This interdisciplinary project deals with the forms and functions of racial imagery in the construction of European identity/ies, focusing on Black and “mixed-race” alterity language representations within the bounds of Czech-German and Czech-French cultural relations and transfers. With a special focus on the “long” nineteenth century, the research spans five interconnected objectives:
(1) to account for the “scientific” constructions of Black and “mixed-race” alterity in the Czech lands; (2) to survey the translating literature with “colonial” topics for the Czech lands; (3) to analyse the Black and “mixed-race” representations in Czech literature (4) as well as the ascription of surrogate “black” identity in German and French literature to Czechs/Slavs; and (5) identify the instrumentalization of Blackness imagery in cultural-political struggles.
Drawing on the methodology of literary history, translation studies and comparative literature, the research aims especially translations of French literature for the Czech lands, literary works, academic and media discourses and mutual representations of Czechs and Germans as “black”. Thus the project conceives (self-)Africanization as a rhetorical strategy of symbolic exclusion of the “other” (and/or self-exclusion), despite being European, from Europe by either the voluntary assumption or the imposed ascription of a surrogate identity. Besides, the interdisciplinary approach, which includes postcolonial studies, discourse analysis, comparative historical linguistics and insights of anthropology, seeks to shed light on the mixophobic framework of racial naming, notably in its gendered and intersectional dimensions.
