Picturing Racism in the Adriatic Borderlands: Anti-Slavic and Colonial Identity from the Habsburgs to the Nazis, November 2023, location TBD
In the Adriatic provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, Anti-Slavic racism has formed a consistent theme in public discourse and culture. Historical studies (Collotti 1999; Wingfield 2003; Catalan 2015) have tended to focus on legal and linguistic racism and forms of ethnic cleansing, such as the Fascist law obligating Slavs (primarily Slovenes and Croats) to italianize themselves by changing their names, the names of places and their education system. The expression of this Anti-Slavic racism, evident in descriptive discourses and images, remains yet to be explored.
This workshop proposes to bring together five to six scholars to present their findings on the articulation of anti-Slavic racism in images of human faces and figures. Focus on the epistemic practices involving the representation of faces in media, popular culture, art and bureaucratic processes reveals the ways in which these images relate to a biologized conception of national identity. We will look at images such as photographic studio portraits, caricatures of the human face and identity photographs as well as the conventions used to construct the identity of Slavs in the press, in literature and in administrative documents of the state bureaucracies active in the first half of the twentieth century in the Adriatic Borderlands. The aim is to put together a picture of the chauvinism, hostility and racism inherent in the ‘imagined communities’ and the stereotypes of South Slavs in the borderlands. With emphasis on the pathologization of both biological and ideological (e.g. Communist, Socialist, Anarchist) identity, this workshop intends to deconstruct the visual dimension of anti-Slavic racism and its portraiture.