The functionality of Russian images of Africans: The case of “Hottentot morality”
The Russian Empire had little direct contact with sub-Saharan Africa, but stereotypes of people from that region made their way into Russian collective consciousness and acquired rhetorical and even political functions. For example, the “Hottentot” became a metaphor for the “savage within” and was u...
保存先:
| 出版年: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/chreecc, |
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| 第一著者: | |
| フォーマット: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| 言語: | Anglais |
| 出版事項: |
Cahiers d’histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique
2026
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| オンライン･アクセス: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| 要約: | The Russian Empire had little direct contact with sub-Saharan Africa, but stereotypes of people from that region made their way into Russian collective consciousness and acquired rhetorical and even political functions. For example, the “Hottentot” became a metaphor for the “savage within” and was used for designating various domestic groups—from cultural modernists to political radicals—to define and censure perceived threats to the Russian social and moral order. The semantics of the “Hottentot” image in Russian collective consciousness remained stable and largely disconnected from travelogues, race science and scholarship on Africa. The significant changes occurred in the circumstances under which that image was evoked and in the roles that it played, reflecting internal Russian developments. The term “Hottentot morality” emerged in the 1900s as a critique of political opportunism and double standards, from a model introduced in the literature of the mid-nineteenth century. The racialized image of Africans was instrumentalized in Russian domestic political debates and ideological struggles during the three revolutions and the Russian Civil War. |
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