A feminist becoming? Louise Thompson Patterson’s and Dorothy West’s sojourn in the Soviet Union

This article follows the socialist activist Louise Thompson (later Patterson) and the writer Dorothy West on their infamous journey to Soviet Russia to shoot a film about North American anti-Black racism in 1932. The film about the US history of racial oppression was ultimately never made, but the women stayed in the Soviet Union for several months, travelling to the Soviet republics, meeting famous Soviets, and experiencing Soviet modernization. Looking at the travel writings, correspondence, and memoirs of Thompson and West through the lens of intersectionality, this article analyses the women’s distinctly gendered experiences and their experience of socialist women’s liberation movements. It argues that a close reading of the literary writing, travel notes, letters, and memoirs and their biographical trajectories after they returned to the United States reveals how their experiences in the Soviet Union created a feminist consciousness within the two women that crucially altered their political and personal views of Black women’s agency and significantly altered their life trajectories.

A feminist becoming? Louise Thompson Patterson’s and Dorothy West’s sojourn in the Soviet Union

This article follows the socialist activist Louise Thompson (later Patterson) and the writer Dorothy West on their infamous journey to Soviet Russia to shoot a film about North American anti-Black racism in 1932. The film about the US history of racial oppression was ultimately never made, but the women stayed in the Soviet Union for several months, travelling to the Soviet republics, meeting famous Soviets, and experiencing Soviet modernization. Looking at the travel writings, correspondence, and memoirs of Thompson and West through the lens of intersectionality, this article analyses the women’s distinctly gendered experiences and their experience of socialist women’s liberation movements. It argues that a close reading of the literary writing, travel notes, letters, and memoirs and their biographical trajectories after they returned to the United States reveals how their experiences in the Soviet Union created a feminist consciousness within the two women that crucially altered their political and personal views of Black women’s agency and significantly altered their life trajectories.

The Monstropolous Beast

In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West use the backdrop of agribusiness and fruit imports respectively to dramatize the precarity of black bodies within global capitalism. Their novels feature black male characters who have come to believe in the opportunities the food industry extends them, only to be sorely disappointed and in some cases utterly destroyed. In this way, Hurston and West suggest the racist limits of the category of Man. At the same time that they debunk this ideal subject, Hurston and West use figurative language to connect black bodies with animals and fruit. As scholars of critical race studies have shown, animacy hierarchies, the ranking of bodies according to their relative liveness, frequently subtend pejorative forms of racialization. Instead, Hurston and West overturn these hierarchies, pursue ecological enmeshment, and celebrate black women, queerness, and corporeality.

Artificial Color

In the early twentieth century, US writers looked at modern food—its global geographies, its nutritional theories, and its technological innovations—and saw not merely the incursion of industry and the threat of adulteration but an imaginative possibility. Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s represented food systems and used alimentary metaphors to unsettle the bases of racial classification and white supremacy. Dietetics played a key role in so-called race science, which blamed industrial food for Nordic degeneration and looked to euthenics, the study of nutrition and environment, to fix broken modern bodies that were insufficiently white. Thus, the dreams of new bodies and new categories expressed in this literature constituted a radical response to the political and nutritional theories of this cultural moment. For Jean Toomer and George Schuyler, both frustrated by the stigma of blackness in a segregated society, food technologies represented an opportunity to invent a new race or to renovate an old one. For F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, enmeshment in the food system revealed that whiteness could not embody the purity that was supposedly its hallmark. In the Great Depression and thereafter, Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West indicted racist social structures and used food to interrogate the boundaries of the human. In a time of segregation, nativism, and Fascism, food brought bodies together and spoke of shared pleasure and vulnerability.