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"Alice Childress, Natalia Baranskaya, and the Speakin' Place of Cold War Womanhood."
Kate Baldwin, Associate Professor of American Studies, Department of English, Northwestern University
April 3, 2007

The piece situates experimental fiction of two authors on opposite sides of the iron curtain in the context of kitchen debate politics.  I argue that the kitchen debate exposes the investment of US consumer capitalism in the concurrent discourse of a suppressed racial inequity for which the highlighted captivity of middle-class womanhood -- trapped in the kitchen -- served as a foil.  Baranaskaya's and Childress's texts register this misplacement of women and redress it by constructing visions of diversity that belie an easy association between multiculturalism and the market.  Both texts present a heterogeneity not reliant upon the captivity of women and minorities (or the erasure of their histories of inequity).