Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul

by Dale E. Peterson, Dmitrii Garichev (Translator)

Overview

ENG

During the nineteenth century literate Russians and educated American blacks encountered a dominant Western narrative of world civilization that consigned Slavs and African Americans to the status of unhistoric peoples. In response, generations of Russian and American black intellectuals have asserted eloquent counterclaims for the cultural significance of a collective national "soul" veiled from prejudiced Western eyes. UP FROM BONDAGE is the first study to parallel the evolution of Russian and African American cultural nationalism in literary works and philosophical writings. Each chapter compares influential texts from each tradition at a similar point in the development of national self-consciousness.

RUS

В XIX веке грамотные русские и образованные афроамериканцы столкнулись лицом к лицу с доминирующей западной концепцией мировой цивилизации, которая, казалось, игнорировала их историю. В течение нескольких поколений в русской и афроамериканской интеллектуальной среде формировался ответ, постулирующий культурную значимость коллективной «национальной души», скрытой от предвзятого западного взгляда. Книга Дэйла Петерсона — первое исследование, в котором проводится параллель между эволюцией русского и афроамериканского культурного национализма в литературных произведениях и философских трудах.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887195315
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Series:	Contemporary Western Rusistika
Pages:	326
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Language:	Russian

About the Author

ENG

Dale Peterson is Professor Emeritus of Russian and English at Amherst College. His research and writing have focused on Russian-American literary history and cultural affinities. He is the author of The Clement Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James as well as numerous essays of literary comparison such as Hemingway and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Richard Wright, Nabokov and Poe.

RUS

Дейл Петерсон — почетный профессор русского и английского языков в Амхерст-колледже. Его исследования и работы посвящены истории и культурным связям американской и русской литературы. Автор книги The Clement Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James, а также компаративистских эссе о Хемингуэе и Толстом, Достоевском и Ричарде Райте, Набокове и По.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue:
Justifying the Margin: The Cultural Construction of “Soul”

1. Civilizing the Race: The Missionary Nationalism of Chaadaev and Crummell


2. Conserving the Race: The Emergence of Cultural Nationalism


3. Notes from the Underworld: Dostoevsky, DuBois, and the Discovery of Ethnic “Soul”


4. Recovering the Native Tongue: Turgenev, Chesnutt, and Hurston


5. Underground Notes: Double-Voicedness and the Poetics of NationalIdentity


6. Native Sons Against Native Soul: Maxim Gorky and Richard Wright


7. Eurasians and New Negroes: The Invention of Multicultural Nationalism


8. Preserving the Race: Rasputin, Naylor, and the Mystique of Native “Soul”

Epilogue:
Response and Call: The African American Dialogue with Bakhtin

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

A remarkable, almost epic book. Up from slavery and up from Slavdom: Dale Peterson focuses on comparable moments in the coming-to-consciousness of two ‘dark continents,’ the African and the Russian, where the stubborn fact of bondage for the many, a rich and conflicted dual identity for the educated few, and routine exclusion from the European mainstream as ‘non-historical peoples’ motivated a sophisticated intellectual odyssey that astonishes us afresh each time we rediscover it. Up From Bondage is an inspiration.”—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University


“Navigating the endless bounty of intellectual lapses and possibilities that reside in the gap between the West (qua ‘philosophy’) and the Rest (as barbaros, or racialized ‘outcasts’), Professor Peterson finds an accommodating comparative channel in similarities between African American and Slavic forms of intellectual, missionary, and cultural nationalisms. The result is one of those books one remembers as uncannily important, yoking together seemingly incompatible regions in interesting ways.”—Houston Baker, Duke University

From the Publisher