Lecture Tuesday: 'Black America and Russia'

D. Chernov

Angela Davis in Moscow, 1972.

The Russian Program, African and African American Studies Program and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences invite all to a lecture by professor Richard Tempest of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The lecture, entitled "Black America and Russia," will be at 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 27, via Zoom.

Tempest will discuss the points of contact between the African American experience and Russian culture and politics from the time of the Civil War to the present day, with emphasis on the people-to-people dimension of that relationship.

Who were the Black artists, activists and adventurers who traveled there, and what did they find? Learn about the amazing lives of four Black Americans: the son of a Mississippi sharecropper who became a millionaire in pre-revolutionary Moscow, a Ford Motor Company worker who spent four decades in the Soviet Union as a captive of the regime, a child movie star who grew up to become a Soviet naval officer and a cult Russian poet, and a young female writer who spent a year in Moscow where she met KGB spies and witnessed the decline of Soviet communism.

Topics include the connection between Richard Wright's novel Native Son and Dostoevsky's imagined worlds; W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Angela Davis' visits to the Soviet Union and their attitude to the Soviet communist project; and the reception of iconic Black figures such as Muhammad Ali and Barak Obama in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

Tempest is an associate professor of Russian literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies the interactions between Russian and Western culture. He writes fiction, as well as works on postmodern writers, exploring the concepts of gender and sexuality in contemporary works. 

His recent book is entitled Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Fictive Worlds (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019). 

Zoom link.

• Meeting ID: 857 5185 2225
• Passcode: YHH4%TGy

This lecture is sponsored by the Russian Program, African and African American Studies Program and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.