Introduction: Imagery of blackness and colonial fantasies in Central and Eastern European modernism

Abstract

The introduction addresses the broader context of the research topic, presents the state of the art and outlines the objectives and sources of the special issue. Its articles examine literary, artistic and scientific representations of race and the Other, analysing the way Central and Eastern European societies have adopted, adapted or subverted colonial ideas. As a whole, the volume offers interdisciplinary insights into how imagery of blackness and colonial fantasies shaped identities in Central and Eastern Europe, revealing the complexities of modernity, colonialism and racial constructs.

In the absence of an ‘official’ colonial history of their own, most Central and Eastern European countries have long been left out of conversations on (post)colonialism. From the simple fact of the temporal co-existence of colonialism and continental affiliation, however, it would be surprising if this ‘other’ Europe had not developed opinions, emotions or even a relationship with those peoples over which Western powers extended a civilisational domination and with Western Europeans whose political, ideological and cultural apparatus resonated throughout the continent. Debates about the limits of existing understanding of colonialism and imperialism, initiated two decades ago, thus have also gradually shifted attention to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and to research on the engagement of local societies, specifically Austria–Hungary, in the economic, scientific and social structures of the colonial project (Sauer, 2012). An important heuristic impetus for this special issue was the concept of colonialism without colonies (Lüthi et al., 2016), which emphasised the role of cultural, artistic and scientific production – that is, the production of colonial knowledge and imagery in countries not directly involved in colonial expansion.

Concepts characterising the specific forms and degrees of engagement in the colonial project were first developed in the case of the belated colonial powers and the Nordic countries. Susanne Zantop analysed the colonial aspirations of precolonial Germany through the ‘preparatory’ production and dissemination of corresponding discourses and sets of images under the heading of the inspiring notion of colonial fantasies – colonial encounters that are imaginary but, in a way, exemplary of real colonial enterprises (Zantop, 1997). Using Finland as an example, Ulla Vuorela elaborated the concept of colonial complicity, describing the situation of countries without colonial possessions that are ‘seduced’ by Western hegemonic discourses when negotiating their positions of power (Vuorela, 2009). The concept of colonialism without colonies was formulated using cases from the European North. These and other examples have demonstrated that the absence of a colony in the administrative and political sense did not preclude taking a colonial stance towards the Other and copying or ‘creatively’ evolving the colonial model.

Countries of CEE were, then, no exception in this respect, using the same patterns and mechanisms in their search for a place between colonial metropolises ¹ in the West and imperial centres in the East. Research on how the region was involved in colonialism in terms of ‘participation’, ‘complicity’ or ‘innocence’ is currently evolving, in publications such as Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century (Křížová and Malečková, 2022), which examines engagement with the colonial discourse, from artistic representations and museography to missionary expeditions, of three major national communities of Austria–Hungary (the Czech, Slovak and Hungarian). Another recent volume, Staged Otherness: Ethnic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe, 1850–1939, covers the phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people (Demski and Czarnecka, 2021). Race and the Colour-Line: The Boundaries of Europeanness in Poland analyses the history of colonialist racial thought in Poland up to the present (Balogun, 2024). A recent special issue of Complit, ‘Sketches of Black Europe in African and African Diasporic Narratives’, focusses mainly on Central European German-speaking territories, drawing attention to the memory of the colonial experience in contemporary writing (Folie and Zocco, 2023).

These, as well as many other studies, analyse from various methodological positions the relations of CEE to other parts of the continent and to the extra-European world and explore the specificities of the historical experience of this region, including contemporary resonances. The emphasis is placed on global perspectives as well as on intra-European and intra-regional relations. Central and Eastern Europe are not historically, politically and culturally univocal terms. Nor are they designations of a homogeneous region or identity. What we mean by CEE here is rather a geographical space between the Germanic and the Russian world, where power relations are unequal and geopolitics is extremely complex. The ‘production and circulation of knowledge, colonial imaginaries and colonial networks’ (Lüthi, 2022: 207) must therefore be considered in light of this complexity, including dialectical relations between centre and periphery, as well as the dynamics between hegemonic and local discourses.

In a similar way, this special issue seeks to contribute to research on the interactions between Central and Eastern European countries and the scientific and societal structures of the colonial matrix, as developed by Aníbal Quijano. ² In particular, we are concerned with examining the production and display of colonial knowledge and racial thought, becoming expressions of Western modernity, and with analysing artists’ engagement with these powerful tools, whether through their adoption, adaptation or subversion. The position of the societies in the area we are focusing on here is specific: ‘Persistent oscillation between the self-perception as those dominating and those being dominated constitutes one of the characteristics of Central European self-fashioning in the modern era’ (Křížová and Malečková, 2022: 16). This specificity is observable in various types of discourses, including literary representations of imagined black people and gendered representations of their bodies. Concerning the context of the Czech lands, studies from different fields have pointed to the appearance of both a colonial gaze on America’s population of African descent in Czech-language fictional and factual narratives (Švéda, 2016) and a colonial gaze on Czechs, intersecting Slavs, slaves and occasionally black people in German-language texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Budňák, 2010, 2021; Gauthier, 2015). At the same time, research on translations of Western literature into Czech shows that Czechs themselves used some form of identification with enslaved and revolting Africans as part of their national and cultural emancipation in the Habsburg empire (Kalivodová, 2017; Kantoříková, 2022). ³ Still in the Slavic context, Kopp (2012) has highlighted examples of ascribing a ‘black’ identity, associated with enslavability, to Poles in German fin de siècle literature; Luksza (2021) and Uffelmann (2011) have explored cases of subversion of colonial discourse and the self-identification of Poles with the colonised in Polish literature. The question of the relationship between art, colonial knowledge and the racial thought that produces the Other is thus multi-layered, complex and in many ways under-explored. ⁴ As Kristin Kopp shows in her article in this volume on the literary imagination of the German–Polish borderlands, images of slavery or enslavement are not necessarily tied to skin colour, not least in an age of scientific racism and the wide circulation of colonial discourses.

Our purpose in this issue is to explore colonial entanglements in CEE in a multi-perspectival way. The region under study is considered here both as an object and as an agent of colonial and imperial dynamics. Just like the colonial powers, European ‘colonial outsiders’ were driven by the imperative of modernity, understood as the need for constant innovation, discovery and exploration of things, space, others and the self. In their efforts to participate fully in the European civilising mission and knowledge production, Central and Eastern European societies wanted to share the white man’s burden. At the same time, they are aware of their limitations (in terms of geography, demography, administration, etc.) and look for strategies to differentiate themselves from the West. As Markéta Křížová demonstrates in her article ‘Hidden histories of scientific voyeurism: The making of the “African woman” for the Czech spectators of the late nineteenth century’, the way in which the ‘African woman’ was violently constructed in Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century was influenced by the nationalist rivalry between the Czechs and the Germans while emphasising the alleged Czech ‘humanity’ as a distinguishing feature from the Germans. In a similar vein, Jana Kantoříková’s article ‘Literary representations of “racial mixing” in Czech modernism’ points to Czech representations where Czechs are staged as members of a nation at the peak of modernity – in the cultural and technical as well as the moral sense – and as potentially ‘good’ colonisers.

According to Susanne Zantop, in her seminal work, colonial fantasies, which are identity-forming, and nationalist sentiments exist in dangerous proximity. The question then arises: how did modernism negotiate such fantasies when it sought to overcome the national principle with the ideal of internationality and to correct modernising processes driven by the idea of reason and scientific progress – whether by returning to nature, the ‘natural’ order of things, or by recreating the world through art? Envisaging modernism as a totality of aesthetic ideologies and principles that were shaped in the period 1880–1914 and remained dominant up to the Second World War, our investigations focus on interplays between science, culture and art. Indeed, racial sets of images are both the building blocks and the products of influential nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ and aesthetic theories based on racial and climatic criteria – for example, Philosophie de l’art by Hippolyte Taine and (eugenic) discourses about the (im)purity of national languages and bodies. As Anita Frison also demonstrates in her analysis of the image of the black ‘colonial body’ in the Russian context, modernism’s tendency towards abstraction in the sense of transformation into symbols is intrinsically intertwined with the abstracting approaches of scientific classification.

The European avant-garde is captivated by the ‘exotic’ South and imagined black people. In this excitement, it reconsiders previous modernist discourses and invents new codes. Alongside ‘progressive’ works celebrating ‘black’ Africa, so-called primitive art and the idea of bringing continents together, Prague publishers offered translations of ‘classic’ nineteenth-century Western colonial novels based on pseudo-scientific racial discourse. Also the decadent eroticism that has its roots in such fantasies often remains in the 1920s, only transferred to a new setting. The question arises whether the rupture with the past happens in all European regions in the same way. More precisely, how do modern art, literature and culture east of Paris engage with colonial knowledge and the legacy of racial ‘science’? How is this knowledge and heritage handled by an artistic production that ignores modernist experiments and turns to the ancient past and tradition? What ‘discoveries’ are inspired by the interest taken by the Central and Eastern European avant-gardes in African art? Is there an affinity between the European discovery of the Other and its own otherness or ‘blackness’ in relation to the cultural West?

Answers to these and other questions can be sought, this issue suggests, through comparative and interdisciplinary research. This volume, therefore, brings together scholars from disciplines such as history and ethnology, art history, literary history – whether Slavic, Germanic, Romance or African – and translation studies who share an interest in exploring the imaginary of blackness and colonial fantasies related to CEE, whether produced in or applied to the region. After all, is it actually possible to consider blackness and colonial fantasies separately? The imagery encompassed by the notion of ‘blackness’, which the contributions in this issue discuss, is a colonial fantasy – more precisely, a colonial construct of the essential otherness of colonised or – to-be-colonised populations that served as a power instrument and source of phantasms. Aníbal Quijano stated that ‘“color” is a belated and euphemistic way of saying “race” – a usage that did not become worldwide until the end of the 19^th century’ (Quijano, 2007: 51). In this sense, blackness is a product of the coloniality of power par excellence, an expression of the colonial matrix that extends far beyond colonial powers. ‘Colonial knowledge production did not require a colonial state of its own’, notes Barbara Lüthi (2022: 209), and returning to the Czech context before 1918, there is no necessity for a state either; a national community is sufficient. But there are, of course, other understandings and uses of the term blackness, particularly in the sense of identity construction or even identity claims of black persons. The relationship between Central and Eastern European discourses of blackness and artistic performances of blackness, on the one hand, and the aesthetic-political movement of Négritude, on the other, are thus the subject of two articles in this issue: ‘“Négritude” as a critique of civilisation prose fiction and cultural theory of German and French avant-gardes’ by Urs Urban and ‘Unbounded avant-gardes: On the reciprocity of Central European modernism and the movements for African poetics’ by Nadjib Sadikou.

This special issue was initiated at a workshop on the imagery of blackness and colonial fantasies in CEE, held 21–22 September 2023 at the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin and organised by the Humboldt University of Berlin in collaboration with the Modernitas Research Centre MSH, ULB Brussels. The issue brings together seven research articles that, applying new methodological approaches to overlooked material and taking into account neglected aspects of seemingly familiar material, seek to expand our understanding of the region’s embrace of modernity and modernist experiments with nineteenth-century heritage, as well as of the complex relationships between Europe and Africa that art and culture have helped to shape. The case studies deal with various types of sources and corpora, including ego-documents, journalism, literature and visual art, with a particular focus on the interaction between different media, as in the case of Markéta Theinhardt’s ‘Academic posing “in Black”: Drawings and illustrations by František Kupka’ and Anita Frison’s ‘On colonial bodies: Poetics and politics of blackness in Russian modernism’.

The cultural–historical and geographical scope of the issue is broad, stretching from metropolitan France and the belated colonial power of Germany to imperial Russia. In addition to the central position of the Europe–Africa relationship, the spotlight is on intra-European ties – Czech–German, German–Polish or German–French – and the relationship of the Russian empire to the West. All the concerned countries, powers, societies and national communities involve Africa and its population, ‘captured’ in various representations, while negotiating their positions. It is productive to observe borders, not so much of states and empires but of cultures and languages. Finally, colonialism in the sense of perceiving and constructing otherness (conscious and unconscious) through a Western lens – that is, through the lens of the Eurocentric colonial episteme and the adaptation of strategies and preconceptions based on it – is borderless.

The issue starts with the article by Markéta Křížová which focusses on the stories of three racialised and sexualised women. She explores the specificities of the Czech, and more generally Central European, view of the African continent, particularly its ‘symbolic appropriation’ through the display of African women’s bodies. During the nineteenth century, a Czech discourse drawing parallels between the Slavic peoples oppressed by the Germans and the colonised populations of Africa or the Americas occasionally emerges. By the late nineteenth century, however, as Křížová demonstrates, a discourse performing the symbolic colonial ‘whiteness’ of the Czech national community has prevailed. Attempts to prove the modernity of the Czech lands lead to the adoption and even the amplification of inferiorising representations of the black Other. Křížová’s contribution to the research on Czech colonial complicity, critically analysing its gender dimension, eventually relates the question to contemporary reactions to the European refugee crisis after 2015.

The context of the Czech lands and the question of engagement with Western colonial discourse are also addressed by Jana Kantoříková’s article on representations of ‘racial mixing’. The emphasis is therefore on language as a central means of knowledge-based activities and its use in literary fiction that (re)produces colonial knowledge and offers symbolic access to colonial space. This analysis, focusing on mixed-race characters, demonstrates that the adoption, adaptation and gradual domestication of colonial racial imagery and racial nomenclature are closely intertwined with the question of Czech national self-determination, and the relationship to the non-European Other reflects – whether with seriousness or self-irony – a competitive relationship with other European nations as well as a critical stance towards one’s own (national) community. The idea of the ‘blackness’ of the Czech national body in the analysed corpus is thus connected, apart from the fear of the subaltern position, for example, with aspirations for ‘true’ and modern Europeanism or, in the aesthetic experiments of the avant-garde, with messianic visions.

Anita Frison’s article shifts the perspective towards imperial Russia, rather absent in works on representations of bodies subjected to the coloniser’s gaze. Focusing on the imagery of the black African body, she analyses different media, including photography with its ethnographic potential, painting, literature and ego-documents. As Frison demonstrates, the African body becomes an object of ethnographic research of the ‘European standard’, an instrument of competition with the West and, in its deformed form, a metaphor for modern anxiety or a symbol of criticism of the Western world (specifically Belyi’s disturbing representation of colonial France in his African Diary). What is at stake here is the construction of identity (as in the case of the Czechs, though the scale is not the same) – that is, the possibility of identifying with the civilisational level of Europe or the West but also the possibility of ‘claim[ing] Russia’s place as a better example of a civiliser’.

The visual representations of the black body as ‘other’ are also the subject of the Markéta Theinhardt’s case study on František Kupka. She explores the satirical and socially critical work of this Czech artist-philosopher based in Paris, with a focus on his collaborative work with the geographer Élisée Reclus, revealing Kupka’s anti-colonial visual realisations as integral to his convictions as a free thinker, for example his confrontation of the stereotypical ideas about the ‘primitive’ spirituality of non-European civilisations with the religious prejudices and superstitions of (Christian) Europe. Theinardt also demonstrates that Kupka’s illustrations reinforce the parallel Reclus draws between slaves in America and serfs in Russia, depicting a shared experience of oppression. Despite the fact that these ‘modern allegories’ are determined by predetermined visual schemes, they resort to an optimistic vision of an expanding modern world.

Kristin Kopp in ‘On the colour of slavery and servitude in the literary imagination of the German-Polish borderlands’ shows that in Central European literature at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the conceptual link between enslavability and ‘blackness’ is one of the possibilities in the literary imagining of ethnic and cultural differences in the region. She draws attention to the over-determination of intrinsic links between both concepts, pointing to two historical novels, the German Ernst Wicher’s Heinrich von Plauen and Polish Heinrich Sienkiewicz’s Krzyżacy as examples of depictions of European slavery and serfdom that are not the result of the supposed racial difference. Both novels deal with the related reasons that make several ethnic groups enslavable, but skin colour and physical features do not enter into the discussion. In a similar vein, Kopp cautions against presuppositions about the structuring of Eastern European thought by discourses ‘identified in the Western European cultural contexts’.

Urs Urban, in contrast, exploits a Western context and its connection to a paradoxical case of ‘colonialism without colonies’ in Germany after the First World War and analyses the anti-European discourses of European authors based on the exoticisation of the Other, namely black Africans. Urban offers a reading of Claire Goll’s Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa and Philippe Soupault’s Le Nègre, examining how they work with the imagery of blackness and looking for the links to the later influential concepts of négritude by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, grounded in the experience of colonial violence and oppression. In the case of Claire Goll’s novel from 1926, that ‘pleads for the recognition of identity and difference and, with this in mind, develops its own identity-political programme’, Urban considers it an implicit precursor of the ‘theory’ of Négritude with its associated challenges.

The framing of the notion of négritude is also addressed in Nadjib Sadikou’s article, which explores interconnections between African and Central European politics and poetics of ‘worldmaking’. Focusing on two famous Dadaists, the Romanian-Jewish poet Tristan Tzara and the German poet Hugo Ball, the article demonstrates how the border-crossing avant-garde movement sought to break down the power asymmetry between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘primitive’ and negate the supposed superiority of Western art. As Sadikou argues, the two poets’ performances exerted an influence on the African Caribbean Césaire, just as the classical works of German literature inspired the Senegalese Senghor.

This special issue follows the great journey we started in September 2023, and we hope it can encourage the further development of research in this field and strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue.