African American Intellectuals in Europe in the Interwar Period

Abstract

In the period that witnessed the rise of communism and its transformation into Stalinism, the emergence of fascism, and two momentous "interwar wars," numerous African American intellectuals met their counterparts in Europe. Encounters include: Counte Cullen and Claire Goll (Paris), Claude McKay, Alain Locke, and George Grosz (Paris, Berlin, Moscow), McKay, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Leon Trotsky (Soviet Union), Horace Cayton and Nancy Cunard (Paris and Hamburg),Alain Locke and the "Black Watch on the Rhine" (French-occupied Rhineland), Langston Hughes, James Yates, and the Spanish Civil War,and W.E.B. Du Bois in Nazi Germany. Common human misunderstandings create a comedy of intellectuals against the climate of political violence in interwar Europe.