Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley obtained her PhD in Caribbean literature and linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus and teaches literature and writing at Elizabeth City State University. Among some of her scholarly publications are those on Claude McKay, Frantz Fanon, Derek Walcott, Jacques Roumain, Ralph de Boissière, and Patrick Chamoiseau. She is the co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture (2010).
From the Harlem Renaissance to the Trinidadian Awakening, Anglophone Afro-Caribbean writers have actively expressed a culturally particular identity by engaging in a surrogate dialogue with Russian writing. With a focus on Claude McKay's struggle to define a folk-based West Indian cosmopolitan nationalism, Tatiana A. Tagirova-Daley's book maps, for the first time, the journey through classic Russian realism and Soviet internationalism toward a Caribbean postcolonial literature that both aroused ethnic identity and raised class consciousness. (Dale E. Peterson, Amherst College) This spectacular new inquiry into Claude McKay's presence in Russian periodicals and literary diaries illuminates in entirely novel ways the Harlem Renaissance writer's role in shaping Soviet insights into black matters. McKay's fascination with the black Russian writer Alexander Pushkin and the white Russian radical Leo Tolstoy, alongside his acquaintanceship with revolutionary Caribbeans C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissiere, makes this remarkable study requisite reading for future interracial, transnational, and transcultural study. (Gary Edward Holcomb, Ohio University; Author of `Claude McKay', `Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance' and `Hemingway and the Black Renaissance')