Attendees of the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans (January 9-12) are warmly invited to attend the IVNS session on “Nabokov, Blackness, and Whiteness” this Saturday (January 11, 2025) at 3:30 p.m. For more information on the 2025 MLA Convention, please click here: https://www.mla.org/Events/2025-MLA-Convention.
Please note: this is an in-person conference panel scheduled for Saturday, January 11th from 3:00-4:45 p.m. at the Hilton Riverside, New Orleans, in Marlborough A (2nd Floor).
Nabokov, Blackness, and Whiteness (Panel #598)
SATURDAY, 11 JANUARY 3:30 PM-4:45 PM
MARLBOROUGH A (HILTON RIVERSIDE NEW ORLEANS)
Sponsoring Entity: International Vladimir Nabokov Society
Presentations:
1. “Ada in Black and White,” Ana Bumber (Paul Sabatier U)
2. “The ‘Wandering Jew’ and the ‘Magical Negro’: Vladimir Nabokov’s Other,” Anoushka Alexander-Rose (U of Southampton)
3. “A Revolution of Values: Reading Lolita with bell hooks,” Agnès Edel-Roy (U of Paris-Est Créteil)
4. “‘Shadows of Leaves / Roundlets of Live Light’: Nabokov in Black and White and the Harmony of Opposites,” Leopold Reigner (U de Rouen-Normandie)
Presiding: Christopher A. Link (State U of New York, New Paltz)
Nabokov, Blackness, and Whiteness
Below please find the abstracts for the scheduled MLA/IVNS panel presentations:
“Ada in Black and White,” Ana Bumber (Paul Sabatier U)
Abstract: In his seminal 1985 monograph Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness, Brian Boyd highlights the intricate duality of Nabokov’s longest novel disclosing both its bright and dark side. As he points out, one of the main characters, Adelaida Veen, is itself described in black and white contrary to her siblings who both have at least some hints of color. Even her family lineage is imbued with different shades of blue. However, despite this chromatic diversity, we will see that both Ada, the character and the imagery throughout the eponym novel Ada remain bi-chromatic for the most part, if one considers black and white to be colors. Its iconic quote “Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive” (ADA 403) hints at this chiaroscuro atmosphere which seem to pervade in it. This choice of black and white is rather interesting considering that Nabokov prided himself with his ability to distinguish different hues. Published in 1969, but written throughout the sixties, starting circa 1962, the writing of this novel coincides with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and a series of protests against segregation epitomized in Nina Simone’s iconic 1964 protest song “Mississippi Goddamn”. Nabokov as a seismographer of his time has managed to capture antisemitism in Berlin in his novel The Gift, which he happened to write throughout 1930’s. In this paper, I will try to unravel the significance of the chromatic choices in Ada and explore the potential link to Nabokov’s commentary against segregation.
“The ‘Wandering Jew’ and the ‘Magical Negro’: Vladimir Nabokov’s Other,” Anoushka Alexander-Rose (U of Southampton)
Abstract: This paper posits that Vladimir Nabokov writes the ‘Other’ through racial types, namely the ‘Wandering Jew’ and the ‘Magical Negro’, defined in their service to the Christian/White protagonist. Although Nabokov’s comments on condemning ‘the jasmine-belt lyncher and the mystical anti-Semite’ are oft-referenced, there is a discernible dissonance between his public rejections of racism and literary tendencies to use reductive ‘types’. Elements of the cinethetic stereotype of the ‘Magical Negro’ can be found in Kinbote’s ‘Negro gardener’ in Pale Fire and the maid Desdemona in Pnin, whose service roles exist to offer the protagonist ‘folk wisdom’ and spiritual guidance. These characters’ Blackness are entangled with Jewishness: discussions of the gardener as ‘Negro’ are mediated through the semantics of antisemitism; Desdemona shares her recognition of Pnin as saint with the squirrel, a resurrection of the Holocaust victim Mira Belochkin. These ‘Magical Negroes’ are reinventions of Nabokov’s ‘Wandering Jew’ figures such as Silbermann in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The Inventor in King, Queen, Knave, and Weinstock in The Eye – liminal characters who magically appear to serve the protagonist – demonstrating Nabokov’s authorial reliance on these narrative ‘types’. Shifting from the ‘Wandering Jew’ in Nabokov’s Russian works, to the ‘Magical Negro’ in his American fiction, reflects the malleability of the racial Other across continents and contexts. This study illuminates how Nabokov writes Jewishness and Blackness through magical service roles, drawing on a tradition of imagined racial ambivalence, and presents a framework for his treatment of the Other as a whole.
“A Revolution of Values: Reading Lolita with bell hooks,” Agnès Edel-Roy (U of Paris-Est Créteil)
Abstract: talking back. thinking feminist, thinking black, the title of a 1989 collection of essays by bell hooks (1952-2021), a Black feminist and intersectional thinker, provides the thread for my proposal to reconsider both the authoritarian interpretation—by white men in a position of domination—of Lolita as a transgressive love story and the mechanism at the heart of this “white” interpretation: to stifle the dissenting, rebellious voices of women, starting (in the story) with the voices of Charlotte and Dolores, the mother and her child, and continuing with the voices of women critics, from the Seventies to the present day.
“Talking back”, as experienced by bell hooks since her childhood, and meaning “speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion” (2015, 1), is precisely what the patriarchal system of white domination cannot stand if it wants to perpetuate itself.
For Lolita and the true story of sexual tyranny endured by Dolores, time has come to talk back. Against the postmodern idea of a novel totally cut off from values and referents, and reading Lolita through bell hooks’ claiming for a « Revolution of Values » (1993) and through her redefinition of love (2000), I will argue that Lolita is not the depiction of a romantic, although transgressive, love story, but the deconstruction by Nabokov of white men’s conceptions of love and beauty, which stifle the voices of females reduced to objects of male consumption and pleasure.
Secondly, it’s time also for the “frigid gentlewomen of the jury” (Humbert Humbert speaking) to talk back, and to consider that the invisibilization of women critics on Lolita, since the Seventies to the present day, is the sign that the white patriarchal system of domination is under threat from dissenting voices calling, like Martin Luther King, for a “shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a ‘person’-oriented society” (quoted by bell hooks, 1993, 7).
Books by bell hooks cited:
1993. “A Revolution of Values: The Promise of Multicultural Change”. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 26, No. 1, Cultural Diversity (Spring, 1993), pp. 4-11.
2000. all about love. new visions. New York: HarperCollins.
2015 [1989]. talking back. thinking feminist, thinking black. New York: Routledge.
“‘Shadows of Leaves / Roundlets of Live Light’: Nabokov in Black and White and the Harmony of Opposites,” Leopold Reigner (U de Rouen-Normandie)
Abstract: There exists a recurring, sharply contrasting image in Nabokov, between lightness and darkness. In The Defense: “[…] the whole world suddenly went dark, as if someone had thrown a switch, and in the darkness only one thing remained brilliantly lit, a newborn wonder, a dazzling islet.” In Pale Fire: “There was a sunburst in my head/And then black night. That blackness was sublime.”
This image is worth analyzing further not merely because of its ubiquity, its potential symbolic implications, its link to a chessboard motif or the evident value in studying the use of light by a writer as visual as Nabokov, but also because of how it relates to a vision of art as the harmony of opposites, presenting the ultimate coordinated contrast.
Further, this contrast is strikingly similar to another recurring image in Nabokov, that of light being seen on the ground, ebbing and flowing inside the shade of rustling branches. This image is present in Speak Memory, in Nabokov’s first “gleam of complete consciousness”, as well as in his lecture on Dead Souls: “I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves” and in Ada, in the game Van and Ada play under the linden and the oak. Perhaps, the contrast between light and dark in Nabokov may be seen as an outgrowth of this foundational image.
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