From “Backward Villages” to “Speaking of Success”: Representations of African Women through the Lens of Soviet Woman during Early Decolonization

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis

Abstract

This article explores representations of African women in Soviet Woman between 1956 and 1964. This magazine was a medium of socialist outreach aimed at women worldwide. Its approach to developing countries, in particular, entailed not only denouncing imperialism but also presenting the Soviet system as a template for postcolonial advancement in a way that conjures up a civilizing mission. This impression is heightened by exotified representations of African women and idealized depictions of Central Asia women as beneficiaries of the revolutionary dismantling of the Russian Empire and thus models for emulation. Yet, this article demonstrates, in its images and rhetoric, that Soviet Woman did not wholesale essentialize African women or render them lower in hierarchical relation to Soviet ones. Rather, amid national liberation movements and rising female global activism, it also presented them as agents in postcolonial development and highlighted commonalities with women everywhere. The portrait of African women that Soviet Woman generated thus appears to be more complex than the Soviet representations of African men that scholars have observed.