Literary Representations of ‘Racial Mixing’ in Czech Modernism

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 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. Eugene 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.