2024 Recipient

Masha Salazkina

World Socialist Cinema Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023)

The University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Masha Salazkina, World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023)  

World Socialist Cinema is a highly original and rigorous work of film scholarship that astounds with the breadth and depth of its investigation. There is little doubt that it will be a mainstay in the field and an exemplar of research invention for a generation. Masha Salazkina places Soviet cinema in conversation with Egyptian, Chilean, Palestinian, Turkish, Senegalese films, among others, through a captivating account of the organization and execution of the Tashkent Festival of Cinema of Africa and Asia, which was launched in 1968 and expanded in 1976 (as the Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America). Relatively free of the oppressive control of censors and organizers at other Soviet festivals, the Tashkent Festival was a unique meeting point of different political and cultural networks from parts of the “Global South.” In vibrant complexity and abundant detail, Salazkina explores a host of global films woefully understudied today in an attempt to dismantle post-Cold War epistemic regimes that obscure more than they instruct. Salazkina’s scope is impressively ambitious, especially in the variety of sources consulted, from epistolary correspondence to minutes from event organizers’ meetings. The prose is crisp, engaging, and always keenly attentive to striking human stories and interrelationships. These attributes and more make World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War an instructive, insightful and highly memorable work of scholarship. 

Honorable Mentions: Talar Chahinian and Brian K. Goodman

Prize Committee: Martha Kelly (chair), Rory Finnin, and Maria Taroutina