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

REVIEWS ten."' He notes that "European elements are converted to Latin American use with such advantage to the latter that the term influence—which may imply European control—is no longer suitable for denoting the relationship" (172). The most compelling exploration ofthis process comes in an analysis oftwo paintings, Antonio Ruiz's Sueño de la Malinche (1939) and Wilfredo Lam's La jungla (1943). Beardsell relies here on Andrea Giunta's notion of the "appropriation of appropriation ." This refers to "the repetition ofa European cultural phenomenon which is already borrowed from a non-European culture." Repetition ofthe European model is a way ofmaking "a critical commentary on it," while allowing Latin American artists to make a fuller discovery oftheir own cultural identity (174). The process is beautifully illustrated by Lam's painting. Beardsell follows Giunta in arguing that Lam's encounter with European avant-garde art helped him to understand his own culture better, and produce a body ofwork whose primitivism was more authentic than that ofhis European colleagues: "Lam could see that the African 'primitivism' that interested the Cubists and Surrealists was an aspect ofthe Négritude movement that he actually experienced as a condition ofbeing Cuban" (193). In sum, it is a pity that Beardsell chose to approach his topic from the vantagepoint ofpostcolonial theory. From these lofty heights, the view ofLatin American culture turns out to be abstract and reductive. Fortunately, Beardsell's gaze often slips out ofits theoretical prison. When it does, he helps the reader see more clearly the rich, complex, and conflictive nature ofLatin America's relationship to Europe. Maarten van DeldenRice University DALE E. PETERSON. Upfrom Bondage: The Literatures ofRussian and African American Soul. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. ? + 249 pp. Peterson has fashioned a unique work ofunusual importance and relevance in the post-Cold War world. As previously delineated boundaries of "east" and "west" become increasingly blurred and the former Soviet Union struggles with its own identity somewhere between Europe and Asia, Peterson suggests that intellectual, cultural, and philosophical ties exist between African Americans and Russians that emerge through their respective literary works and intellectual thought. Upfrom Bondage explores this seemingly inaccessible territory by bringing two disparate worlds together within the framework ofcultural hybridity and ethnic self-awareness , citing generously from canonical works ofliterature and social commentary. Literary critics and social commentators have discussed the obvious surface similarities between the experiences of the American slave and the Russian serf— especially in literary portraits—since the early twentieth century. This volume, however, is the first critical work to examine not only the status of Russians and African Americans as marginalized and underrepresented populations, but also the ways in which their portrayal in literary and philosophical writings actually shares a vocabulary and language for expressing cultural nationalism in the US and in Russia. In spite ofboth countries' insistence upon a positive monolithic cultural base embodied in the "American melting pot" and the "multicultural country" (mnogonacional'naia strana) ofRussia, both countries have histories ofracial and ethnic strife simmering not always quietly under the surface rhetoric ofequality. For Russian serfs, even in the so-called Golden Age of literary and intellectual creativity, there was a kind ofdouble jeopardy in being second class citizens both Vol. 26 (2002): 152 THE COMPAKATIST as non-Europeans and as non-gentry. For the American slave, life was rife with hypocrisy in the "land ofthe free" as many ofthe most "progressive" nineteenthcentury statesmen were slave owners themselves. Peterson's comparison begins with the nineteenth-century literary tradition, which is marked in both worlds by the canonical works ofmasters: Chaadaev, Dostoevsky , and Turgenev in Russia, Crummell, DuBois, and Chesnutt in the U.S. Through close textual and contextual readings, Upfrom Bondage offers compelling portraits ofhow writers and thinkers in the two countries arrive at a new consciousness and awareness of nationalism. In several cases it is not until some of the brilliant work ofenlightened (read: pro-emancipation) Russian writers, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, finally reach the English speaking audience in the U.S. that the deep similarities in the two populations becomes palpable. Peterson demonstrates that Dostoevsky's biting social commentary in Notesfrom Underground (1864) gets revisited by African American writers only...