Literary representations of ‘racial mixing’ in Czech modernism

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate that colonial discourses on ‘racial mixing’ and their taxonomic intricacies were by no means limited to the Western colonial powers. By focusing on literary representations of racial mixing, it offers an analytical overview of this motif in the Czech context, while emphasising 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. Eugène Sue, Wilhelm Bauberger) from the first half of the nineteenth century, to Czech patriotic productions (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 the author to point out some tendencies characteristic of the Czech cultural context, especially its oscillation between mixophobic and mixophilic approaches.

The colonial gaze places a black person at the antipode of the paradigm represented by the white European man and as such that black person embodies the ultimate alterity. Nineteenth-century science not only acquiesces to this perspective but even exacerbates it. The position of so-called mixed-race people in this hierarchical structure of races ¹ was always specific, for their mere existence undermined the binary constellation by which the so-called civilised world legitimised its colonial enterprises. In an attempt to maintain the hierarchical order, colonial administrations developed detailed racial classifications that structured the emerging societies. ² In spite of different approaches in various territories, the common objective was to ensure the social distinction of the mixed-race people from the white population.

We might assume that questions pertaining to so-called racial mixing between black and white people and the associated taxonomic intricacies were exclusive to the colonial powers and their reification of administrated populations. However, symbolic representations of the relations between people assigned to different racial groups gained a much greater reach and application. Colonial racial imagery and terminology nourished nation-building discourses relatively early even in countries whose contact with non-European populations was minimal. Eloquent in this respect is the statement of the philologist Josef Jungmann, a key figure of the Czech National Revival, who in 1814 resorted in his defence of the Czech language to a clearly ‘mixophobic’ rhetoric, directed primarily against Czechs who lacked national awareness and were too open to the German language. The disappearance of the Czech language, Jungmann (1814: 195) argued, would deprive the Czechs of their nationality, understood as character, virtue and spirit, and thus make them resemble ‘mulattoes’, ‘Moorish-Arabs’ and other ‘mixed-race’ people. ³ This aggressive metaphor of incompatibility, borrowed from German nationalist and gymnastics educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, ⁴ is just one example of the local application of racial imagery and terminology, reflecting concerns about the integrity and homogeneity of the national body ⁵ and fears of the subaltern position associated with ‘blackness’.

By focusing more specifically on literary representations of racial mixing, I want to attempt an analytical overview of this motif while emphasising its function as a projection surface for local fears and desires, including colonial ambitions. Indeed, for countries without colonies, ⁶ literary, artistic and in broader sense cultural production was a crucial means of approaching the reality of the colonial world and symbolically accessing this space. In the Czech context, moreover, writing in the Czech language had traditionally had a special significance – as an activity of conquest itself, seeking to prove the civilisation level of the national community. While this article focuses mainly on the modernism and avant-garde of the 1920s – a period when the question of racial mixing was no longer just an abstract encyclopaedic entry or part of a narrative from faraway lands – the ‘productive reception’ (Kalivodová, 2010) of this motif through nineteenth-century translation and its use within the literary staging of Czechs in colonial enterprises will also be addressed. In an attempt to cover a longer period of time, we want to point out some tendencies that seem to be symptomatic of the Czech cultural context, especially its navigating between ‘mixophobic’ and ‘mixophilic’ approaches.

The linguistic conquest of cultural space

Until the late nineteenth century, for the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Czech lands, encounters with non-Europeans took place through discursive and visual representations. Mixed-race people were first presented to the general Czech reading public as insurgents by press coverage of the Haitian revolution (1791) and to the scientific community as an anthropological phenomenon subject to moral condemnation (Jungmann, 1831: 551). The strategy of strengthening Czech national identity by naming all relevant segments of reality has even led to the creation of a ‘purely’ Czech nomenclature for mixed-race people, though the imported one of Latin origin seems to remain in use (Gauthier and Kantoříková, 2021; Kantoříková, 2022).

A more developed, if stereotyped, image of people who are neither black nor white was offered by literary translation. The desire for exotic topics is combined here with the aim of cultivating the national language and thus catching up with the more advanced German culture and European literature in general. We encounter various kinds of adaptation of the colonial racial imaginary to local readers and their experience of the world: some elements, such as racial nomenclature or specific body markers, are absent, other elements are added (for instance, introductions and explanatory notes). Furthermore, racial imagery could also be regulated ‘from above’, as the dissemination of foreign literature and its translations within the Habsburg empire was subject to censorship, also resulting in self-censorship. French Romantic literature in particular came into the crosshairs, often regarded as mere entertainment based on loose morals (Reznikow, 2002; Wögerbauer et al., 2015). This strain is evidenced, for example, by the transformation of the character of Cecily, the ‘créole métisse’ from Eugène Sue’s bestseller Les Mystères de Paris [The Mysteries of Paris] (Sue, 2009 [1842–1843]: 831): in the anonymous Czech translation from 1862, all the physical signs of the character’s invisible ‘blackness’ disappear, and her unrestrained sexuality becomes much more chaste (Gauthier and Kantoříková, 2021). In contrast, the Czech translation of the play Tony (1812) by Theodor Körner, a German author living in Vienna, did not undergo in 1823 any fundamental changes in sexual and moral tones. Indeed, there was little need for it, since the dramatic love story of a young girl who could ‘pass for a white’ and a white man, set against the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, takes place with the blessing of the Christian God. Thus, the issue for the Czech–Austrian context was not the depiction of crossing the so-called colour line per se, but its moral framework, including the reputation of the author or national literature in question.

Another eloquent example is the novel for young adults by the Bavarian author (and medical doctor) Wilhelm Bauberger (1849), entitled Die Negerin in Guayana. In this story, racial mixing is explicitly spiritualised under the auspices of the Catholic Church, while it is linked to the idea of whitening in both physical and symbolic terms: a Portuguese missionary priest grants a black slave woman the name Blanka evoking whiteness, marries her to a white man named Albin, and they give birth to a ‘mulat Albino’, ⁷ who becomes a role model worthy of following. The popularity of the novel in the Czech lands is evidenced by the fact that it was translated into Czech twice and published six times between 1851 and 1884. ⁸

Literary translation thus brings the ‘exotic’ reality into intimate proximity with the Czech readership: the geographic specifics are explained, the names of black and mixed-race people are Czechized. Nevertheless, these are still observations – whether of the colony or the colonial metropolis – from a ‘safe distance’. Although the narrativisation offered the possibility of identification with these characters, in other contexts the image of racial mixing as bizarre and spectacular was fostered. The figure of a ‘mulatto’ even became a fairground attraction: as reported by the local press, Bergheer’s Theatre in the late 1860s in Prague and Brno presented among other curiosities an ‘automate mulatto’. ⁹

Literary encounters in faraway lands

In 1879 Emil Holub, the ‘Czech Livingstone’, returned from his 7-year African expedition and in 1883 set off for Africa for the second time. The interest in this continent and its population was growing, and this was particularly evident in popular culture, which combined ethnographic observation with entertainment. A key figure in this respect was Matěj Karas, a high school teacher who supplied the general public with his sixty-page adventure books in which he introduced Czech characters to distant lands. The patriotic, educational tone of this writing successfully contributed to the positioning of the Czech and Czechoslavic we/us in European colonial coordinates.

With Karas, the topic of interracial relations and racial mixing enters Czech fiction, but so far very cautiously. While French author Pierre Loti publishes in 1881 the novel Le Roman d’un spahi [The Novel of a Spahi], about the tragic relationship between a French soldier in Senegal and a local woman, ¹⁰ the attitude of Karas’s Czech settlers and travellers remains to observe from a distance. Thus, in the story V území Zulukafrů [In the Territory of the Zulukaffirs] (1883), we meet a brave diamond digger named Štěpán Holub who, like other European nations, conquers the African south. In a typical ethnographic introduction, the reader learns that ‘The Griks, descendants of Dutch settlers and Hottentot women, live north of the Oranje River’ ¹¹ (Karas, 1883: 7). The reader also soon learns that Mr Holub marries a British settler, Mary, and together they have five offspring. Needless to say, the surname of the male character is not chosen at random for this colonial fantasy – ‘Holub’, the embodiment of Czech colonial ambitions, becomes a symbol and a role model. ¹²

Another of Karas’s educational stories in an African setting was aimed at a young female readership. V zemi Namaův [In the Land of the Nama] (1885b), introduces the character of Anna Černá, a young, emancipated Czech traveller who follows her missionary brother. She is guided through the wilderness by a black man, Bob (‘černoch Bob’), of unspecified identity, who protects her from the savage tribes. But Anna is not a passive figure – she uses the knowledge of African languages she learned at Oxford and saves Bob’s life when he is bitten by a snake. Their relationship is represented in various ways as one of equals: a white civilised woman (whose surname, Černá, means ‘black’ in Czech) and a black civilised man are pulling together. Despite their mutual understanding, however, the representation of something other than a friendly relationship is not possible given the social codes of the time and the genre.

While interracial relations in an African setting would seem excessive, the American context is different and provides other narrative possibilities. At the opening of another of Karas’s stories, Dcera otrokářova [Slaver’s Daughter] (1885a), we encounter a description typical of passing stories:

The slender, slight body agrees with this beautiful face, from whose movements natural grace and unfeigned loveliness shine forth. [. . .] But none of us knows that a drop of black people’s blood still flows in the veins of this beautiful girl. (1885a: 10) ¹³

For Czech plantation overseer Karel Fiala, however, the racial origin of his future wife, ‘Miss Mary’, is not an issue. He eventually even becomes a convinced abolitionist and liberator of slaves. The story concludes with his plan to visit Prague with his wife. Although this theme is not developed further, there is a pact between the reader and the text about the social acceptability of Mary’s racial origin – she is beautiful and her ‘blackness’ not visible.

Characterised by an interest in ethnographic accuracy, on one hand, and generalisations on the other, Karas’s literary production thus moves between two poles: the struggle against ‘savage’ black people in Africa and the defence of black slaves in America. Both positions correspond to the self-presentation of the Czechs as a culturally, technically and morally advanced nation – compared to the uncivilised Africans and the uncivilised manners of the slaveholders in America.

Blurring of borders? Cherchez la femme!

From the 1880s onward, the opportunities for the Czech urban population to encounter non-Europeans changed. In addition to discursive and visual representations (book and magazine illustrations or posters), the possibility of direct contact, albeit culturally and ‘scientifically’ mediated, emerged. The physical presence of ‘Africans’ in Prague at the turn of the century as part of the so-called ethnographic shows, together with the mobility of Czech artists, is gradually reflected not only in the frequency of artistic representations of interracial relations and racial mixing but also in their form. A novel comparable to Peter Altenberg’s (2008 [1897]) Ashantee, which directly responds to a Viennese ‘human zoo’ while oscillating between a critique of such an exhibition and pure voyeurism, is lacking in Czech literature. ¹⁴ What there is, however, is the exoticisation and eroticisation of black women’s bodies by a white male gaze, both in journalism (Herza, 2020) and in modernist fiction. For instance, in Miloš Marten’s (1907) Cyklus rozkoše a smrti [The Cycle of Pleasure and Death] there appears the nameless and abstract character of a ‘black nymphomaniac’ (‘černá nymfomanka’), and František Langer (1910) puts at the centre of his short story collection Zlatá Venuše [The Golden Venus] an ‘African woman’, a black woman specified as a ‘mulatta’ Pao (‘Afričanka’, ‘černá žena’, ‘mulatka’). ¹⁵ Racial imagery thus gradually becomes ‘domesticated’ in the Czech cultural context, even though these are images that take place neither in the Czech setting nor in the ‘Global South’ but in the European south – in Italy, a popular backdrop for decadent literature. Langer’s The Golden Venus and Marten’s The Cycle of Pleasure and Death are colonial erotic fantasies, and these episodes remain symptomatically without offspring. Rather than the motif of racial incompatibility and the resulting infertility that can be found in French colonial literature (Yee, 2000), the main concern here is the general meaning of infertility, typical of images of doom in radical modernism – that is, the art of decadence.

Demographic and cultural changes at the beginning of the twentieth century bring representations of a new couple: a black man and a white Czech woman, a couple that is supposed to threaten the idealised image of the national body that associates moral purity with ‘whiteness’. This idea is explicitly, if hyperbolically, expressed in the novel on Czech immigrants in North America Na prahu nového světa [On the Verge of the New World] (1903), by Václav Alois Jung. In this story, a Czech maidservant Andula is ostracised as a renegade for her love for Mr Washington, an African American, called by Andula ‘Vašíček’ (she Czechized his name, which thus recalls the name of St Wenceslas/Václav, the patron saint of the Czech lands). The maidservant’s Czech employer, the editor Pabuňka, is disgraced and in revenge publishes the following report about her in a Czech emigrant newspaper:

We learn with great regret that the Czech Andula Novotná, the maid to one of our most esteemed citizens, who paid for her passage from Bohemia and watched over her as she was the apple of his eye, has repaid him with black ingratitude. She ran away from his house this week and married the barber Blackberry, a full-blooded black man. Because the Czech nation is ashamed of such a daughter, it expels her from its bosom like an unclean sheep. We also report this to her unfortunate parents and extend our deepest condolences to them and her former master. (Jung, 1903: 42) ¹⁶

Against such an excommunication, based on the idea of national danger, stands the opinion of another Czech journalist, Jung’s alter ego, who evokes the idea of racial mixing as a way for the small Czech nation to rise to the top of the civilised world (světovost): ‘– What a shame? – I argued. The Spanish, the Dutch, the French and the English mix with the dark-skinned – why should we stay behind them?’ (1903: 41). ¹⁷ It is not without significance that the Germans, who were in general associated with segregationist colonialism, are absent from this list. ¹⁸ The competitive relationship to Germany is nevertheless present. The question that is implicitly posed is whether the Czech nation should follow the ‘German’ model of racial purity of the national body on its path to Europeanism and cultural progress or seek a different model.

As in the new century the possibility of ‘encounters of the bodies’, even on Czech soil, grows, so does the emotionality around the topic of racial mixing and its political dimension. In this constellation, the figures of white women take on new ‘typical’ features. Although the equality of interracial relations is often questioned by at least one perspective as the basis of the conflict, and all sorts of racial stereotypes accumulate, the white Czech woman is not unequivocally portrayed as the passive victim of the sexually aggressive black man. The character of the emancipated Andula in Jung’s On the Verge of the New World, for example, appreciates that the mild-mannered Washington, unlike Czech men, does not shy away from chores. S. K. Neumann, a left-wing poet, even inverts the traditional paternalistic cliché and presents a black man as the victim of a white woman. In the poem ‘Černoch’ [‘A Black Man’] (1911), we read: ‘Oh, big, brown baby! I do not ask how you got here. / You are some white gentleman’s dog, / in some atmosphere of venality and doom / the power is taken from you by a depraved European woman’ (Neumann, 1936 [1918]: 99). ¹⁹ Given the infantilisation of the main figure, however, even this attitude remains protectionist, paternalistic – in other words, trapped inside the colonial discourse.

Another approach Czech modernism took to the topic was hyperbolisation and cruel comicality, intended to undermine the middle-class vision of order and good manners. From the period between 1911 and 1914 comes the farce Větrný mlynář a jeho dcera [The Windmiller and His Daughter], whose authorship or co-authorship is sometimes attributed to Jaroslav Hašek. ²⁰ Its plot partly follows the popular romantic tragedy by Erst Raupach (1835 [1830]) Der Müller und sein Kind [The Miller and His Child], about the unhappy love of a poor boy, Konrad, and a rich miller’s daughter, Marie, while offering a provocative modern version of a passing for ‘white’ (man) story. The character of the black man, Konrád, in The Windmiller condenses a multitude of stereotypes: originally an African prince, he became a factory worker in Europe, a French soldier captured during the Franco-Prussian War (in the Battle of Belfort), later a servant to the famous Prague maidservant Černá Máry (‘black Mary’) ²¹ and finally a miller’s helper. He is not presented as a noble savage but rather as a cunning deceiver. The motif of mimicry is carried to absurdity, for it is the white flour covering Konrád’s skin that allows him to seduce Marie. The comedy turns into an antique tragedy: the miller kills Konrád, since he wanted to denounce the miller’s flour fraud, and Marie kills her father. Finally, Marie is about to commit infanticide and kill herself.

The blame does not fall on the greedy father with racial biases or on the seducer, but on the woman’s ‘carelessness’ – that is, her uncontrolled sexual instinct. In the final part, Marie claims,

Whether anyone would believe it, or rather not, / that such a fruit of my sinful love will spring forth, / to me the knowledge, alas, too late, had dawned, / that I, poor thing, got mixed up with a black man. The story of life now played out, / was especially chosen for ladies and gentlemen / with the assumption that it would briefly instruct them / in the basics of human zoology, or as it is otherwise called today, / eugenics. Where one race mingles with another, later certainly one will regret. / And I confess my cruel guilt, I cultivated this mixture. / And instead of many vain words, I prefer to kill my child and myself. (Hašek et al., 1976: 136) ²²

While the grotesqueness of this farce, including its rhyming form, makes it impossible to take this eugenic exemplum seriously, the fact remains that its target is female sexuality. The woman is not portrayed as a passive victim of a sexually aggressive black man, but neither is she a convinced advocate of the equality of all people or a free being deciding about her sexuality. ²³ On the contrary, she is depicted as a person subject to her instincts and therefore appears racially and nationally ‘unreliable’.

While we have no reliable testimony, we may assume that before the First World War The Windmiller and His Daughter was performed by the anarchist group around Hašek, like many other farces they authored, in the Prague pub U Zvěřinů. ²⁴ A similar picture of racial mixing can, however, be found in one of the most famous novels of Czech literature, authored by Hašek himself – Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války [The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War] from 1922. Also, here the motif of eugenics appears: one of the Czech soldiers is looking forward to the transfer of his regiment to Hungary with a view to enjoying sexual adventures with local women, while invoking the theory of racial mixing as the best cure for degeneration. Švejk follows it up with a story about the background of a famous Prague waiter. The narration gathers typical sensational motifs such as royal origins, the shock of a black child’s skin. ²⁵ All this is presented with the absurd exaggeration, brevity and vulgar humour characteristic of the so-called pub tale (hospodská historka), the genre on which Hašek’s cult novel is built:

As for this reciprocal mating’, noted Švejk, ‘it is an altogether interesting thing. In Prague there is a black waiter, Kristián, whose father was the Abyssinian king, and he let himself be shown in a circus on the Štvanice Island in Prague. A teacher who used to write little poems about shepherds and a brook in the woods for the Lada magazine fell in love with him, she went to a hotel with him and fornicated with him, as it is called in the Holy Scriptures, and she was tremendously baffled that the little boy she birthed was totally white. Yeah, but after two weeks the little boy started turning brown. He was turning brown and browner, and after a month he began turning black. By the time a half a year was up he was as black as his daddy, the Abyssinian king. She went to the dermatology disorders clinic with him so that they would decolor him somehow, but there they told her that it was real, genuine black Moorish skin and that there was nothing that could be done. So she lost her mind over it, started seeking advice in magazines, asking what worked against Moors, and they drove her away to the Katerinky madhouse and they put the little Moor in an orphanage where they had him for a source and target of tremendous fun. Then he was apprenticed as a waiter and would go dancing from one night cafe to another. There are nowadays being born after him with great success Czech mulattoes in his likeness, who are not as colored anymore as he is. A med student who used to come to the Chalice was telling us once that it was not so simple, though. Such mixed blood half-breed begets mixed blood half-breeds again and at that point they are already indistinguishable from white people. But all of a sudden, in some generation, he said, a black man emerges. Imagine the nasty trouble. You marry some miss. The darling miscreant hussy is totally white and all of a sudden she bears you a black. And if nine months ago she went without you to a variety show to watch an athletic competition where some black guy performed, here I must think that there would still be a bug drilling through your mind a little after all. (2011: 85–86) ²⁶

Similar to the previous texts, this urban legend, which recalls turn-of-the-century ethnographic shows, operates with the motif of female carelessness and at its core echoes the sensational journalistic discourse of the late nineteenth century. The interracial relationship in Czech modernist literature is thus either an erotic motif of decadent literature, characteristically devoid of offspring, or the birth of an offspring is presented as an intimate drama of national scope. In both cases, the aim is above all to épater la bourgeoisie.

Domestication of racial imagery and avant-garde eugenics

In the 1920s, the Czech national problem – that is, its subaltern position within the Austro-Hungarian empire – was (provisionally) solved by the establishment of the nation state of Czechoslovakia, and young artists, including the poet Vítězslav Nezval, fully embraced avant-garde experiments with language and form. Although in his play Depeše na kolečkách [Dispatch on Wheels] (1922), the motif of the seduction of a white saleswoman by a black man (without further specification) resembles more of a caricature à la Hašek, ²⁷ the avant-garde sought a different approach to the topic. In these projections of the new world, the motif of racial mixing is not meant to be a threat to the national body or an ironisation of Czech catching up with colonial powers but a symbol of openness to life and the world, to alterity and imagination. In Nezval’s poem ‘Podivuhodný kouzelník’ [‘The Wonderful Magician’] (1922), which also has a socially critical subtext, an idyllic vision of a European man kissing a ‘mulatto’ woman in a cornfield appears alongside a reference to Moscow, symbol of the future and progress. The poem ‘Cocktailly’ [‘Cocktails’] even proclaims ‘the century of the mixed-race people’:

I gave myself up completely undisturbed to my alchemy of Cocktails / But this mixed-race [person] Where? How? From where? / The black man put his hot mouth / On her white neck / In New York variété he thinks fondly / Of his fair Muse of Seville / Hooray for the century of the mixed-race people! A century of this new magic / We have had too much pure blood / Behold, this gentleman is a pure Arab! But this glorious century of the mixed-race people / We have invented a means to disinherit [. . .] Disinheritance! Thanks to my imagery, I can indulge with impunity in this / crazy poetic force that is innate in the mixed-race people. (Nezval, 1924: 135) ²⁸

In this celebration of imagination and creativity, racial mixing and liberation metaphorically merge. Along with this symbolic ‘mixophilia’, we can observe another specific phenomenon in the Czech avant-garde, namely, the sovereign transfer of racial imagery and terminology to the local setting in order to eroticise the local women. We encounter such domestication of colonial imagery in particular in Konstantin Biebl’s (2014 [1928]) poetry collection, inspired by his travels to Java, S lodí, jež dováží čaj a kávu [With a Ship that Imports Tea and Coffee]. For example, in the poem ‘Na bílém polštáři’ [‘On a White Pillow’], the lyrical subject addresses the following words to his beloved: ‘On a white pillow, you look like a mulatto’ (Biebl, 2014 [1928]: 162). ²⁹ The context, though, suggests that this is a declaration by a white (Czech) man to a white girl.

In the late 1920s, the discourse on racial mixing is highly polyphonic, or rather cacophonous: alongside utopian visions of the avant-garde, unflattering representations circulate through the cultural space in new (and literal) translations of colonial novels by French classics such as Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas. ³⁰ Let us note that the personality of the latter, about whose racial origin anecdotes circulated in the Czech press already in the nineteenth century, ³¹ visibly destabilised the modern eugenics movement. Thus, the physician and anthropologist Jindřich Matiegka, in his treatise Všeobecná nauka o plemenech [General Doctrine of Races] (1929), cautiously presented Dumas, followed by Alexander Pushkin, as exceptions: ‘These are, however, cases which do not prove that racial mixing is always harmless or even beneficial. In this respect, the opinions of scholars still differ considerably’ (1929: 218). ³²

Another Czech physician and member of the avant-garde, Vladimír Raffel, undermines the perspective of mainstream scientific discourse with his literary work. The short story ‘Elektrický kouzelník mezi černochy’ [‘The Electric Magician among Black People’] (1928) offers a counter-narrative to segregationist racism by inverting its principles. In this story, a symbolic ‘one white drop’ leads an African woman to seek a white partner. She is guided on her journey by a magician, a kind of higher principle ensuring the world’s balance akin to Nezval’s wonderful magician. The white Englishman fails, for he has abandoned the pregnant woman. So the higher principle puts a Senegalese medical student ³³ in her path, who accepts the child as his own. Nevertheless, the electric magician rejoices in his work, for racial eugenics (‘rasová eugenika’) here does not mean the preservation of racial purity but, on the contrary, successful racial mixing (Raffel, 1928: 55).

Conclusion

As I have tried to show, during the nineteenth century, representations of interracial relations and racial mixing in the ‘non-colonial’ Czech context went through various mutations, which can be seen in both early literary translations and the original Czech production. The intention was to tailor these representations to the local readers and their lives and literary experiences. Thus, some widespread colonial motifs and plots are missing (such as fingernails as a racial ‘trait’, detailed observation of skin complexion), including typical characters and corresponding allusions (e.g. the name Georges for ‘mulatto’ in French literature). In addition, the colonial racial imaginary was also under the spectre of regulation from above. Due to Austrian censorship (and self-censorship), for example, the stereotype of the mixed-race woman as a symbol of unbridled sexuality only appeared in Czech literature at the turn of the century, although in the French and German context it had spread much earlier.

Representations of the other often reveal much more about the one who represents them than about the represented themselves. This is no different in the case of representations of racial mixing, where the relationship to the non-European other strongly reflects the relationship to one’s own national community and the relationship to other European nations (conflicts, cultural and social catching up, competition). After all, Jungmann’s ‘mixophobic’ outburst to defend the Czech nation against Germanisation was primarily a shot at his own ranks. Also, the literary representations analysed here always seem to be to some extent in relation to the question of Czech national identity and self-determination. The ethnographic interest characteristic of nineteenth-century artistic and intellectual production goes hand in hand not only with colonial ambitions but also with a concern for the symbolic purity of the ‘national body’ and fear of ‘blackness’ associated with inferiority, smallness and under-development. Karas offered his patriotic middle-class readers a colonial self-image in which the Czechs were full-fledged actors on the map of the colonial world. They are presented as good and tolerant representatives of the nation and, implicitly, guardians of its homogeneity. Modernists react to racial discourses about the threat to the purity of the national body with exaggeration that does not lack a critical tone (Jung), with exuberant compassion (Neumann) and with a kind of reductio ad absurdum (Hašek et al.). On one hand, racial mixing is presented as a (national) scandal; on the other hand, the idea of a national body’s ‘purity’ appears backward, not corresponding to modern reality. The imagination of avant-garde artists goes much further. Their international stance also wants to be interracial. The motif of the Czech white woman as a traitor to the nation is disappearing, but not the motif of the black or mixed-race woman as an erotic symbol (Biebl). Also, the racial ‘scientific’ terminology burdened with stereotypes remains, but the figures it refers to now have an almost messianic character (Nezval, Raffel). The sovereign domestication of colonial discourse thus leads to ‘mixophilic’ imagery that undermines the assumptions of this discourse. However, this happens more in the hint of an aesthetic experiment that remains ambivalent. ³⁴ Finally, one can also ask whether the sovereignty with which the Czech avant-garde domesticated the colonial imagery and terminology is still a ‘symptom’ of catching up with Western cultures. In conclusion, more research needs to be done as only investment in further comparative and interdisciplinary studies with a transnational approach will enable us to determine more precisely the national and regional specificities of artistic responses to the colonial gaze in countries whose discursive engagement in the colonial project has been for a long time accompanied by silence.