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Supervisor: Dr Sarah Young and Dr Xine Yao
Present Status: PhD Candidate
Working title of thesis: I Am [An Extraordinary] Man: The Intimate Suffering of Russianness and Blackness
Research: My present research in the Russian and African-American comparative literary field concerns Fyodor Dostoevsky’s influence on twentieth-century, African-American writing. I postulate this Afro-Slavic kinship to stem from the profound affinity of this diasporic consciousness with the bipartite, essential logic governing the Dostoevskian artistic world: the phenomenon of suffering deriving from the very existence of other conscious life figures as the basis of humankind’s existential condition and materialises in a form which is always reducible to an essentially spiritual nature. The authorship of the African-American literary tradition during this century – from the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920 and 1930s and the mid-century’s paternal triumvirate of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, to the prison authors of the 1960s and 1970s and the contemporaneous Black Arts Movement – revelled in the opportunity to negotiate the realities of its condition in relation to a literary world which entirely acknowledges the inescapability, absurdity and gravity of human suffering.
I advance Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorising of double-voiced narrative discourse unveiling the formal logic governing the Dostoevskian novel to account for the most realistic and vivid portrayal of conscious life operating according to this existential principle of suffering in the history of the novelistic form. Accordingly, I engage in Bakhtinian readings of the African-American literature in order to elucidate the existential and spiritual suffering saturating these texts. Concomitantly, I employ the Bakhtinian-rooted theories of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s ‘Signifyin(g)’ and Houston Baker Jr.’s ‘blues matrix’ in my examination of vernacular culture as a locus of the negotiation of this suffering. My research enriches existing scholarly knowledge within the field of Dostoevsky studies by enhancing our understanding of the suffering endured by the Dostoevskian malcontent; equally so, a deeper insight is attained into the modes by which the Russian writer figures as a pillar of twentieth-century, African-American literature and – unanticipated even by himself – an intellectual prophet for the comprehension of the psychological and spiritual impacts of anti-black racism.