Fanny Wehner: Pushkin for the New Millenium – an Afropean (Re-)Turn?

Vortrag im Rahmen der European Conference on African Studies – ECAS 2025: African, Afropean, Afropolitan, 25.–28.6.2025 in Prag

With the emerging Afropean and Afropolitan discourses in the 2000s, a fascinating recontextualization of Russia’s national poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin took place. In her 2005 novel Soul Tourists, Bernardine Evaristo stages a dialogue between Pushkin and his African great-grandfather Abram Gannibal, in which the characters react to their contemporary reception. In the following year, two academic works, both ‘firsts’ in Pushkin studies, were published: the first publication in Russian devoted entirely to Pushkinskaya Afrika (Pushkin’s Africa) by established Pushkinist Alexey Bukalov, and the first volume dedicated completely to Pushkin and Blackness in English, edited by three Slavic scholars (among them the renowned Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy). The foreword to the latter book was provided by the famous literary critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who took up the subject again with an editorial titled “Was the Father of Russian Lit a Brother?” in 2013.

In my paper, I argue that the publications from 2005 and 2006 mark the beginning of an ‘Afropean turn’ in both Pushkin’s literary reception and Pushkin studies. In my view, Johny Pitts’ travelogue Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2019) and Olivette Otele’s study African Europeans. An Untold History (2020) continue this line of engagement with Pushkin. I will explore how the different publications mentioned above represent Pushkin, how they use Afropean/Afropolitan frames of reference and how they build on literary works and research from the 20th century to re-present Pushkin as an Afropean poet.

Die Literaturwissenschaftlerin Fanny Wehner ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Projekt Schwarze Narrative transkultureller Aneignung: Literarische Akte des Konstruierens afroeuropäischer Welten und der Infragestellung europäischer Grundlagen.