Reflections: the myriad shades of blackness
Date
2026
Authors
Version
OA Version
Published version
Citation
Blakely A. Reflections: The Myriad Shades of Blackness. Slavic Review. 2025;84(3):585-588. doi:10.1017/slr.2025.10267
Abstract
“Blackness” in the meaning under discussion here is too elusive to consistently discern because it defies clear definition. For instance, it was not Africans who designated themselves as “black,” nor even as Africans, since their self-identification was with their own respective cultures. The concepts the term “blackness” evokes are mainly what others have associated with Africans and other people of Black African descent. In many respects the purveyors of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades committed the greatest identity theft in world history. When the concept of “blackness” is brought to earth, a common thread that runs through it is a struggle over personal and group identities. It is also at times cloaked in other cultural behavior such as xenophobia. The original European attitudes evincing “blackness” were significantly influenced by Christian tradition surrounding the so-called Curse of Ham, an age-old myth concerning human beings of darker complexion that was shared by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious traditions and came to foster racist concepts positing inherent inferiority of Black Africans in many modern societies. Especially pertinent here, the Russian Primary Chronicle of the early twelfth century begins with an overview of the genesis of nations based on this Hamitic myth.1 Therefore, because of shared Christian traditions, Russians and other Slavs spread this concept alongside western Europeans even in the period before close direct contacts with the west were established. This is the broader historical background of the themes treated in this timely collection of essays “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies.”
Description
License
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.