Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - English

PROGRAMME

WORKSHOP PRESENTATION

In the absence of an official colonial history, most Central and Eastern European countries have long been left out of discussions on (post)colonialism. However, the growing interest in colonialism without colonies (Lüthi, Falk, Purtschert 2016) has not only demonstrated the involvement of these countries in the economic, scientific and societal structures of the colonial project, but has also shifted the attention to research on their cultural and artistic production, developing their own colonial fantasies and Blackness imageries. Still, the nation-building representations, both discursive and visual, produced in countries that sought to position themselves between colonial metropolises and imperial centres, often remain under-examined in terms of their “colonial participation”, “complicity” or “innocence”. Regarding the context of the Czech lands, while some historians (Křížová, Malečková 2022) and art historians (Winter 2013) have responded to this challenge, the field of literature produced and received in this region (i.e. not only Czech-language literature) has not yet been conceptually analysed from this perspective. Studies from different fields and methodological positions, though, have pointed to the appearance of both a “colonizing” gaze on America’s Black population in Czech-language fictional and factual narratives (Švéda 2016) and a “colonizing” gaze on Czechs, intersecting Slavs, slaves and Black people in German language texts (Budňák 2010, Gauthier 2015), similar to representations of Poles (Kopp 2012). Staying with the Polish examples, research has also pointed to the subversion of discursive colonization in favor of the “colonized” as a form of empowerment (Uffelmann 2011).

The workshop intends to explore the region of Central and Eastern Europe both as an object and agent of colonial and imperial dynamics. We thus focus on East-Central European modernism and avant-garde as the object of Western art and literary history. As experts on Central and Eastern Europe affirm, the art of the region has been too often treated from a Western, potentially “colonial” perspective, as the historians and specialists have been trying to conform local movements, aesthetic tendencies and schools to the Western narrative of modernism and the avant-garde rather than accepting and explaining local and regional specificities. Inspired by the work of art historians such as Piotr Piotrowski, Eva Forgacs, Marie Rakušanová and Isabel Wünsche, we want to explore the critical meta-discourse and methodology concerning East-Central European modernism and avant-garde. Challenging the still powerful narrative of the centre-periphery dichotomy might thus be a way of “decolonizing” the cultural history of East-Central Europe.

We also aim to explore East-Central European modernism and the avant-garde as an agent of colonial dynamics. In fact, Europe’s “colonial outsiders”, including East-Central Europe, and the former colonial powers share the “modernist urge”, understood as the need for constant innovation, examination of things and exploration. Envisaging Modernism(s) as a totality of aesthetic ideologies and principles that were shaped in the period 1860-1914 and remained dominant before WWII, our investigation will focus on various interplays between science, culture and art. Indeed, racial imageries are at the same time building blocks and products of influential “scientific” and aesthetic theories of the 19th-century, based on racial-climactic criteria (such as La philosophie de l’art de Hyppolyte Taine), and discourses on “(in)purity” of national languages and bodies that feed into the widespread eugenics cultural discourse, which is indissociable from the cultural history of European modernity, its East-Central part included. European avant-garde, empowered by technological advances, are captivated by the “Global South” and imagined Black people. In this excitement, they rethink previous modernist discourses and invent new codes. Nevertheless, alongside “progressive” works praising black Africa and the so-called primitive art, the book market offers new translations of “classic” 19th-century “Western” colonial novels, anchored in pseudo-scientific racial discourses. Also the decadent eroticism that has its roots in such fantasies often remains, only transferred to a new setting. Following Marinetti’s futurist program, we can thus ask whether libraries and archives burn at the same rate everywhere in Europe.

This workshop intends to bring together scholars from different fields such as history, literary history, comparative literature, history of arts, ethnology or translation studies, sharing an interest in exploring Blackness imageries and colonial as well as imperial fantasies in East-Central-European Modernism(s). Applying new methodological approaches to overlooked material and taking into account overlooked aspects of seemingly well-known material, we would like to bring more nuance to discussions about the nature of modernist experiments with 19th century heritage and going into contemporary contexts – in dialogue with contemporary trends in postcolonial studies. How (if) is the legacy of racial “science” reshaped in the minds and hands of avant-garde artists? What are, for example, the new artistic uses of the old mixophobic rhetoric (e.g. mixed-marriage tropes)?

We would also like to reflect together on the conceptualization of the relations created by art between Europe, Africa and the Americas in the period under examination. What “discoveries”, for instance, are offered by the great interest of the East-Central European avant-garde in primitive art? Is this affinity about the European discovery of “the Other” or even more of one’s own otherness or Blackness in relation to the “West”? And what perspectives open up the voices (or statements in a broader sense) of Black artists present in Central and Eastern Europe about the inhabitants of the region? Ultimately, the outlined perspectives, relations, approaches, transformations or attempts at them, typical of the “modern urge” on permanent innovation, raise the question if/how they affect the degree of colonial “participation”, “complicity”, “innocence” of these European “colonial margins”.

Our focus is not at all limited on relations between Central and Eastern European countries and the “Global South”. Racial cartography is capricious and so, for example, in terms of the “purity” of the French language, the “corruption” comes from the “North” and the “East” (McGuinness 2005). Our interest is thus addressed to intersections of Blackness imageries and colonial fantasies with imperial ones in the Central-European context with often fluid national identities within the realm of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its successive nation states after 1918. Papers on individual cases but also on broader contexts of colonialism without colonies are welcome, as well as analyses on (post)colonial aspects of Czech-Slovak, Slovak-Hungarian, Czech-German, German-Polish, Czechoslovak-Ruthenian relations.