Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In his autobiography I Wonder as I Wander (1956), Langston Hughes describes his 1932 journey to the USSR, devoting one chapter to the film project which brought him there. The Mezhrabpom studio’s Black and White set out to depict race relations in the American South, but was aborted soon after Hughes and 21 other African Americans arrived in Moscow. Mezhrabpom’s official reason for the project’s cancellation was script defects, and Hughes details some of these in his autobiography. Describing his initial reaction to the script as a mixture of laughter and tears, he argues that despite their good intentions, the Soviets were simply unable to grasp the realities of American race relations.
However, using archival materials found in Moscow and Atlanta, this paper demonstrates that Hughes’ 1956 depictions of Black and White are almost complete fabrications. The original Russian-language script, as well as the English variant given to the African American group, do bear inaccuracies, but none of those depicted in I Wonder as I Wander—and none so glaring. The goal of this paper is to weigh two possible explanations for Hughes’ 1956 depictions of the film. The first is McCarthyism and the anti-communism of the 1950s: in 1953, Hughes renounced his radical ties before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his exaggeration of Soviet inauthenticity in I Wonder as I Wander might be seen as bolstering or justifying this renunciation. However, Hughes’ favorable depictions of the Soviet Union in the same work—particularly in his chapter on Soviet Central Asia—weakens this explanation.
The second explanation refines the first, focusing on U.S. notions of race and ethnicity following World War II—what I call “Cold War Multiculturalism.” Drawing from Nikhil Pal Singh and Mary Dudziak, the paper will relate the gains of the early Civil Rights Movement to American anti-communism in the 1950s. As Singh and Dudziak assert, formal equality (enfranchisement and anti-segregation) served to maintain consensus at home and counter Soviet propaganda abroad. I will argue that these gains tinge Hughes’ depictions of Black and White: civil rights, coupled with McCarthyism, led many African American intellectuals to turn from leftist internationalism to more insular notions of culture and community. In this light, Hughes’ depictions do not per se discredit the Soviet Union. Rather, they assert the primacy of racial and ethnic boundaries over the Soviet “friendship of peoples,” as well as national over transnational affiliations. Such assertions would become more prominent from the 1960s onward, with growing demands for official cultural recognition beyond formal equality—what is now referred to as “multiculturalism.”
I will conclude by suggesting that multiculturalism served as a weapon, alongside formal equality, in the U.S. Cold War arsenal. For instance, the State Department’s “jazz ambassadors” presented to the world a “culturally authentic U.S.,” implicitly opposed to a “culturally inauthentic USSR.” However, I will argue that Hughes’ fabrications complicate this binary, opening the way for a reexamination of Soviet “many-nation-ness” and its relevance for the U.S.