Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (review)

Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul, by Dale E. Peterson. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. 249 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2560-8.

The possibility of comparing Russian and African-American experiences of bondage within literate cultures that celebrated the European Enlightenment tale of progress toward free individuals and self-determining nations has been an attractive and intriguing one recognized first by some of the African American writers and thinkers examined in Dale Peterson's Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul. Academics have addressed the problem in the biographical details of individual authorial inspiration and from a historical-sociological perspective in work such as Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987). Although the suggestive parallels of intellectual and literary history have been, in this reviewer's experience, a topic of conversation in and out of the classroom, Peterson's is, so far as I know, a pioneering overview. Compiled largely of previously published essays substantially reworked into explicitly comparative exercises (a sign of an evolving sensibility on the author's part and, perhaps, an indication of continuing uncertainty about the status of comparative work in many of our discipline-based journals), Up from Bondage has much to offer the student of the varieties of nationalism in the course of performing some new readings of Russian and African American literary classics.

Peterson's chapters pair Russian and African American members of literate elites, examining their strategies for negotiating with the conventions of European culture in order to come to terms with or problematize the relations of their marginalized peoples to an exclusionary, Eurocentric process of universal history, whether by devising means for "belated" assimilation or for producing a recognizably unique, oppositional ethnic voice. The time span and range of textual practices are broad, extending from Alexander Crummell to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston Baker, Jr., on the one hand, and from Peter Chaadaev to Valentin Rasputin on the other.

Any foray into such a field of comparison always leaves the author open to accusations of arbitrariness. I thought, for instance, that where Peterson had chosen Ivan Kireevsky's Slavophilism, Vladimir Solov'ev's complexly ambiguous position on nationalism would provide a more appropriate comparison to W. E. B. Du Bois's early formulations of a socially constructed but effectively real race idea. Still, the ease with which alternate or additional comparisons may be suggested merely confirms Peterson's basic premise that such comparison has much to teach us. He must be congratulated on the fruitfulness of his endeavor, which draws out the many nuances of cultural nationalism through the evidence of convincing close textual reading and scholarly synthesis. Paying careful attention to the details of literary genre, historical and geographical situation, and the interplay of "roots and routes,'" Peterson never allows his objects to collapse into an assimilating sameness. "Soul" is a term whose meaning is radically heterogeneous not only across cultures, but within each. Peterson, rather than attempting to exhaust the subject, has wisely chosen to compile an introductory survey that gestures toward further detailed research, inviting the reader to extend the dialogue.