Abstract This article examines African American intellectual Louise Thompson Patterson’s 1932 journey to the Soviet Union as a lens through which to explore the complexities of transnational racial identity across ideological borders. It argues that Patterson’s experiences reveal both her political commitments and the contradictions of Soviet internationalism for Black women seeking alternatives to racial capitalism and gender oppression. Rather than viewing her engagement as naïve or disillusioned, the article situates it within a historically rooted, politically intentional search for liberation. The paper further contends that Soviet reactions to Patterson’s identity illuminate a rigid understanding of blackness, complicating claims of anti-racism and revealing internal hierarchies. By analyzing Patterson’s unpublished writings alongside broader historical currents, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of Black women’s transnational activism, the racial politics of the USSR, and the ongoing challenges of forging solidarity across different conceptions of race and justice.

Ed. Anna Toropova and Claire Shaw. Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. xii, 252 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $115.00, hard bound. - Volume 84 Issue 2

Jeffrey S. Hardy. Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, ix, 264 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Figures. $39.95, hard bound. - Volume 84 Issue 3

Jan Musekamp. Shifting Lines, Entangled Borderlands: Mobilities and Migration Along the Prussian Eastern Railroad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024. xiii, 293 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Maps. 40.00, paper. - Volume 84 Issue 1

Ed. Tabe Bergman and Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman. Media, Dissidence, and the War in Ukraine. Routledge Studies in Media, Communication, and Politics. London: Routledge, 2024. xiv, 189 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. $180.00, hard bound. - Volume 84 Issue 2

A Failed Geopolitics of Culture, or How Americans Failed to Westernize the Russian Libraries, Archives, and Russian Culture - John Van Oudenaren. The Geopolitics of Culture: James Billington, The Library of Congress, and the Failed Quest for a New Russia. (Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2024). vii, 366 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Figures. Tables. $25.95, paper. - Volume 84 Issue 4

Abstract Although blackface minstrelsy is considered to be one of the first American pop culture products, its circulation in central and eastern Europe is relatively unknown. This article engages with the history of blackface performance and imagery in Poland, treating it as a lens granting insight into ways of imagining blackness in the region. It focuses on the interwar period as a time of rapid adaptation of colonial imagination with its global racial hierarchies in the public sphere of the newly independent country. Against the ideology of “colonial exceptionalism” and “white innocence” based on an assumption that Poland—as a state with no history of overseas colonies and Black slavery—is free of anti-black racism, we describe the active involvement of large groups of society in transnational colonial imagination, developed especially in the sphere of entertainment. The article not only demonstrates the existence of the tradition of blackface in Poland and reconstructs its distinct character but also suggests structural determinants that continue to affect ideas about blackness in Poland today.