Blackness Imagery in the Construction of European Identity/ies: The Case of the Czech Lands in a Transnational Perspective

The project explores both forms and functions of imagined Black people for the construction of European identity(ies). The focus will be on French-Czech and German-Czech cultural relationships from the 19th century to the interwar period of the 20th century. Anthropological spectacles and their medial interpretation in the early 19th century, for example, were meant to prove the "maturity" of the young Czech nation and to symbolize the affiliation of the Czech lands with the colonial powers. Czech nationalists also instrumentalized African metaphors and colonial narratives in the political struggle against the Germans, sometimes as a rhetorical "self-Africanization." At the same time, Slav discourse also played an increasing role, i.e., the "black" identity ascribed to Slavs as an "inner colonial discourse." The following areas will be given special attention: Modes of the representation of Black people in Czech literature, translations with "colonial" motifs into Czech, shifts of meaning in terminology, modalities of production and exploitation of Black alterity in the Czech lands, links between fin-de-siècle misogyny and "discursive colonization". Thus, it addresses a nuanced as well as comprehensive reflection on the question to what extent the cultural, intellectual, and scholarly production of a "non-colonial" small nation can participate colonially - even when the members of this nation are considered and represented as colonized objects themselves.