On colonial bodies: Poetics and politics of blackness in Russian modernism

This article analyses how the ‘colonial body’ (i.e. the body of the colonised), and especially the black African body, has been depicted in Russian modernism, from photography to painting and literature. Drawing on works by renowned artists, including Andrei Belyi, Nikolai Gumilev, Aleksandr Benua, Kuz’ma Petrov-Vodkin and Lev Bakst, I will show, on the one hand, their indebtedness to the Western colonial imagination and, on the other, their peculiar re-elaboration of the iconography of the ‘black body’ within the framework of modernist poetics. In doing so, I will address some topical questions, that is, the alleged ‘exceptionalism’ of Russia and its actual complicity in reproducing and reinventing Western colonial rhetoric.