Up from Bondage: The literatures of Russian and African American Soul.

Dale E. Peterson. Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. 249 pp. $18.95.

In Up from Bondage, Dale E. Peterson explores numerous parallels between the works of Russian and African American writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Noting that historical circumstances have placed both groups of writers in marginal positions relative to mainstream Western culture, Peterson presents convincing arguments that Russian and African American writers have often responded to this marginalization in similar ways. Sometimes these similarities arise from cases of direct influence, especially of Russian writers on African American writers. In other cases, the similarities simply arise from a common sense of cultural marginality and of a need to develop viable cultural identities in the face of that marginality, either through the development of independent nationalist identities or through engaging in dialogue with the cultural mainstream.

Peterson's book begins with an account of the parallel work of nineteenth-century thinkers such as Peter Chaadaev in Russia and the Reverend Alexander Crummell in the United States, both of whom were Eurocentric intellectuals who drew upon Christian religious models in an attempt to pull their peoples into the cultural mainstream. Peterson then turns to an account of their successors, Ivan Kireevsky and W. E. B. Du Bois, both of whom began to move toward more nationalist conceptions of independent cultural identities that would be appropriate to the special historical experience of Russian peasants and African Americans. The remainder of the book is then devoted to a discussion of the parallel ways in which Russian and African American writers have continued to pursue this two-pronged project, either by pursuing cultural identities congruent with essentialist visions of ethnic "soul" or by countering such essentialism through exploration of the historical contingency of ethnic cultural identities.

In general, the parallels discussed by Peterson are both convincing and illuminating. Up from Bondage thus makes an important contribution to our growing understanding of the global phenomenon of multiculturalism and of its relevance to the special multiculturalism of the United States. In this regard, it should be valuable as a contribution to both Russian studies and African American studies. However, the book does have two shortcomings. For one thing, the historical circumstances that Peterson cites to explain the parallels between Russian and African American culture also apply to any number of non-Western cultures around the world. In fact, Russian writers probably have more in common historically with postcolonial African writers than with African American writers, a possibility that Peterson does not explore. In this same vein, Peterson may place too much emphasis on the use of Mikhail Bakhtin's work by African American critics such as Henry Louis Gates, given that critics of mainstream Western literat ure have found Bakhtin's work equally useful, while other critics have pointed out the general relevance of Bakhtin's dialogic vision of language to postcolonial literatures around the world.

The more troubling shortcoming of the book is the fact that, despite its acknowledgment of the social and historical circumstances that inform the parallels it explores, Up from Bondage shows a tin ear for real politics throughout. For example, Peterson cites similarities between the right-wing Dostoevsky and the left-wing Du Bois without addressing the politically problematic nature of this particular conjunction. More importantly, Peterson essentially ignores what is probably the most important and direct link between Russian and African American literature in the twentieth century--the important leadership role played by the Soviet Union in the attempt to develop socialist-informed, anticapitalist literature around the world. Thus, he does not even discuss the inspiration provided in the 1920s by the Russian Revolution and the subsequent rise of the Comintern to nonwhite writers around the globe, including those associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In particular, Peterson ignores the work of scholars su ch as Barbara Foley and William Maxwell, who have done a great deal in recent years to uncover the important historical legacy of interactions between international socialism and African American culture, especially in the 1920s and 1930s.

This refusal to acknowledge the important influence of international socialism (and especially the Soviet Union) on African American writers leads Peterson into some peculiar situations. For example, in his discussion of the link between Maxim Gorky and Richard Wright (where it is impossible to avoid at least a mention of politics), Peterson characterizes Gorky's work primarily as growing out of the historical experience of Russian serfdom, thus linking it to the post-slavery writing of Wright. Yet Gorky, in the 1930s, was regarded as a model of leftist writing by proletarian writers of many nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, and it is surely their shared radical politics that provides the most important connection between Gorky and Wright. This omission is not surprising, given that the whole field of Russian studies was constituted during the Cold War on a premise that nothing good could possibly come from Soviet culture or socialist realist aesthetics. In this post--Cold War era, however, it is time tha t we begin to acknowledge that important positive cultural energies did arise from the Soviet Union, even (and maybe even especially) in the Stalinist 1930s, and that these energies provided inspiration to writers around the world who were marginal to the Western cultural mainstream.