"Racial Paradise in Central Asia, or Forced Famine in Soviet Ukraine"
Thursday, November 5, 2026 4:30-6 p.m.
In 1932, the great African American poet Langston Hughes toured Soviet Central Asia, and found what he thought to be a racial paradise. At the same time, two wealthy white women from Atlanta, Alva Christensen and Mary de Give, independently toured the USSR, including a wrenching passage through Soviet Ukraine at the start of its Stalinist forced famine, or Holodomor. The three travelers met by chance in Ashkhabad in October 1932, and wrote about each other – though all of those writings then nearly disappeared. Professor Moore’s talk excavates the nearly forgotten writings of all three travelers, and evaluates their wildly contrasting accounts. Moore explores how factors like race, class, gender, sponsorship, mode of transportation, pathways, and politics shaped their drastically different perspectives – as well as the reception of their writings. Hughes was a pioneer in the global analysis of race; Christensen and de Give were the first American witnesses to publicly document Ukraine’s forced famine. Their intersection will be the subject of this talk.
David Moore’s primary interests are in literary and cultural interactions in the 20th and 21st century Black Atlantic world, most notably in African/African-American connections — all seen in a global or “Afro-planetary” framework. Significant allied interests include translation, postcolonial studies, the post-Soviet sphere, archives, and globalization writ large. He has published widely on these topics in journals such as PMLA, Diaspora, Transition, Ab Imperio, Research in African Literatures, Callaloo, Genre, Safundi, the Langston Hughes Review, the Journal of Anthropological Research, Profession, the Slavic and East European Journal, Resources for American Literary Study, the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal; and Accounting, Organizations and Society. He is co-editor with Martin Bernal of Black Athena Writes Back (Duke University Press, 2001). Larger projects include a fourteen-language presentation of the translations of Ferdinand Oyono’s 1956 novel Une Vie de Boy, and ongoing editions of historical writings by Langston Hughes and his correspondents.