One of the main research results is a case study exploring how the Haitian revolution resonated in the Czech literary and cultural landscape, especially through translations from French and German. A microanalysis of the Czech version of Victor Hugo’s novel Burg Jargal shows that the translation adds an anti-colonial and anti-imperial layer to the text, suiting local emancipatory aspirations. Thus, from the beginning of the 19th century, in addition to the stereotyping racial colonial discourse, cases of the heroization of enslaved and struggling Africans with identifying potential can be recorded in the Czech lands. Another article, “The Death of the Black and White Venus”, examines the way the female body is depicted as an object of violence in Central and Eastern European art and literature in late 19th century, focusing on the specific motif of the woman on the cross. In doing so, it reveals that the imagery of the suffering body is not universal, but racialized; the parallels in the images of the mixed-race woman and the Polish Jewish woman suggest that in the case of the marginalized “Other”, aesthetic norms are more pervasive. A forthcoming article in the Journal of European Studies explores how colonial discourses of “racial mixing” entered the Czech context. A forthcoming article in the Journal of European Studies explores how colonial discourses of “racial mixing” entered the Czech lands. It offers an analytical overview of this motif, while emphasizing its function as a projection surface for colonial fantasies, aspirations of great Europeanness and fears of “blackness”. Tracing a long period of time allows us to highlight specific phenomena, such as the delay in the spread of certain racial stereotypes as a result of Austrian censorship or the rise of mixophilic motifs in avant-garde art. The project also resulted in the French translation of Vladislav Vančura’s play Jezero Ukereve, set in Uganda, in which the metaphor of the enslavement of the Czech nation and the symbolic dimension of blackness come to life. The publication’s critical apparatus shows how the play challenges racial prejudices and thus contributes to our understanding of anti-colonial resistance during the interwar period. Further impact of the project lies especially in expanding the scope of (post)colonial scholarship on Czech cultural context and in fostering interdisciplinary dialogue leading to new insights into the formation of European and national identity/ies in Central Europe, both in the past and in the present.
