This article examines the experiences of African students at the Gorʹkii Literary Institute in the 1960s and 70s, a period when the Soviet Union positioned itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and racial equality. Through case studies of Gaoussou Diawara and Fikre Tolossa, it explores the contradictions between the public celebration of African writers and the more complex, often racialized, dynamics they encountered. While officially embraced as symbols of socialist internationalism, these students were also subject to exoticization and subtle forms of exclusion. Based on archival materials, memoirs, interviews, and literary texts, the article argues that African writers in the USSR responded to these tensions with ambivalence, expressing admiration for the Soviet project while downplaying or reframing discrimination. Their experiences reveal how the ideals of socialist solidarity retained meaning even when undermined in practice, offering insight into the strategic ways postcolonial intellectuals negotiated belonging, dignity, and ideological commitment.

In Brazil, black women are symbolically and practically associated with domestic work. The article examines feminist responses to black women's place in the socio-economic hierarchy of the city of Salvador, Bahia. These include proposals to introduce affirmative action and a ‘politics of presence’, involving the election of black women to represent the city's black female constituency. It describes the racial dynamics at work between black and white feminists in Bahia, signalling the contradictory tendencies that structure their relationship. Arguing against the view that a ‘politics of identity’ necessarily supports a new essentialism of race or culture, the article describes the diverse ideological and political influences upon the ideas and proposals of Bahian feminists. Black feminists construct racial difference as experiential and structural in origin. They adapt academic concepts and language in order to discuss their own lives and the specific social and cultural context of Salvador. The ethnographic and micro-historical perspective adopted here provides insight into ‘native’ understandings of affirmative action and a ‘politics of presence’ and suggests that criticisms of these measures on the grounds that they represent imported, non-Brazilian views of race are misplaced.