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American Literature 73.4 (2001) 884-885



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Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul. By Dale E. Peterson. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2000. x, 249 pp. Cloth, $54.95; paper, $18.95.

At first glance, a book about Russian and African American conceptions of “soul” would seem odd. While Russians and African Americans are rarely considered together, rarer still are scholarly attempts to link the ways Russians and African Americans have responded to modernity. Dale Peterson has forcefully made the case that such comparisons are intellectually interesting because they expand our understanding of the undercurrents of the modern West. Both groups were caught in the undertow of the waves of modernity: they were characterized as unhistoric peoples. Both Russians and African Americans also engaged in creative adaptations of the best of modernity, drawing on their respective vernacular cultures to resist challenges to their [End Page 884] dignity and to invent existential resources that enabled them to survive and flourish.

Peterson has two basic aims: first, to deepen scholarly understanding of the complex relation between Russian and African American literature, and second, to examine the peculiar (yet similar) expressions of Russian and African American cultural nationalisms. In particular, he explores the various ways that marginalized Russian and African American elites appropriated folk resources to articulate what he refers to as “soul.” This appropriation, however, was always marked by an uneasy ambivalence. For Peterson, literary expressions of Russian and African American soul presume either a sense of group belonging based on blood or a broader set of assumptions in which Russians or African Americans are “in but not of” the West. As Peterson writes, this latter view “dramatizes the historic contingency of a psychic ‘double-mindedness’ that is understood to be the complex fate of bicultural Russians and African Americans who find themselves involuntarily at the forefront of a newly emerging nationality.” Chaadaev and Crummell; Dostoevsky and DuBois; Turgenev and Chesnutt and Hurston demonstrate, for Peterson, the complicated ways that elites negotiated these two different conceptions of identity as they confronted the violence of Western modernity. Through close readings of their literary works, Peterson reveals how the compensatory order of vernacular culture (what’s constructed in the wake of modernity) deepens the call to difference and, in the case of those figures who begin with the assumption of hybridity, ironically reproduces the kind of authority associated with filiation.

This is fascinating stuff, and Peterson pulls it off with extraordinary elegance. In my view, he could have addressed more explicitly the challenge that Maxim Gorky and Richard Wright presented to those who turned to vernacular culture to resist the forces unleashed by modernity. For these writers, the culture of the folk was not something to celebrate but a site of pain and suffering. He could have also addressed more fully the historical contexts in which these works were produced, a shortcoming particularly evident in his failure to mention or read any text produced during the Black Power era, a period when the idea of soul was paramount. In spite of these criticisms, Peterson has produced a wonderful text, a must-read for anyone interested in the undercurrents of Western modernity.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. , Bowdoin College



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