The Images of Blackness: Savages, Workers and the Emergence of the Counterimagination in Germany (1884-1925)
The Images of Blackness: Savages, Workers and the Emergence of the Counterimagination in Germany (1884-1925)

Summary/Abstract: The author interprets the figures of European workers and colonized Africans presented as slaves of capitalism and imperialism, the image that circulated in the social and cultural imagination in Germany after the Berlin Conference (1884-1885). The aim of the article is to introduce the concept of “counterimagination” and show how the image of the rabble became juxtaposed with a visualization of the black slave. The author argues that both figures were considered to be a real threat to the German social order and to German Kultur, and concentrates on the popular images of the “other” circulating in the German visual culture after 1880. The first part of the article is devoted to the aesthetics of the weekly satirical magazine Simplicissimus founded in April 1896. In the second part, the aggressive propaganda campaign against the Occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troops is discussed. The author describes the mechanisms of envisioning black soldiers and points out the anticolonial reactions to the “Black Shame” campaign.

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