Professor Alexandar Mihailovic Office hours: Tuesdays 1:30-3:30, and by appointment Office: B-22 Marston Hall, (401) 863-3597 [email protected]

Russian 1400 [S01] / Africana Studies 1400 (Spring 2014): The Black Experience and Russian Culture

Course Description:

The contact that began in the early eighteenth century between the Russian empire and the cultures of the sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora reveals a mutual fascination that speaks powerfully about notions of racial identity in an increasingly global era. We will study the fateful misunderstandings as well as strong mutual influences among Russians, Africans and their descendants. The course begins with an examination of entry of the Abyssinian prince Abram Gannibal into the court of Peter the Great and concludes with a consideration of the tense dialogue over political values and conceptions of race, ethnicity and sexuality that underpins the volatile relations between Barack Obama’s United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Particular points of interest will be the suggestive parallels and occasional points of interaction between the struggles against slavery in the United States and serfdom in Russia in the nineteenth century, the extended visits to Russia of African- American artists such as Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson, and the often contentious engagement of figures within the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movements with conceptions of Marxism that originated in the Soviet Union. Readings will include Russian responses to Blackness within the poetry and prose of Aleksandr Pushkin (the great-grandson of Abram Gannibal), Marina Tsvetaeva and the contemporary Russian-Jewish novelist Anya Ulinich, and African-American responses to Russian culture in the essays, fiction and autobiographical writing of Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Audre Lorde, Ralph Ellison and Cornell West.

Required Reading:

Alexandrov, Vladimir. The Black Russian. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013. [ISBN-13: 978-0802120694]

Hughes, Langston. I Wonder As I Wander. An Autobiographical Journey. New York: Hill and Wang. [ISBN-13: 978-0809015504]

Khanga, Yelena. Soul to Soul: A Black Russian Jewish Woman’s Search for Her Roots. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994. [ISBN-13: 978-0393311556] 2

Pushkin, Aleksandr. Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, The Captain's Daughter, Peter the Great's Blackamoor. Tr. Alan Meyers. Oxford World Classics, 2009. [ISBN-13: 978-0199538652]

Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998. [ISBN-13: 978- 0807064450]

Ulinich, Anya. Petropolis. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. [ISBN-13: 978- 0143113010]

**Course packet (Available at Allegra copies on Thayer Street), and on E-Reserve through the OCRA and Canvas pages for the course.

Course Objective:

The purpose of this class is to encourage thinking in more integrative and multidisciplinary ways about race, cultural identity, and historiography.

Course Requirements:

The written work for this course consists of four papers. Students will receive a choice of topics for each essay assignment well in advance of the deadline. All papers should be submitted electronically, in a .pdf format, by the dates indicated on the Schedule of Assignments below. Over the course of the semester, presentations and discussions on the Canvas site for the course may also be assigned, and will be counted as a part of class participation. On the last day of the semester, each student will give a presentation about their term paper project The breakdown of the course grade is as follows:

Class participation: 25% Two short papers (4-6 pages each): 40% [20% each] Research term paper (10-12 pages for undergraduates; 15-20 pages for graduate students): 35%

Viewing of Films:

Students may view the films by either checking out the copy that is kept on reserve at the Sciences Library or Orwig, or by streaming them through the OCRA and Canvas pages for the course. Students are required to view all of the films that are listed in the Schedule of Assignments.

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Schedule of Assignments:

Introduction: A Dialogue Across Continents and Cultures

January 28: Langston Hughes, “Ballads of Lenin,” “Lenin.” Aleksandr Pushkin, “Eyes open wide, the poet weaves . . .” [*Photocopies]. Film: excerpt from Grigorii Alexandrov’s Circus (USSR, 1936)

I. Early Contacts: the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

A. Aleksander Pushkin and Abram Gannibal

February 4: Pushkin, “Peter the Great's Blackamoor,” from Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, The Captain's Daughter, Peter the Great's Blackamoor, pages 209-245. N. K. Teletova. “A. P. Gannibal: On the Occasion of the Three-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Aleksandr Pushkin's Great-Grandfather” Pushkin, Chapter 1 from Eugene Onegin [*Photocopy / Electronic reserve]

B. Aleksandr Pushkin’s on Blackness and the Struggle for Freedom

February 11: Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman” [*Course packet] Pushkin, “The Shot” from Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, The Captain's Daughter, Peter the Great's Blackamoor, pages 7-18. Selections from Marina Tsvetaeva’s My Pushkin and Abram Tertz’s Strolls with Pushkin (from Nepomnyashchy's Under the Sky of My Africa: Aleksandr Pushkin and Blackness) [*Course packet]

C. The Dead Hand of History: American and Russian Bondage

February 25: Peter Kolchin, “In Defense of Servitude: American Pro-slavery and Russian Pro-serfdom Arguments, 1760-1860.” The American Historical Review 85 (October 1980) [*Course packet] Vladimir Alexandrov, The Black Russian

March 4: Vladimir Alexandrov, The Black Russian

March 7: **Deadline for electronic submission of first paper (4-6 pages)

II. The Twentieth Century

A. The Harlem Renaissance 4

March 11: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground [*Course packet]

March 18: Selection from Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home [*Course packet]. Langston Hughes’ I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (selections)

B. Conceptions of Blackness in Stalin’s Soviet Union

April 1: Film: Circus (USSR, 1936; Dir. Grigory Aleksandrov) Beth Homgren, “The Blue Angel and Blackface: Redeeming Entertainment in Aleksandrov’s Circus” [*Course packet]

C. A Giant Among Artists: Paul Robeson

April 8: Paul Robeson’s Here I Stand Film: The Emperor Jones (USA, 1933; dir. Dudley Murphy)

April 11: **Deadline for electronic submission of second paper (4-6 pages)

D. The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement

April 15: Yelena Khanga’s Soul to Soul: A Black Russian Jewish Woman’s Search for Her Roots (selections). Audre Lorde, “Notes from a Trip to Russia”; Cornell West, “Chekhov, Coltrane and Democracy” [*Course packet]

III. Post-Soviet Blues: Race After the End of History

A. Black Russians

April 22: Yelena Khanga’s Soul to Soul: A Black Russian Jewish Woman’s Search for Her Roots (selection). Anya Ulinich, Petropolis Film: Black Russians (USA 2001; dir. Kara Lynch)

B. Race in Putin’s Russia

April 29: Anya Ulinich, Petropolis Film: Gagarin’s Grandson [Russia; dir. Aleksei Panin, 2007]

C. The Shadow of Race in Barack Obama’s America and Vladimir Putin’s Russia

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May 6: Conclusion. Term paper presentations.

**May 12: Deadline for electronic submission of term paper (10-12 pages for undergraduates; 15-20 for graduate students)

Select Secondary Bibliography (on Reserve)

Baldwin, James. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. Ed. Randall Kenan. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

Baldwin, Kate A. “The Russian Connection: Interracialism as Queer Alliance in The Ways of White Folks.” In: Tidwell, John Edgar and Cheryl R. Ragar, eds. Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007: 209-34

Barnes, Hugh. The Stolen Prince: Gannibal, Adopted Son of Peter the Great, Great- Grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, and Europe's First Black Intellectual. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.

Blakely, Allison. Blacks in Russian History and Thought. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1986.

Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Davis, Angela Y. An Autobiography. International Publishers, 1989.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. Norton Critical Editions. Tr. and ed. Michael R. Katz. 2nd Edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Sons, 2000.

Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson: A Biography. New York: The New Press, 1989.

Ellison, Ralph Waldo. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Ellison, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Essays. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: The Modern Library, 1995.

Frank, Joseph. “Ralph Ellison and a Literary ‘Ancestor’: Dostoevsky.” The New Criterion (Volume 2: September 1983): 11-15.

Gessen, Masha. Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

Gillespie, David. Early Russian Cinema: Innovation, Ideology, Propaganda. London: Wallflower Press, 2000. 6

Holgrem, Beth. “The Blue Angel and Blackface: Redeeming Entertainment in Alexandrov’s Circus.” Russian Review 66 (January 2007): 5-22. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. James, Joy, ed. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998.

Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990.

Lorde, Audre. “Notes from a Trip to Russia.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press Feminist Series, 2007: 13-35.

McKay, Claude. A Long Way from Home. New York: Mariner Books, 1970.

Marshall, Herbert and Mildred Stock. Ira Aldridge: Negro Tragedian. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.

Maxwell, William J. Old Negro, New Left: African-American Communism and Writing Between the Two Wars. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Matusevich, Maxim, ed. Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters. Africa World Press, 2006.

Mihailovic, Alexandar. “‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’: Paul Robeson and the 1949 Pushkin Jubilee.” Under the Sky of My Africa: Aleksandr Pushkin and Blackness, ed. Cathy Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny and Ludmilla A. Trigos. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006: 302-331.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Notes on Prosody and Abram Gannibal: From the Commentary to the Author’s Translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Princeton University Press, 1964.

Nepomnyashchy, Cathy Theimer, Nicole Svobodny and Ludmilla A. Trigos, eds. Under the Sky of My Africa: Aleksandr Pushkin and Blackness. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2006.

Prince, Nancy. A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of Nancy Prince. Marcus Wiener Publishing, 1990. [ISBN-13: 978-1558760196]

Pushkin, Aleksandr. Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse. Tr. James E. Falen. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.

Pushkin, Aleksandr. The Bronze Horseman. Tr. D. M. Thomas. New York: Viking Books, 1982. 7

Robeson, Paul Jr. Paul Robeson Jr. Speaks to America: The Politics of Multiculturalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Robeson, Paul Jr. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939 – 1976. New York: Wiley, 2010.

Robinson, Robert. Black on Red: My 44 Years in the Soviet Union. Acropolis Books, 1998.

West, Cornell. The Cornell West Reader. New York: Basic Books, 1999.