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Race-ing the Russian Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Edyta M. Bojanowska
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Abstract

The article offers a methodological reflection on the practical work of reading race in Russian literary texts, especially from the nineteenth century. It makes four key arguments. First, “racialization,” in the sense of an interactive process, is a more productive lens than an essentially static concept of race. Second, race is not only, and not always, a question of perception or meaning-making, but also ideology. Third, the concept of race typically engages notions of class, gender, and sexuality, an intersectionality that merits particular attention. Fourth, critiquing race can be productively furthered by paying attention to anxieties and insecurities that underlie racial hierarchies and biases, which can be revealed through readings against the grain. As we cast new light on Russia's engagement with race, it is essential that the culture of the Russian nineteen-century become part of this reappraisal.

Keywords

Raceempirenineteenth-century Russian cultureideologyclassgenderintersectionality
Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 258 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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Footnotes

My warm thanks to the colleagues who shared their valuable comments and suggestions: Ned Blackhawk, Giorgio DiMauro, Rod Ferguson, Marina Mogilner, and William Mills Todd, III.

References

1. The pioneering literary studies of race in nineteenth-century Russian literature are Nepomnyashchy, Catherine Theimer, Svobodny, Nicole, and Trigos, Ludmilla A., eds., Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (Evanston, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mondry, Henrietta, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, since the 1880s (Boston, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Murav, Harriet, “Jews, Race, and Biology,” in Martinsen, Deborah and Maiorova, Olga, eds., Dostoevsky in Context, (Cambridge, Eng., 2015), 122–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bojanowska, Edyta M., A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), 213–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I thank the Harvard University Press for its permission to reproduce fragments of this book in this article.

2. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” in Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Appiah, Kwame Anthony, eds., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1986), 5Google Scholar. Following Gates’s warning against essentializing race through critical practice, I imply distancing quotation marks around “race” throughout my article.

3. Banton, Michael, The Idea of Race (London, 1977), 5Google Scholar.

4. Stoler, Ann Laura, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (January 1997): 198Google Scholar. For an overview of intellectual debates, see Banton, Michael, Racial Theories, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Stepan, Nancy, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden, 1982), xviiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. David Rainbow, “Introduction,” in David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Contexts (Montreal, 2019), 10.

7. Vera Tolz, “Diskursy o rase: Imperskaia Rossiia i Zapad v sravnenii,” in A. Miller, D. Sdvizhkov, and I. Shirle, eds., “Poniatiia o Rossii:” K istoricheskoi semantike imperskogo perioda, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2012), 161–62; (see also, in the same volume, Karl Hall, “‘Rasovye priznaki koreniatsia glubzhe v prirode chelovecheskogo organizma’: Neulovimoe poniatie rasy v Rossiiskoi imperii,” 194–258). “Tribe” was also used interchangeably with “race” in western racial thought (Banton, Racial Theories, 39). For an anthology of tsarist-era writings on race, if lack of scholarly apparatus and the editor’s championing of racialism can be overlooked, see V.B. Avdeev, Russkaia rasovaia teoriia do 1917 goda: Sbornik original΄nykh rabot russkikh klassikov, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2001).

8. Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (Lincoln, Nebr., 2013), 5–6.

9. Vera Tolz, “Constructing Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood in Imperial Russia: Issues and Misconceptions,” in David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race, 29–58; Nikolay Zakharov, Race and Racism in Russia (Houndmills, 2015), 29 (the source of the “less tainted” quotation); Eugene M. Avrutin, “Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 16; Mogilner, Homo Imperii, 7. On the permeability of ethnicity, nationality, and race, see also Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 6–8. On attitudes toward miscegenation, see Tolz, “Constructing Race,” 38–41 and Willard Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts?: ‘Going Native’ and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s–1914,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 806–25.

10. Bojanowska, A World of Empires, 213–61.

11. Ivan Goncharov, Fregat “Pallada”: Ocherki puteshestviia v dvukh tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1858).

12. Gates, “Introduction,” 6.

13. Zakharov, Race and Racism, 3, 33, 65–70; Avrutin, “Racial Categories.” Avrutin defines racialization as “ways in which social attitudes and administrative practices constructed, validated, and justified a hierarchy of human difference” (16). On race as a discursive practice that sometimes indexes without naming (by the Jakobsonian mechanism of a nonreferential linguistic function), see Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice,” Slavic Review 61, no 1 (Spring 2002): 54–61.

14. Toni Morrison analyzes subtle operations of whiteness in American literature in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

15. Ivan A. Goncharov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1997; hereafter PSS), 257, 261–62. Soviet criticism praised The Frigate Pallada for its profound humanism and sympathetic portrayals of all ethnicities. Even the nadir of Goncharov’s racism—his struggle to detect human kinship with one prisoner in an African jail, an example I will spare the Slavic Review readers—failed to temper these rosy assessments. While Goncharov’s attitudes to human difference fluctuate widely, this generalization is untenable and ethically irresponsible.

16. Rainbow, “Introduction,” 9–10.

17. Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 160; see also David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC, 1993), 11.

18. B.M. Engel΄gardt, “Putevye pis΄ma I.A. Goncharova iz krugosvetnogo plavaniia,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 22–24 (1935): 423; PSS, 2:659.

19. Craig S. Wilder, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York, 2013), 188.

20. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, 1988), 184. On the synergies of capitalism and racism, see also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York, 2008).

21. PSS, 2:135.

22. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 3rd ed. (New York, 2015), 155, 160. On the close relation between race, sexuality, and gender, see also Young, Robert J. C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and Ferguson, Roderick A., Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis, 2003)Google Scholar.

23. Stepan is cited in Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 161.

24. In this, racial discourse operates similarly to colonial discourse, its close twin; see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), esp. Ch. 4 (“Of Mimicry and Man”), 121–31.

25. PSS, 2:130.

26. Gates, “Introduction,” 6.

27. At my home institution (Yale University), Ethnicity, Race, and Migration is among three most popular humanities majors, surpassing all foreign language and literature majors combined.