Russia and Blackness: Literature and Politics from Gannibal to Griner

(HIST/POLI/REES 244)

Course Description:

This course provides a historical, literary, and political survey of Russia’s encounters with different ideas of Blackness, from the rise of one prominent intellectual and statesman of African descent during the reign of Emperor Peter the Great, to Russia’s recent imprisonment of an American professional basketball player under President Vladimir Putin’s current administration. Drawing on a variety of sources, including novels, memoirs, film, media reports, and contemporary scholarship, the course explores the concepts of race, belonging, otherness, and duality as they have evolved in Russia’s varying historical contexts. Particular attention is paid to juxtapositions of racialization and racial injustice in America and in Russia, as gleaned from the biographies of “Black Russians” such as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, Frederick Bruce Thomas, and Yelena Khanga, as well as from the works of writers and scholars such as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Goncharov, W.E.B. Du Bois, Allison Blakely, Audre Lorde, Maxim Matusevich, and Joy Carew. From classic Russian literature, to Soviet propaganda, to contemporary geopolitics, the course asks: How has Blackness been historically understood and/or used by Russians, and what cultural and political legacies has that left in Russia’s post-Soviet space?

Selected Key Texts:

Barnes’ The Stolen Prince (on Abram Gannibal)

Pushkin’s The Moor of Peter the Great, and My Geneaology

Blakely’s Russia and the Negro

MacDonald’s Acting Black: Othello… and the Performance of Blackness (on Ira Aldridge)

Goncharov’s Frigate Pallada

Kolchin’s Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom

Hecht’s Russian Intelligentsia and American Slavery

MacKay’s True Songs of Freedom: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture and Society

Alexandrov’s The Black Russian (on Frederick Bruce Thomas)

Roman’s Representations of American Racial Apartheid and Soviet Racelessness

Aleksandrov’s film Circus

Fiks’ Wayland Rudd Collection (archive of Soviet images of African and African American peoples)

Carew’s Translating Whose Vision

Robinson’s Black on Red

Matusevich’s Revisiting the Soviet Moment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Khanga’s Soul to Soul

Balabanov’s film Brother 2

Ziemer’s Minority Youth, Everyday Racism, and Public Spaces in Contemporary Russia

St. Julian-Varnon’s The Curious Case of Russian Lives Matter