Black Don Juan and the Ashanti from Asch: Representations of "Africans" in Prague and Vienna, 1892-1899
Abstrakt
This essay addresses the common practice of exhibiting the so called "Africans" in two urban centres of the late 19th-century Habsburg monarchy, namely in Vienna and Prague. The so-called "ethnographic villages" are here presented and analysed as a specific form of commercial entertainment culture, which was linked to the contemporary ideological discourses on race, gender, and national collective.
The examples provided here emphasize the link between the representations of racial and cultural "difference" and the growing concern for the "proper" reproduction of the national collective, which was from the second half of the 19th century in the central European context imagined as a "greater family" and as a racial unity. Moreover, a comparison of Prague and Vienna informs us about the ways in which the figure of "the Other" served as a means of barbarization of different groups of individuals, which were to be distracted from the collective body of the nation.