Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - English

Publications

 

Special issue

  • Dir. of special issue "Imagery of Blackness and Colonial Fantasies in Central and Eastern European Modernism", Journal of European Studies, 2025.

Translation

Papers

  • Jana Kantoříková: "Colonial Fantasies in Czech Modernism and Avant-Garde", In: Avant-Garde Beyond Metropolis - Volume 1 (1880s-1920s), Cultural History of Central European Avant-Gardes, 2025 (Brill/Rodopi), dir. Beata Hock, Petra James, Steven Mansbach, Agnes Berencz (in preparation).

  • Jana Kantoříková: "Literary Representations of 'Racial Mixing' in Czech Modernism", Journal of European Studies, Spring 2025. 

Abstract: 
This paper aims to demonstrate that colonial discourses on “racial mixing” and their taxonomic intricacies were far from limited to the Western colonial powers. By focusing on literary representations of racial mixing, it offers an analytical overview of this motif in Czech context, while emphasizing its function as a projection surface for colonial fantasies, aspirations of Europeanness and concerns about the integrity and homogeneity of the “national body”, principally fears of the subaltern position associated with “blackness”. Attention is paid to translations of French and German literature (e.g. Eugene Sue, Wilhelm Bauberger) from the first half of the 19th century, to Czech patriotic production (Matěj Karas) and especially to representations of modernists and avant-gardists and their critical perspective (e.g. Jaroslav Hašek, Vítězslav Nezval, Vladimír Raffel). Considering a longer period of time allows to point out some tendencies characteristic of the Czech cultural context, especially its oscillation between mixophobic and mixophilic approach. 

 

  • Jana Kantoříková: “Literary Echoes of the Haitian Revolution in the Czech Lands”, ESamizdat. Rivista Di Culture Dei Paesi Slavi / Journal of Slavic Cultures / Журнал славянских культур, 15, 2023, 193-208.

https://www.esamizdat.it/ojs/index.php/eS/article/view/167

Abstract
The article examines how the topic of the Haitian Revolution resonated in the Czech literary scene in the first half of the 19th century. At the core of the study is Victor Hugo’s early work Bug-Jargal (1826). Based on colonial discourses, the story reflects the hierarchization of displaced Africans and their descendants through a detailed racial classification that 'scientifically' structures colonial society. The Czech version of the novel by Dalibor Kopecký (1839) contains significant changes, allowing racial imagery to be adopted and adapted to the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic goals of the text in its new context. Considering other literary echoes of the Haitian Revolution in the Czech lands and the cultural and political context that preceded the Spring of Nations, the translator’s rewriting emerges as a response to local emancipatory efforts. 

 

Jana Kantoříková:

Abstract:
This paper aims to demonstrate that colonial discourses on “racial mixing” and their taxonomic intricacies were far from limited to the Western colonial powers. By focusing on literary representations of racial mixing, it offers an analytical overview of this motif in Czech context, while emphasizing its function as a projection surface for colonial fantasies, aspirations of Europeanness and concerns about the integrity and homogeneity of the “national body”, principally fears of the subaltern position associated with “blackness”. Attention is paid to translations of French and German literature (e.g. Eugene Sue, Wilhelm Bauberger) from the first half of the 19th century, to Czech patriotic production (Matěj Karas) and especially to representations of modernists and avant-gardists and their critical perspective (e.g. Jaroslav Hašek, Vítězslav Nezval, Vladimír Raffel). Considering a longer period of time allows to point out some tendencies characteristic of the Czech cultural context, especially its oscillation between mixophobic and mixophilic approach.

 

  • Jana Kantoříková: “La mort de Vénus noire et blanche. L’imaginaire de la femme crucifiée dans les beaux-arts et la littérature entre l’Europe centrale et le monde russe”, La Revue Russe, 2023, 91-107.

http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/18452/27669
Abstract
"The death of the black and white Venus. The Imagination of the Crucified Woman in Fine Arts and Literature between Central Europe and the Russian World"
This article explores the representations of the female crucifixion that have proliferated since the second half of the nineteenth century. The symbolic superposition with the Corpus Christi as well as the narrative reference to the Passion of Christ endow the image of the crucified woman with a particular semantic framework that opens it to experimental (self)projections. The analysis, based on visual and literary corpora from the French, Czech and Russian languages, points out the milestones in the evolution of this subversive motif from male-authored portraits of female martyrs to female-authored “self-portraits”. By focusing on the turn of the century and by making the question of the “racial” origin of the crucified women relevant, our analysis shows that the way of representing violence on tormented bodies is far from being universal.

 

  • Jana Kantoříková: “’Auteurs afro‑tchèques’ – Tomáš Zmeškal – Obonete S. Ubam”, Revue des études slaves (in preparation).

 

Related papers

  • Cécile Gauthier–Jana Kantoříková: “Traduire la créolité métisse dans les Pays tchèques: l’exemple des Mystères de Paris d’Eugène Sue”. In: Études romanes de Brno, 42/2, 2021, 163-180. http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/144452

  • Jana Kantoříková: "Bestiaire blanc: l’image de l’Homme et la symbolique du blanc dans la littérature décadente des Pays tchèques". In: Callebat, K. et Grudzinska, A. (éd.): Le blanc, cette “obscure clarté”. La symbolique du blanc dans la culture européenne (XIXe–XXIe siècle). Paris: Sorbonne Université Presses, 2023 (in print).

 

Books

Monograph

  • Jana Kantoříková, Fatální kniha. Dvojí Cyklus rozkoše a smrti Miloše Martena, Prague: Academia, in preparation (planed for 2024/2025).

 

Complete bibliography

https://www.slawistik.hu-berlin.de/de/member/jkantorikova/publikationen