The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. Lee remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.