Journal of European Studies

Using basic information about the history of the Russian family to set up some elementary points of reference, the lecture examines the ways in which a series of eminent Russian male authors from the eighteenth century to the present day have represented in their fiction the relationship between mothers and their adult sons. They are found to have treated the mother figure in three main ways: elimination, idealization and demonization.

Springing from the argument in recent scholarship that ‘race’ is a doctrine that emerged only in the post-Enlightenment, this essay develops a theory concerning the ideological history of ‘racism’, understood in its modern Western sense. While it is impossible to examine all forms of Western racism, the author focuses on evolving reactions in European travel accounts, belles-lettres and anthropology to the Khoikhoi, popularly known as ‘Hottentots’, a people that became proverbial as the most wretched and degraded of all ‘savages’. The question posed is why the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people, attracted this virulent hatred.

Challenging the assumption of the small body of modern scholarship on the Khoikhoi, I maintain that this spite derived not simply from a sense of the Hottentots’ ‘Otherness’, but more accurately from the awareness that this people upset models of ethnicity that supported the Western vision of the non-European world. Europeans needed to neutralize the ideological threat represented by the Khoikhoi, a programme that culminated in the development of the modern science of ‘race’. ‘Race’, and its corresponding ideology of ‘racism’, I conclude, involves not merely the exclusion, but an approximation and appropriation of the ‘Other’ into Western systems of thought: the ultimate and fatal destiny of this highly distinct and independent culture.

The use of ‘monstrous’, anxiety-generating imagery (tropes of the mythological Medusa or the Hydra) to demonize opponents was a marked feature of political caricature and national propaganda on different points in the ideological spectrum, from the French revolutionary and counter-revolutionary period, through the ‘Commune’ (1871), to the First and Second World Wars. Using examples from contemporary lithography, literature, the press and official sources, my paper argues that this propaganda owed its ubiquity and polyvalence to the presence of powerful associations, sometimes unstated, sometimes explicit, between the revolutionary ‘Medusa’ and the guillotine, and the other supreme socio-medical hantise of the period, the threat of venereal infection.