conjoined in their effort to combat Nazismcorresponded to an existing sense of togetherness and shared responsibility among the exiles, Brecht included: a “people's front” in the spirit of Heinrich Mann.

This chapter considers how a range of U.S. southern writers with varying political views responded to the Depression and New Deal. It stresses that even when competing visions of and for the South were articulated by different “fronts” in the period’s “cultural wars,” such visions were not always reducible to left versus right, communism versus capitalism, or “Agrarian versus Industrial.” William Faulkner’s short fiction between 1941 and 1943 reveals complex, contradictory attitudes toward the New Deal, especially the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The writing of Zora Neale Hurston, including texts produced for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project, includes a critique of Jim Crow labor exploitation comparable to the work of her supposed antagonist (and fellow FWP author) Richard Wright. Arna Bontemps’s historical novels, especially Black Thunder (1936), approach Depression-era social upheaval allegorically by depicting earlier black laborers revolting against slavery in the U.S. South and the Caribbean.

This chapter narrates the twists and turns in monetary relations that culminated in the Tripartite Agreement. After discussing the franc's deteriorating position from the spring of 1935 and the implications for Britain's management of the pound, it turns to the pivotal Anglo-American relationship. Distrust was pervasive, but the two sides eventually came to an understanding, assuring each other that they would not further depreciate their currencies in response to a fall in the franc. With London and Washington talking again, there was now space for an agreement to facilitate French devaluation. The resulting Tripartite Agreement, announced on September 26, 1936, set forth revolutionary principles for monetary cooperation, including the rejection of competitive depreciation and exchange controls. With time, the Agreement--informal and vague, unconventional and pathbreaking--would turn the page on the chaos of earlier years and redefine the international monetary landscape.

This chapter examines the problems of the franc during the Tripartite years. The Big Three generally shared the following hierarchy of priorities (in decreasing order of importance): maintain solidarity, uphold the Tripartite Agreement, forestall exchange control, and prevent excessive depreciation. They succeeded in achieving their top three priorities, a signal accomplishment. Yet confidence in the franc plummeted at times, and with French requests for financial support refused and capital fleeing at an unsustainable rate, depreciation seemed the only way out. The ensuing falls in the franc were larger than Britain or America wished, but both agreed that it was much better to manage them within the club than to eject France. It was far more important for the general framework of the Agreement to survive than to risk all that had been gained over too strict an interpretation of its guidelines.