5. Disguises. Black Africa at the Service of the Arts
Journal: Open Book Publishers
Year: 2026

This chapter analyses portrayals of ‘black Africa’ in Russian literature and art, across both elite and popular forms. It shows how African imagery served as a vehicle for exploring social anxieties related to hybridity, race, and gender, often transposed onto a distant and ‘othered’ setting. Drawing on European colonial literature, Russian writers and artists used ‘disguise’ as a narrative and metaphorical device, turning Africa into a symbolic screen for the tensions of modernity.