Racialized Performance and the Construction of Slovene Whiteness: Ethnographic Shows and Circus Acts on the Habsburg Periphery, 1880-1914

Abstract

This article explores how encounters with racialized performers that visited the region with touring ethnographic shows and circuses in the late Habsburg period, informed Slovene notions of race. It discusses how this experience not only contributed to the dissemination of Western racial discourses regarding blackness, savagery, civilization and modernity but also tied the emerging Slovene national identity to Europeanness and whiteness.