UCIS Central Calendar

This lecture considers the problem of the cultural value of political mystifications, forgeries, and appropriations. In doing so, I will focus on the historical and ideological contexts (in particular, the role of the Communist International in Moscow) of one of the most popular “songs of protest,” which was published by the American folklorist and pro-Communist activist from a Jewish-Hungarian family Lawrence Gellert’s (1898-1979) in his influential collection of African-American political songs (1936). In the 1930s, the song was translated into several languages and published in various left-wing periodicals, set to music, illustrated, performed in various countries, choreographed, interrogated by the American government as a part of “the propagandistic play,” and, all in all, embodied the anti-religious nature of a revolutionary new genre of song created by Black Americans. It eventually became an integral part of many communist singers’ repertoire (from Paul Robeson, William Bowers, and Pete Seeger to Ernst Busch). In this lecture, I show that the poem itself was both an ideological construct and a significant cultural fact which helped to introduce a new musical genre and secretly promoted the Soviet political agenda of the mid-1930s.