Fanny Helena Wehner, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"
Doctoral Research Project

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) was and is canonised in (imperial, Soviet and contemporary) Russia as the country's national poet, with the intercultural complexity of his identity and work frequently being ignored.

Wehner's dissertation project seeks to liberate Pushkin from this nationalistic reception by focusing on minority perspectives on the "prisoner of Russia" (Yuri Druzhnikov) that have received little attention to date. This includes works such as Bernardine Evaristo's Soul Tourists (2005), Olivette Otele's African Europeans. An Untold History (2019) and Johny Pitts' Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2019), all of which are associated with Afropeanism, a movement that has its precursors in twentieth-century Afro-diasporic and African American literature: In Claude McKay's late novel Amiable with Big Teeth (written in 1941, published in 2017), for instance, ideologically conformist Soviet and African American views of Pushkin clash in a Harlem setting.

The project revolves around the central hypothesis that the absence of the poet's African heritage (his great-grandfather came from Africa, most likely from present-day Cameroon) and his involvement in Russia's imperial expansion (particularly towards the so-called 'Russian South') from the dominant strand of his reception is closely linked to repressive historical narratives: the construction of a historically white Europe and Russia, on the one hand, and colonial amnesia at the 'borders of Europe', on the other.

  

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Susanne Frank (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/EXC 2020), Dr. Gianna Zocco (Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, ZfL)