The Black Experience and Russian Culture

Catalog description

The contact that began in the early eighteenth century between the Russian empire and the cultures of Africa and its diaspora reveals a mutual fascination that speaks powerfully about notions of racial identity in an increasingly global era. We will study the fateful misunderstandings as well as strong mutual influences between Russians, Africans and their descendants from the Abyssinian ‘prince’ Abram Gannibal’s entry into the court of Peter the Great up to the tense dialogue over political values and conceptions of race, ethnicity and sexuality that underpins the volatile relations between Barack Obama’s United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.