In The Racial Imaginary and the Cold War Kitchen, Kate A. Baldwin reads an eclectic range of mid-century literary and cinematic works, advertising artifacts, and cultural phenomena from American and Soviet contexts. Her motivating scene is the Nixon–Khrushchev “kitchen debate,” staged at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in July 1959. Baldwin zeroes in upon the absences from this scene – the lack of actual white middle-class housewives and African American domestic workers – and upon the two feuding white male world leaders who take the places of these missing women in diverse ways. The Racial Imaginary and the Cold War Kitchen is largely a search for those missing women, as well as for a broader African American presence in the US Cold War narrative and for the Soviet woman who – like the African American of this period – was a delineating “other” to the ideally feminine, modernly emancipated, white middle-class American woman. Although Baldwin avers a “proliferation of the kitchen in women's literature of this era” (55), the texts selected in this brief work are notably few, and only one canonical text – Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) – presents any notable business occurring in the kitchen per se. Her other overtly kitchenesque text – Alice Childress's Like One of the Family (1956) – is less known (though well deserving of the attention given here). The remaining works considered – Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Russian author Natalya Baranskya's A Week Like Any Other (1969), and director Rouben Mamoulian's Fred Astaire musical Silk Stockings (1957) – say little, if anything, regarding kitchens.

To deal with the problem, Baldwin ably extrapolates from the themes and figures excluded from the original kitchen debate: the hypocrisies of US foreign policy (including “diversity” defined as copious consumer choices equated with democracy and freedom), homogenized values that discount the African American perspective, under-engaged suburban women and their overworked Soviet counterparts. Thus a minor character, a black kitchen worker, in The Bell Jar is commended by Baldwin as “the one character in the novel who reads Esther accurately … [as] a little shit” (71). Plath's alter ego is equally depressed at work and at home, while on far sides of the cultural spectrum, the heroines of both Childress's and Baranskya's episodic novels are simply oppressed by exhausting workloads and employers oblivious to their plights. While home is something of a respite for both of these less privileged workers, the emphasis in both is on the labor erased by the grand political and aesthetic designs at the National Exhibition in Moscow. Baldwin reads A Raisin in the Sun, somewhat curiously, in terms of its emotional drives, as if characterological emotion were not simply universal in literature and no distinguishing feature of this text whatsoever. She contrasts the small kitchen window at the back of Raisin’s set to the expansive picture windows of the suburban homes from which the Youngers are all but excluded as the play concludes; as Baldwin observes, “in their very transparency … [picture] windows were a key part of the vanishing of social relations and belief systems upon which suburban environments were built” (118). Baldwin reads Silk Stockings almost entirely in terms of its absented African American musical presence, due to its heavy reliance on white actors dancing to jazz and rock and roll and singing satirically about the mix of high and low culture. Baldwin applauds this film for troubling the binary between Western capitalism and Soviet socialism. Rounding out the discussion is an opening look at the ideological work performed by Charles and Ray Eames's seven-screen Glimpses of USA, on view next door to Nixon's kitchen at the National Exhibition, and a closing glimpse of photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald's working-class mother and Russian-born wife in a friend's kitchen the day after Kennedy's assassination. Baldwin focusses in this scene upon the image of Oswald's mother Marguerite: her “bristling non-sequiturs [in a later interview with Jean Stafford] point to irresolvable tensions and discontinuities within those smooth [Cold War] systems of communication. As a ghostess in the kitchen, she summons the energies of those who labor without attribution and calls for some recognition” (182).

This book is especially valuable for its diverse collection of archival texts, including ephemera from the National Exhibition; also, it usefully puts into conversation works by mid-century African American and Soviet authors and incisively interprets the roles played by African American and Soviet “others” in the US Cold War imaginary. Though at times overreliant on dense terminology held over from the theory years, Baldwin's overall take on this uncharted territory from the cold war's culture wars makes a useful contribution.