Translation and the Global Fifties : When the African American Left Came to Czechoslovakia (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics)

People, texts, and ideas traveled across the Iron Curtain and back again, even during the 1950s. As radical leftist African Americans struggled with oppression in the US, they found an audience on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in Czechoslovakia. This book uses a transnational lens to uncover these conversations; it explores the role of translation and the cultural transfers and racial imaginaries that both shaped them and were shaped by them. While the early Cold War is the focus of the book, it covers the period between the 1910s and the 1970s and combines close reading with previously unexplored archival materials.