Race and Nineteenth-Century Russia

But first: what is race? The diverse intellectual, scientific, and historical genealogies of race are most commonly linked to slavery and global colonialism, which mobilized European thinkers to conceptualize an emerging picture of human diversity by recourse to Enlightenment-style taxonomies popularized by naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus. Bodily typologies gave rise to racial hierarchies of inferior and superior “races” into which all humanity was divided, with white Europeans obligatorily at the top. Subsequent race “science,” using the lens of skin pigmentation, “physiognomy,” facial angles, and cranial sizes, biologized conceptions of culture and human behavior. Racial commonalities, by and large considered to be inborn and heritable, were thought to determine mental and physical aptitudes and to trigger or prevent civilized behavior. Of course, we now know that race, in the sense of a biological, heritable template of human abilities and proclivities, does not exist. As a false and pernicious descriptor of human difference, race has been called a “dangerous trope.”Footnote ² To study race is to study the institutional, social, and cultural impacts of a pervasive fiction, in whose shadow we still live.

Glancing at the “forest” of race as a phenomenon of western societies, while conducting inventories of the “trees” in our own Slavic backyard, always seemingly more complex, risks an ineluctable slide to Russian exceptionalism (imperialism is another casualty of such bifocalism). This should be resisted. First, “there was no clear-cut nineteenth-century idea of race”—not in western Europe, not anywhere.Footnote ³ Race was a landscape of clashing theories, classifications, and controversies. Both fixity and malleability were central to how race was understood and mobilized for the distribution of social entitlements and economic privileges.Footnote ⁴ Sometimes, racialism and racism operated without a stable terminology of race. At other times, the discourse of race blurred or coopted ethnic, linguistic, and national distinctions. Jews, Celts, the Irish, the Chinese, Hottentots, Anglo-Saxons, Slavs, Europeans, and Teutons have all at some points been called “races.”Footnote ⁵ The heterogeneity and “messiness” of racial discourse does not excuse reluctance to engage it; such reasons never stopped us from engaging the discourse of the nation, just as heterogeneous.

Both popular and scientific ideas about race arrived in Russia bundled with Europe's other intellectual products. Historians have debunked the notion that race was a marginal concern in imperial Russia: “Not only were practices of race more prevalent in Russia and the Soviet Union than previously thought, so too were explicit vocabularies of race.”Footnote ⁶ Modern conceptions of race reached Russia in the 1830s and were soon adopted by intellectuals of all political stripes. By the 1860s the word “rasa” (race) appeared in dictionaries (it was interchangeably used with poroda and plemia).Footnote ⁷ Russian physical anthropologists studying the empire's diverse populations felt uniquely positioned to contribute to pan-European race research, not least because the cradle of the Caucasian race was a region of the Russian empire.Footnote ⁸ In the Russian context, race, ethnicity, and nationality (narodnost΄) formed “a single conceptual field,” which Vera Tolz has traced from Petr Chaadaev to Nikolai Nadezhdin and beyond. Theories of culture, including language, were biologized; the concept of race, conversely, relied heavily on culture. Although the tsarist regime never adopted race as a category of official institutional practice and was “less tainted” by moral culpability than its western peers, it promoted racial consciousness and racist attitudes. Yet while questioning Russia's purported exceptionalism, historians have also identified characteristic inflections of Russian racial thought, which tended toward the liberal end of the European spectrum. These include a predominant belief in monogenesis, in the environmental conditioning of races and their malleability, lesser purchase of racial hierarchies or crude social Darwinism, as well as a more permissive attitude toward miscegenation, which, however, waned post-1870s.Footnote ⁹

The implications of historians’ work for literary scholars are enormous, especially regarding the fluid boundaries between race and nationalism, by no means unique to Russia. For if we need to rethink narodnost΄, permeating so much of nineteenth-century Russian culture, having overlooked its racial entanglements, the enormity of this task cannot be overstated. Similarly, we may need to refocus our postcolonial lens to more fully account for the role of race in the representations of imperial Others.

Yet the goal of this article is not to sketch research agendas; the existing analytical work on this topic has not yet reached a critical threshold to afford this reflection. My goal is to facilitate such analytical work. A fuller account of my own practice appears in Ch. 5 of my book, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada, on which I will draw to illustrate my points.Footnote ¹⁰ This book takes Ivan Goncharov's imperial bestseller—the travelogue The Frigate Pallada (1858), describing a voyage around Africa and Asia—as a lens on the global operations of imperialism.Footnote ¹¹ In the current article, I wish to promote the reading strategies that get at deeper operations and wider enmeshments of race. Mere red-flagging of racial bigotry will not do. We need to explore the affective mechanisms and textual structures of racial logics, their cultural, social, and political wellsprings and estuaries. What can literature tell us about the operations of racialized understandings of human difference? I am suggesting, in short, that we read racial ideas and images for their deep structure rather than surface, heeding Henry Louis Gates's call “to deconstruct…the idea of difference inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge inherent in popular and academic usages of ‘race.’”Footnote ¹²

Racialization instead of Race

In connecting discourse and power, the concept of racialization is a more supple tool than the essentializing category of race. As an interactive and dynamic process involved with “making, doing, and becoming,” racialization connects discourses of race with social relations and political practices, revealing how racialism becomes socially consensual.Footnote ¹³ Yet the concept of racialization is also useful in analyzing the discourse itself. For a literary critic, it provides an opportunity to discuss authors and characters as “making” and “doing” race, operations of special vividness in the thickened social and political contexts of realist texts. These texts rarely feature stable and clear-cut categories of races but often do plenty of racializing.Footnote ¹⁴ By shifting from category to process, we also become attuned to the creeping racialization of ethnic groups and nations.

Let us take the example of Ivan Goncharov's ambivalent portrayal of Asians in The Frigate Pallada. Initially, he claims that the bodies of the Chinese are “almost the same” as Russian bodies. Yet he subsequently stresses difference when evoking the images of the repulsive “dark yellow” Chinese bodies and “physiognomies,” prematurely aged and “lacking the expression of energy and manliness.”Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, such racializing comments are layered on fairly elaborate ethnographic depictions of various Asians, who are possessed of culture, beliefs, customs, and manners—the things Goncharov's racialized Africans largely lack. So were Asians for Goncharov a race or an ethnicity? Such a question betrays an expectation of a rigid mental template of races and of categorical purity rarely encountered in cultural evidence. Analyzing racialization and its functions is more productive. In this case, these functions included shoring up projections of (white, Russian) racial superiority, promoting European imperialism, and dealing with the psychological burdens of processing what appeared to Goncharov as a dizzying spectrum of human difference. Racialization additionally allows us to speak of degree. Instead of a litmus test, we embrace the metaphor of a dial: something that can be cranked up or dialed down, as the need arises.

Race as Ideology

Race is not only, and not always, a question of perception or meaning-making, but also ideology. Racialized representations are modulated by concerns of class conflict, nationalism, imperialism, or geopolitics, so it is essential to probe their specific political investments. As a classificatory system, race was about evaluation, ranking, hierarchy, and therefore power. As a discursive practice, or a language for describing difference, it was instrumentalized in pursuit of political and social goals, or implicitly informed them. This leads David Rainbow to emphasize race as ideology.Footnote ¹⁶

Ideology need not imply doctrinal coherence. As analysts of colonial discourse established, ideology can work not only by reducing and containing meaning but also by proliferating it, a semantic capital that increases ideology's political utility.Footnote ¹⁷ This is especially pertinent in the case of the Russian empire, which resisted systematizing its multilayered diversity because to do so would hamstring the sinews of power and control.

Such ideological dimensions are on full display in Goncharov's travelogue. Let us return to the vagaries of the writer's racialization of Asians. While liberally racializing the Chinese and the Japanese, Goncharov checks this impulse when describing the Asians of the north: indigenous Siberians. Yet he displays no such compunction in his letters. These disparate examples clarify the difficulty of making arguments about Goncharov's perceptions. Which are the real ones? After all, private letters can also be communications with concealed agendas rather than outpourings of sincerity.

Nonetheless, the existence of letters that jar with the book at the very least shows a reluctance to racialize Russia's Siberian subjects for a public audience. The historical context strongly suggests these reasons were ideological. At stake was the question of Siberia's status within the imperial polity, lingering late into the nineteenth century: was it, or could it become, an integral part of Russia? As I argue in my book, while Russian imperialism, like any other, devoted considerable energies to marking difference, it also featured powerful currents of enforcing confluence, whereby the entire multiethnic population of the Russian empire was in the process—fitful, but inevitable—of becoming Russianized (the term was obrusenie). This assimilating impetus discouraged the “othering” or vilifying of minorities, since all were, in a sense, Russians in the making.

That is what Goncharov does in his book. Yet he abandons such discreetness in the private letter, describing a Russian girl in Yakutsk in the following way: she is “very white,” her cheekbones, thankfully, “do not resemble shafts (oglobli), and her hair is not replaced by bear fur—in a word, she's a Russian.” In a clear link between nationality and race, the girl's Russianness emerges as a somatic difference from indigenous Siberians, whose ursine appearance indexes their low placement on the racial ladder of being. Her (Russian) whiteness is in a symbiotic relationship with their racial otherness, each constituting the other. When recycling this passage in his book, Goncharov expunges the racialization, presenting this Yakutsk settler as simply “a very pretty girl, completely Russian.”Footnote ¹⁸

Intersections with Class, Sexuality, and Gender

Race interacts not only with other forms of groupness, such as ethnicity and nation, but also with such socially constructed identities as class and gender. Some environmental theories of race held that harsh living conditions, unremitting labor, and poor protection from nature were the cause of primitive societies’ darkened complexion. To a lesser degree, this phenomenon was thought to be observable also among the laboring classes of industrialized Europe. Class, in other words, produced race.Footnote ¹⁹ In nineteenth-century British writing, race and class are often “covertly interchangeable or at least analogous” according to Patrick Brantlinger, who calls race “a surrogate class system.” Conquered races, judged to be capable of manual labor only, were designated as a new proletariat, whose task it was to build white civilizations worldwide.Footnote ²⁰ The Frigate Pallada, for example, reduces black Africans to bodies with labor value.

Goncharov vividly captures the dynamic interplay between class and race when describing his entrance to a Cape Town hotel. He charts his progress from the street to the hotel's domestic core as an ascending gradient of whiteness among those he encounters:

This miniature quest to the hotel's whitest inner sanctum superimposes racial hierarchies on social ones. The spectrum of class becomes the spectrum of color, whereby the English and Malay servants differ less by the type of color than its degree. A dilution of whiteness at lower social rungs explains the color difference between the English servant and the young English girl, who is the proprietress's daughter. Spatial arrangement reinforces the racial/class hierarchy in this vignette. The black servant is out on the street, “on the lowest step”; the white owner's daughter is inside, at the elevation of the stairs. To enter the interior means to approach the heart of whiteness. Playing with his own metaphor, Goncharov color-codes the old proprietress through her hair rather than skin, defining gray as the highest form of whiteness. She is the whitest person around in the combined senses of race, class, property, and age. The passage is a perfect icon of a reigning nineteenth-century racial hierarchy and its class and economic correlatives. It also reminds us that race is not only a discursive tool for constituting Europe's “others” but also its white selves.

This passage also brings us to the interpenetration of race, sexuality, and gender. Since sexuality was the mechanism for preserving or eroding racial difference, women, according to Ania Loomba, “demarcate both the innermost sanctum of race, culture, and nation as well as the porous frontiers through which these are penetrated.” Whiteness construed itself as the domain of heteronormative patriarchy and bourgeois domesticity. White male avengers took it upon themselves, in Gayatri Spivak's pithy phrase, to “save brown women from brown men,” seen as sexually violent and barbaric. Alternatively, such men were portrayed as effeminate, sexually promiscuous, or deviant.Footnote ²²

The very idea of race was gendered. Race scientists drew analogies between deficient and low-weight female brains and those of lower races. As Nancy Stepan puts it, “lower races represented the ‘female’ type of human species, and females the ‘lower race’ of gender.”Footnote ²³ Asians are such a feminized lower race in The Frigate Pallada, lacking manly vigor and energy. The puny silk-robed bodies of the Japanese men appear gender-ambiguous to the Russians, who—true to an Orientalist stereotype—suspect them of homosexual leanings. Such gendering sent an ideological message, to return to my earlier point, by portraying the Japanese as easy military targets and potentially compliant subjects.

Deconstructing Race

A critique of race should attend to the anxieties and insecurities lurking underneath racial hierarchies and biases, their projections of confidence notwithstanding.Footnote ²⁴ Literary texts sometimes fracture under the weight of their racial discourses’ intellectual certitudes, pretense of disinterestedness, and moral blindness. Readings against the grain help bring those to light, exposing the flimsy basis on which racialism stands. This returns to Gates's idea that the task of writing about race lies in deconstructing its trope and revealing the power relations concealed therein.

Such a moment appears in The Frigate Pallada. On one of his ethnographic sorties to the countryside surrounding Cape Town, Goncharov meets three African women whom he asks to identify their “tribe.” One of them replies:

The flow of this passage is instructive. The black woman refuses to gratify the white man's obsession for tabulating Africans, likely a tedious ritual of her daily life in the British colony. Rather than make herself more transparent, she puts up a smokescreen. The shouting makes defiance palpable. She foils Goncharov's classificatory zeal and makes him into the butt of a joke, thus reversing the expected power dynamic. The white man's befuddlement becomes a merry spectacle for her African female companions.

Momentarily thrown off-kilter by such audacity, and possibly feeling unmanned by the black woman's derision, her Russian analyst initially dissolves the barrier of race by asserting the uncanny similarity of lighter-skinned African women to their sunburnt Russian equivalents. Yet rather than ennobling, perhaps this comparison already pivots toward putting the woman in her place. The well-practiced class superiority of the Europeanized elite over Russian peasants, and in this case layered onto a gender hierarchy, propels the assertion of racial superiority over the African woman. Class prejudice, in other words, trains one for racial prejudice. This prejudice materializes in Goncharov's comment about the radical racial inferiority of darker-skinned blacks whom he depicts through a grotesque racial template.

For the proper unfolding of the colonial script, the natives must be put in their place. The real-life African is ungovernable. While allowing her assertion of agency to slip in, Goncharov must nonetheless suppress it to recover a sense of his own superiority. So he makes her discursively governable by deploying scurrilous racial rhetoric and transforming her weapon—her laugh—into the “terrible and evil” smile of all black people. To merely record the conversation without such commentary would imperil the writer's image as a European white man in control of the situation. Racial debasement helps him reassert his privileged status. And the narrative is his tool for remedying the perceived disrespect he suffered in the actual interaction.

For Goncharov, the story is a lesson on Africans’ irrationality and rudeness. Yet despite the shackles of Goncharov's colonial gaze and authority, the woman's alternative, accidental story—of noncompliance, evasion, and disrespect—blooms between his lines. Reading this passage against the grain allows us to recover the woman's agency, expose the psychological mechanism of racialization, and render some reparative justice to its subjects—however “tiny” this gesture may feel.Footnote ²⁶ It is the least we as humanists can do.

Race in the Classroom

Yet it is not all that we could do. Further scholarly work on race in our field depends in large measure on changing our graduate and undergraduate education. At the graduate level, the inclusion of race in the Slavic PhDs’ critical toolbox will spur new research. It will also equip them to teach, say, Zora Neale Hurston alongside Tolstoevskii, a likely task, given the job market's increasing demand for generalist nimbleness, at least in North America. While familiarity with western critical race studies is important in this pedagogic reorientation, we will be most effective when race-ing Slavic studies from within: by encouraging young scholars to reconstruct multiple local contexts and traditions that informed the semantics and deployment of race in specific situations.

Most importantly, we need to ensure that “Russian culture,” as a subject in a twenty-first century university, is appropriately updated in view of our own evolving understanding of it and the general trends in the humanities. Such updating would respond to our students’ evident and legitimate interests and concerns, likely increased by the traumatic events of the past year.Footnote ²⁷ There is no reason why students curious to investigate the concept of race should not be able to do so in Slavic departments. Prior to becoming socialized in the Slavic field's old assumptions and interpretive habits, our students are often alert to the racialization of Russian literature's Jews or Roma or “Tatars” (a frequent catch-all for Asian imperial subjects). This is a classroom conversation we must be ready to enter.