Founding the father: Constructing a paternal identity in Aleksandr Pushkin’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great and Alexandre Dumas’s Blanche de Beaulieu

Abstract

This article investigates how Aleksandr Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas – writers of partial African descent – reconstruct their forefathers’ identities, and to some extent their own, through fictional narratives, thereby restoring ‘whitewashed’ black legacy to its rightful place. The focus on the forefather in Pushkin’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (begun around 1827) and Dumas’s Blanche de Beaulieu (1826) reflects a watershed moment in the writers’ personal and professional lives, in which they were preoccupied with their public image, their creative legitimacy and their legacy. By simultaneously evoking, yet concealing, the writers’ ancestry, these fictions permit a surreptitious exploration of its distressing aspects. Although the narrative construction of the ancestors’ identity operates within the constraints of the hierarchical representational binaries described by Said in Orientalism, the texts ultimately destabilize these binaries, exemplifying literature’s unique ability to subvert hegemonic ideology.