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Wanting to know everything in a complex world: An interview with Allison Blakely

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2010

Suzanne De Graaf
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In the fall semester of 2007 Professor Allison Blakely visited the Netherlands, a country that he studied extensively for his acclaimed book on racial imagery, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Indiana University Press, 1994). His other work on the black experience in Europe, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Howard University Press, 1986), won the American Book Award in 1988. Professor Blakely published numerous articles in a myriad of national and international journals. Blakely is currently Professor of European and Comparative History and George and Joyce Wein Professor of African-American Studies at Boston University. In 2006 he was elected president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and in the spring of 2008 he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.

Information

Type
Interview
Information
Itinerario , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , November 2007, pp. 8 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2007

References

Notes

2 Nepomnyashchy, C.T. et al. , eds. Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006).Google Scholar

3 The figure of Zwarte Piet has always had a somewhat ambiguous role. Descended from a devil hauled through the streets by St. Nicholas on horseback on 5 December, he has evolved into a black- or brown-skinned man who acts as a servant to St. Nicholas and is both a clown and a bogeyman to children. His ambiguity also shows in the way he is depicted: he carries both a sack full of sweets and toys to reward obedient children with, and a bundle of birch twigs to punish disobedient ones. Zwarte Piet is also said to put especially disobedient children into his sack and take them to Spain, were he and St. Nicholas reside during the year. The bogeyman aspect has been softened over the decades, but Zwarte Piet still shares traits that have been used to stereotype blacks, both in appearance and in behaviour: he has thick, black, curly hair, full red lips, brown skin and he wears big golden earrings; he is dressed in the attire of a sixteenth-century page; he is a servant more than a companion; and often acts clownish and childlike. For more information on the Dutch St. Nicholas tradition, see Blakely, Allison, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modem Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 39–49.Google Scholar

4 For fairly recent examples, see: Dabydeen, David, Gilmore, John and Jones, Cecily, eds. The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin, Peter and Alonzo, Christine, eds. Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt: Schwarze im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz Verlag, 2004)Google Scholar; Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996)Google Scholar; and Matusevich, Maxim, ed. Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2006).Google Scholar