UP from Bondage

Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet1 of262 Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheetof262 2 This Intentionally Page LeftBlank 3 of262 . Up from Bondage 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet Durham & London Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 4 of262 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet © Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ! Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Portions of the prologue first appeared in ‘‘Justifying the Mar- gin: The Construction of ‘Soul’ in Russian and African Ameri- canTexts,’’ Slavic Review (): –; chapter , in ‘‘Civiliz- ing the Race: Chaadaev and the Paradox of Eurocentric Nation- alism,’’ Russian Review (): –; chapter , in ‘‘Notes from the Underworld: Dostoevsky, Du Bois, and the Discovery of Ethnic Soul,’’ Massachusetts Review (summer ): – ; chapter , in ‘‘The Origin and End of Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook: The Poetics and Politics of a Precarious Balance,’’ Rus- sian Literature (): –; chapter , in ‘‘Underground Notes: Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, and the African American Confes- sional Novel,’’ in Bakhtin and the Nation, ed. Donald A. Wesling et al. (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, ), –; chapter , in ‘‘Richard Wright’s Long Journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky,’’ African American Review (): –; chapter , in ‘‘ ‘Samovar Life’: Russian Nurture and Russian Nature in the Rural Prose of Valentin Rasputin,’’ Russian Review (): –; the epilogue, in ‘‘Response and Call: The African American Dialogue with Bakhtin,’’ American Literature (): –. Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet5 of262 For Lorna, Zachary, and Seth Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet6 of262 This Intentionally Page LeftBlank 7 of262 Acknowledgments ix Prologue Justifying the Margin: The Cultural Construction 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet 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 Unveiling of Ethnic ‘‘Soul’’ 4 Recovering the Native Tongue: Turgenev, Chesnutt, and Hurston 5 Underground Notes: Double-Voicedness and the Poetics of National Identity 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 Select Bibliography Index Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet8 of262 This Intentionally Page LeftBlank 9 of262 This book has a long history, and I have accumulated manydebts to those who have nurtured its growth. To the best of my recollection, it started to germinate fifteen years ago in midair over the Atlantic. Stimulated by 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet a memorable conversation with Houston Baker Jr. on a flight to Moscow for a Soviet-American conference on literature and national identity, I began to reflect on the strong affinityexpressed bycontemporary African American cultural theorists for the dialogic thought of Mikhail Bakhtin. After many years of teaching and thinking about the parallels and con- trasts between Russian and American literature, I finally began to appre- ciate the particular relevance of the emancipation of serfs and slaves for the literary forms and cultural theories created by the most innovative Russian and African American writers. I could not have dared to explore so vast a terrain on my own without the intellectual encouragement provided by two mentors. My early years of teaching at Amherst College brought me into close association with Leo Marx, who offered me a model of cultural criticism and tex- tual fidelity I shall always hope to emulate. My former colleague, Robert Gooding-Williams, allowed himself to be persuaded to collaborate with me several times in teaching an upper-level interdisciplinary course on the construction of Russian and African American ‘‘soul.’’ His patient tutelage and philosophical mind provided much moral support in the classroom and improved many a page of my writing. Crucial portions of my research depended on access to special collections. I am grateful to the Board of Trustees of Amherst College for making possible a Faculty Research Grant that enabled my travel to the Czech Republic and to Howard University in pursuit of my work on the Russian Eurasians and the New Negro movement. Dean of Faculty Lisa A. Raskin has been especially kind in understanding and accommodat- ing my special requests. I cannot praise sufficiently the professional li- brarians who have assisted me in locating and utilizing the materials in their vast collections. Milena Klimova, the Curator of the Slovanska Kni- hovna at the Klementinum in Prague, generously gave me her personal Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 10 of262 x Up from Bondage attention, pointing me toward the invaluable Savitsky Archive and issu- ing the necessary permissions to work in it and make citations from it. I am also grateful to Joellen El Bashir, Curatorof Manuscripts at the Moor- land Spingarn Research Center, for her courtesy in granting me unim- peded access to the Alain Locke papers at Howard University. Nearer to home and equally gracious, I thank Linda Seidman and her staff at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for helping me find exactly the items I needed in the Du Bois Archive. The individual chapters of my book gradually cohered over a decade and, in many instances, represent significant expansions of published 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet articles. Portions of the prologue first appeared in Slavic Review, and shorter versions of succeeding chapters have been published in the Rus- sian Review, Massachusetts Review, Russian Literature, Bucknell Review, African American Review, and American Literature. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of the above journals and to the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for permission to reprint in part my pre- vious writings. No acknowledgment would be complete without expressing my enor- mous gratitude to my colleague, Kim Townsend, who has read carefully and commented critically on every sentence in the penultimate version of my manuscript. I am ultimately responsible for whatever stylistic in- felicities remain, but he has done his best to correct them. My editor at Duke University Press, Valerie Millholland, has been a paragon of patience and a much-appreciated source of constant faith and encouragement; her humane professionalism has helped me persist. Others of my close friends and colleagues at Amherst College have contributed more than they suspect. I am grateful for the superb conversation of Frederick Griffiths and the shrewd perceptions and remarks in response to my work offered by Barry O’Connell, Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Stan- ley Rabinowitz, and Stephanie Sandler. My greatest debt of gratitude goes to my wife, Lorna, who has literally and lovingly supported every word of this attempt to put two great literary cultures into sympathetic dialogue across racial and linguistic barriers. She has made me feel that this academic book was something worth doing in a life, even if only to justify a marginal position in a world that cries out for more active cor- rection of ignorance and intolerance. Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 11 of262 If we call up the most analogous case as a basis of forecast,—the torturous way by which the peasant came into Russian literature and the brilliant sudden transformation his advent eventually effected, we may predict...theGreatAge. —Alain Locke, ‘‘American Literary Tradition 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet and the Negro’’ Every word smells of the context or contexts in which it has lived its socially intense life. —Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘‘Discourse in the Novel’’ Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 Tseng 2000.4.24 14:31 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet12 of262 This Intentionally Page LeftBlank 13 of262 Justifying the Margin: The Cultural Construction of ‘‘Soul’’ 6043 Peterson / UP FROM BONDAGE / sheet Twice in the twentieth century, proclamations of a culturally distinct African American literature have been accompanied by generous refer- ence to Russian precedents.What is perhaps even more remarkable than this sensed affinity between modern black and Russian modes of artistic expression is how little the phenomenon has been remarked upon. De- spite the amount of attention currently devoted to studies of ethnic and postcolonial literatures, the scholarly world has little noted nor long re- membered the significant moments when African American writers and thinkers have called to mind the emancipatory example of nineteenth- century Russia’s soulful writing and music. Clearly, something already present in the cultural self-awareness of African American intellectuals prepared them to respond to the call of Russian literary forms once they became widely available in English translation. What W. E. B. DuBois famously named the ‘‘double con- sciousness’’ of the Negro American—‘‘this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, and measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on

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