INTERNATIONALIST AESTHETICS: CHINA AND EARLY SOVIET CULTURE
By Edward Tyerman
Published by Columbia University Press, New York, 2021
At the core of scholar Edward Tyerman’s 353-page monograph Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (2021) about the brief period of political alignment in the 1920s between China and the newly formed Soviet Union is the tension “between global solidarity and Soviet leadership, between transnational community and abiding cultural differences,” and the manifestations of these tensions in cultural productions of the era.
As with any Western work pertaining to Asia, Tyerman must reckon with Edward Said’s seminal theses from (1978). Said had proposed that knowledge produced about “the East” from the West is a means to further the ends of Western hegemony. For Tyerman, the early Soviet interest in China was more nuanced. There was an element of orientalism in the Soviet experiment, but Tyerman argues that
