Hidden histories of scientific voyeurism: The making of the ‘African woman’ for Czech spectators of the late nineteenth century

Abstract

The article explores how the ‘African woman’ was constructed in Central Europe (namely, the Czech lands) of the late nineteenth century within the context of the colonialist fantasies that arose around the modernisation processes and nationalist competitions of this period. Case studies of three African women who at some point became entangled with and known within the Czech lands (a young African maidservant, an ethnographic show performer and a native woman as object of anthropological study) open the possibility of analysing the particularities of Czech, and more generally Central European, perceptions and symbolic appropriations of the African continent through the bodies of African women.