A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition

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In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (19251985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Gumas book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialisma point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journeythe first since 1978restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Gumas text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.

Reviews

This critical edition of Alex La Gumas A Soviet Journey (first published in 1978) offers a key to understanding the allure of the Soviet Union during the early through mid-20th century for African and diaspora writers. Editor Lee (Lafayette College) annotates the work with Americanized grammar and punctuation and offers essential grounding in La Gumas political and creative impulses. Lees introduction is both historically and critically comprehensive, providing sufficient context for La Gumas travel literature and political praxis. Lee suggests that La Gumas work is important because of its value as a travel account, a work of political theory, and a work of aesthetic theory. Beyond this, students and researchers unfamiliar with his work will find this edition helpful in understanding his lifelong quest for equality. La Guma (the peoples writer who suffered exile) attempted to demonstrate through his Soviet travels that it is possible to create a society and political system that is anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperial in nature. Therefore, he, like other writers from Africa and its diaspora, was seeking a philosophical space for his South Africa and other Third World countries suffering from the weight of multilevel oppression. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. * Choice Reviews *
The book [a re-publication of South African novelist Alex La Gumas composite 1978 memoir of several journeys to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s] is graced by Professor Christopher Lees comprehensive introduction to the enduring ties between the Soviet Union and South African freedom struggles, and La Gumas place in this relationship. Indeed, this sixty-page introduction is worth the price of the book. Lee vividly evokes that breathless moment in the mid-twentieth century when a brand new Third World, full of anger, promise, and emancipatory vision was rising out of the ashes of colonialism. . . . For students of the Soviet Union and transnational communism in the Cold War era, La Gumas lively tale provides a valuable perspective on less-travelled Soviet byways, and the ways that officials and ordinary people alike presented themselves and their communities to an honored and enthusiastic African comrade. * Slavic Review *
The unique memoirs of an exiled African Communist and acclaimed writer during his travels in the Soviet Uniona fascinating account by a fascinating man. -- Hakim Adi, author of 'Pan-Africanism: A History'
Scholars and students of Africa and the Cold War owe Christopher J. Lee a debt of gratitude for rescuing from oblivion and masterfully editing this fascinating travelogue by one of the central figures of modern African literature and radical Cold War internationalism. Alex La Guma never published a memoir and this account of his Soviet travels presents us with an opening into a remarkable and remarkably eventful life of a talented globe-trotting writer, a fierce political activist, and, ultimately, a committed humanist. -- Maxim Matusevich, Seton Hall University
It is beyond valuable to have back in print A Soviet Journey by Alex La Guma, one of South Africa's most important leftists. In this rich, descriptive account, La Guma offers a Southern perspective of the Soviet experiment. He is bedazzled by the fact that the Tsar's dominionsbackward by every indicator in 1917had thrived so fundamentally through socialist praxis. This is a marvelous book, honest in parts, hopefully idealistic elsewhere, but in all of it true to what La Guma experienced in the context of his own rich and important life. -- Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
This invaluable republication of an important yet previously neglected work by Alex La Guma fills a gap in the corpus of antiapartheid literary texts and the history of Third World internationalism. More than a simple travelogue, A Soviet Journey reveals the determining role played by the Eastern Bloc in the anticolonial imaginary. The compelling and idea-rich accompanying critical apparatus reveals the texts cultural significance. Together with the brief but luminous prefatory essays by Ngugi wa Thiongo and Blanche La Guma, Lees insightful introduction and meticulous annotations will become a touchstone for scholars and students of African literatures and cultures, Afro-Asian solidarities and African connections to the Eastern Bloc, as well as the global Cold War. -- Monica Popescu, McGill University
Who knew that novelist Alex La Guma also penned one of the greatest travelers accounts of the last century Set in the 1970s, A Soviet Journey captures a forgotten moment of radical possibility, when Third World guerrillas prepared to inherit the earth, when nationalists were internationalists, when the USSR backed global anti-imperialist struggles. With a prodigious introductory essay by Christopher Lee, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the global Left. -- Robin D.G. Kelley, author of "Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times"
A qualitatively bounded study this may not be, but it does manage to capture the localized, human stories imbued with Marxist imagination. Edited for a new generation, this portrayal of the USSR reminds us of the enduring power of both multinationalism and communism to fascinate. * Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia *

Author Bio

Christopher J. Lee is associate professor of history at Lafayette College.