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"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
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue:
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1. Civilizing the Race: The Missionary Nationalism of Chaadaev and Crummell
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2. Conserving the Race: The Emergence of Cultural Nationalism
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3. Notes from the Underworld: Dostoevsky, DuBois, and the Discovery of Ethnic “Soul”
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4. Recovering the Native Tongue: Turgenev, Chesnutt, and Hurston
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5. Underground Notes: Double-Voicedness and the Poetics of NationalIdentity
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6. Native Sons Against Native Soul: Maxim Gorky and Richard Wright
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7. Eurasians and New Negroes: The Invention of Multicultural Nationalism
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8. Preserving the Race: Rasputin, Naylor, and the Mystique of Native “Soul”
Epilogue:
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Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Dale E. Peterson is Professor of English and Russian at Amherst College and Associate Editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Summary
During the 19th century, literate Russians and educated American blacks encountered a dominant Western narrative of world civilisation that seemed to ignore histories of Slavs and African Americans. This book presents the study to parallel evolution of Russian and African American cultural nationalism in literary works and philosophical writings.
