Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors and on twentieth century American debates about race Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism. Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the