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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Imagining Africa and blackness in the Russian empire: from extra-textualarapkaand distant cannibals to Dahomey amazon shows – live in Moscow and Riga

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In the nineteenth century, Dahomey amazon shows, traveling circuses with menageries and ‘African villages,’ emerged as part of the transnational entertainment industry. This article extends the geography of this global model and generic system and its role in the visual politics of whiteness and blackness in a context outside the imperial colonization of Africa. The first sections examine a rise of visuality in the Russian imperial imagination of race, Africa and blackness through a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Aleksandr Griboedov's play Woe from Wit and Arkadii Averchenko's Death of an African Hunter. These are followed by a discussion of the Dahomey amazon shows in Moscow and their significance in the Russian cultural imagination of Africa and blackness, Europe and whiteness. The discussion of the Dahomey amazon shows in Riga unravels the complexities of interaction between the global visual model and its reception in the Baltic colonies of the Russian empire.1