Under the sky of my Africa : Alexander Pushkin and blackness / edited by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos ; foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer.

Svobodny, Nicole.

Trigos, Ludmilla A.

Series:

Studies in Russian literature and theory

Studies of the Harriman Institute

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799-1837--Knowledge and learning--Race awareness.

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich.

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799-1837.

Race awareness.

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799-1837--Family.

Multiracial people--Race identity--Russia.

Multiracial people.

Black people in literature.

Race awareness in literature.

Pushkin family.

Multiracial people--Race identity.

Families.

Russia--Ethnic relations.

Russia.

Ethnic relations.

Physical Description:

xvi, 417 pages, 48 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2006.

Summary:

In approximately 1705, a young African boy purchased from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan was transported to Russia and presented as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, became Peter's godson and lived to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. He was also the great-grandfather of Russia's foremost national poet, Alexander Pushkin. The editors of this book demonstrate that Gannibal's African legacy played a significant role in Pushkin's creative life, in his perception of himself, and in his perception and interpretation of Russia. Moreover, they contend, the exaggeration or diminishment of Pushkin's "blackness" in biography and portraiture over the last two hundred years serves as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition.

The first single volume in English on this rich topic, introduced with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Under the Sky of My Africa addresses a wide variety of disciplines, including race studies, politics, African American history, and music, as well as mainstream Pushkin studies and Russian literary criticism. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological, the authors take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin's era to the surge of racism in late-Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of material on the subject, including more than seventy photographs that document striking differences in artistic portrayals of Pushkin and a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.

Contents:

Was Pushkin black and does it matter? / Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Ludmilla A. Trigos

A.P. Gannibal : on the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alexander Pushkin's great-grandfather / N.K. Teletova

Pushkin on his African heritage : publications during his lifetime / J. Thomas Shaw

Ruslan and Ludmila : Pushkin's anxiety of blackness / Richard F. Gustafson

How black was Pushkin? : otherness and self-creation / David M. Bethea

The telltale black baby, or, Why Pushkin began The blackamoor of Peter the Great but didn't finish it / Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy

Making a true image : blackness and Pushkin portraits / Richard C. Borden

Pushkin and Othello / Catherine O'Neil

The Pushkin of opportunity in the Harlem renaissance / Olga P. Hasty

"Bound by blood to the race" : Pushkin in African American context / Anne Lounsbery

Tsvetaeva's "blackest of black" (naicherneishii) Pushkin / Liza Knapp

"Sometimes I feel like a motherless child" : Paul Robeson and the 1949 Pushkin jubilee / Alexandar Mihailovic

Artur Vincent Lourié's The blackamoor of Peter the Great : Pushkin's exotic ancestor as twentieth-century opera / Caryl Emerson.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0810119714

0810119706

OCLC:

60705524