title: Alexander Pushkin's Black Ancestry in the Age of Russian Empire
abstract: This chapter explores how the question of “center” and “periphery” becomes complicated by considering various geographical and historical contexts. As a case study, we examine the poet Alexander Pushkin, who was famously descended on his mother's side from an African former captive who became a military general in eighteenth-century Russia. In the United States, Pushkin was used by abolitionists and anti-racists to rebuke those who considered “African blood” a mark of inferiority. In nineteenth-