Identity and Double-Consciousness: Russian and African-American Cultural Identities

Catalog description

3 Lecture Hour(s) 0 Lab Hour(s) The topic for this course is identity and “double-consciousness.” This topic will be explored through a comparison of the creative responses of Russians and African-Americans to Western standards of culture and literacy that marginalized and even attempted to erase the historic voices of these cultures. In both instances the response was cultural construction of an alternative literacy, which involved the very definition of “soul” and rhetoric based on the idea of “double-consciousness.” After examining the construction of the East European “other” by Western Europeans and the shared experience of unfree labor by slaves in North America and serfs in Russia, the emergence and assertion of a distinct cultural identity among both Russian and African-American thinkers will be examined.