Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930

Description

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored by Edward Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1: From Folk to a Folk Race : Carl Arbo and National Romantic Anthropology in Norway Chapter 2: From “Northern Dweller” to “Distinguished Among His Race”: The Transformation of the Nordic Colonial Subject, 1900–1935 Chapter 3: Decolonizing the Archive: Pia Arke and Stories from Scoresbysund Chapter 4: Brigands and Virtuous Musicians: Representations of Roma (“Gypsies”) as Oriental Other in the Eastern Part of the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Chapter 5: Leopold Carl Müller’s Scenes from Egyptian Life: Ethnography, Race, and Orientalism in Habsburg Vienna Chapter 6: A Hungarian Treasure Chest: The Art Colony at Gödöllő in Critical Perspective Chapter 7: The Journey West: Gauguin, Philology, and the Celts of Brittany Chapter 8: In the Beginning Was the Image: Russian Ethnography and Colonial Photography in Turkestan, 1860s to 1870s Chapter 9: Children of the Narod: Early Soviet Children’s Books’ Racialization of Childhood Chapter 10: From Sideshow to Portrait: The Ethnographic Vision of Christian Schad Chapter 11: Anthropological Histories and Techniques in Philip Scheffner’s Films Contributors Index