BROJ ISSUE 3

GSGČasopis za suvremena umjetnička i društvena zbivanja inicijative Građanke svom gradu / Magazine for Contemporary Art and Social Issues of From the Citizens to Their City Initiative

Treći broj / Third issueRijeka, listopad 2021. / October 2021ISSN 2623-582X

Izdavač / PublisherGrađanke svom gradu / From the Citizens to Their City

Glavna Urednica / Editor-in-ChiefIva Kovač

Urednice broja / Editors of this issue Sanja Horvatinčic, Iva Kovač

Tekstovi / TextsCatherine Baker, Inês Beleza Barreiros, Doplgenger, Rui Gomes Coelho, Ferenc Gróf, Minna Henriksson, Sanja Horvatinčic, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Iva Kovač, Patrícia Martins Marcos, Pedro Schacht Pereira, Ana Sladojevic

Slike / Images Gholamreza Amirbegi, Jasmina Cibic, Doplgenger, Rui Gomes Coelho, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Ferenc Gróf, Minna Henriksson, Patrícia Lino, Anna Zimmerman

Lektura hrvatskog jezika / Croatian ProofreadingAntonia Došen

Prijevod i lektura engleskog jezika/ English Translation and ProofreadingSanja Horvatinčic, Zana Šaškin, Leo Vidmar

Vizualni identitet na naslovnici / Visual identity on the coverRafaela Dražic

Grafičko oblikovanje i priprema za tisak/ Graphic Design and PrepressAna Tomic & Marino Krstačic-Furic

Ilustracija na naslovnici/ Illustration on the cover Na naslovnici se preklapa fotografija skulpture Kristofora Kolumba ispred zgrade Kapitola savezne države Minnesota nekoliko trenutaka nakon što je srušen s postolja te Meštrovicevog Kopljanika u Chicagu. / The image on the cover is showing the statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol moments after it was pulled from its pedestal overlapped with Ivan Meštrovic’s Spearman sculpture in Chicago.

Tisak / PrintKerschoffset, Zagreb

Kontakt / ContactGSG — Građanke svom gradu / From the Citizens to Their City Križaniceva 6a, 51000 [email protected]

Naklada 500 primjeraka. / Print-run: 500 copies.

Izdavanje treceg broja GSG časopisa financijski je podržala fondacija Musagetes. / The third Issue of the GSG Magazine is financially supported by the Musagetes Foundation.

Treci broj GSG dostupan je i u online verziji na artseverywhere.ca / GSG’s third issue is also available online at artseverywhere.ca

Treci broj GSG je besplatan. / GSG’s third issue is free of charge.

Sanja HorvatinčićIva Kovač

Prema horizontalnijim osnovama dekolonizacije

Toward a Horizontal Decolonization

Ferenc Gróf

Naša odmetnička država

Our Rogue State

Intervju / InterviewCatherine BakerAna Sladojević

Post-jugoslavenska regija i teorijski pojam rase

The Post-Yugoslav Region and Theoretical Concept of Race

Minna Henriksson

Oslik nordijskih zemalja

Painted Image of the Nordics

Behzad Khosravi Noori

Pod krinkom derviša — Kratka priča o nesvjesnom kolonijalnom sjećanju

In the Disguise of a Dervish — A Short Story about an Unconscious Colonial Memory

Doplgenger

Kroz noć bez zvijezda, tamnu i gustu kao mastilo

Beneath a Starless SkyAs Dark and Thick as Ink

Inês Beleza BarreirosRui Gomes CoelhoPatrícia Martins MarcosPedro Schacht Pereira

Nepodnošljiva lakoća anakronizma:produkcija spomenika i čuvari povijesnog konsenzusa

The Unbearable Lightness of Anachronism: Practices of Monument-making and the Guardians of Historical Consensus

Biografije

Biographies

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4 5 Prema horizontalnijim osnovama dekolonizacijeSanja Horvatinčić, Iva Kovač

Treće izdanje GSG magazina nastajalo je više od godinu dana, u razdoblju obilježenom turbulentnim političkim događanjima, društvenim pokretima i prosvjedima, u kojima se nemogućnost političkog otpora sve češće manifestira u potrebi za simboličkim uklanjanjem označitelja višestoljetnog kontinuiteta imperijalističkih politika. Ako se u ranijim etapama razvoja kapitalizma, problem rasizma još mogao geografski odrediti, u suvremenoj dinamici globalnih tokova kapitala, robe i ljudi, to se nastojanje čini posve izlišnim. U fokusu interesa ovog temata pitanja su koja proizlaze iz suvremenih društvenih i političkih zbivanja i rasprava. U širem dijapazonu takvih tema, primarno su nas zanimala ona koja se tiču suvremene uporabe povijesnih narativa i kulturnih artefakata, odnosno ideologije baštine i kulturne proizvodnje, te njihova uloga u procesu normalizacije i reprodukcije ili pak razotkrivanja i suprotstavljanja suvremenim oblicima nejednakosti i nasilja.

Na poluperiferiji europskog kontinenta, rasprave o ovim pitanjima i dalje uglavnom tinjaju unutar progresivnih, no inherentno privilegiranih akademskih i kulturnih krugova. Iako se poticaji za njihovim otvaranjem nerijetko javljaju kao posljedica budnog praćenja praćenja trendova „sa zapada“, njihova se difamacija čini u jednakoj mjeri problematičnom i neproduktivnom. Propušta se, naime, prilika otvaranja rasprave o bitnim društvenim temama, te briše odgovornost kritičkog sagledavanja tog, sve dinamičnijeg i utjecajnijeg diskurzivnog polja, odnosno izgradnje preduvjeta analitičke, situirane i klasno osviještene rasprave o strukturnim uzrocima i dionicima, a ne samo o simptomima nejednakosti unutar dominantnog sustava proizvodnje znanja. Svaki govor o prošlosti i baštini uvjetovan je aktualnim ekonomskim i društvenim odnosima. Stoga ne samo da govor o uzrocima i nasljeđu imperijalnih politika, kolonijalizma i rasizma u današnjim uvjetima sadrži velik kritički i emancipacijski

Prema horizontalnijim osnovama dekolonizacije


potencijal, već se njime iscrtava važna linija horizonta kulturno-političke alternative sadašnjem trenutku.

Nije, međutim, iznenađujuće da u lokalnom kontekstu, opterećenom nacionalističkim mitovima, nema mnogo prostora kritičkom čitanju baštine uokvirene eurocentričnim, kapitalističkim vrijednostima. Reakcije predstavnika kulturnih i akademskih elita na sporadična i gotovo plaha kritička čitanja ovih fenomena u Hrvatskoj, redovito se manifestiraju kroz samoidentifikaciju s ulogom „čuvara“ i „branitelja“ kanonskih vrijednosti nacionalne kulture. Ideološka potka suvremenih baštinskih politika evidentna je ne samo kroz inauguraciju novoga skupa baštinskih vrijednosti u vrijeme tzv. postsocijalističke tranzicije, već i kroz izostanak analize i kritike mehanizama ekspertne selekcije i valorizacije, analize koja je u velikoj mjeri izostajala i u socijalizmu, a koja je ključna za razumijevanje baštine kao pojma dominantno uvjetovanog imperativom izgradnje i legitimacije nacionalnih, klasnih, rasnih i rodnih podjela. Stoga rasprave o potrebi ili primjerenosti problematiziranja rasizma ili uopće mogućnosti manifestacije rasizma i kolonijalnog nasljeđa u kontekstima koji se povijesno-geografski nalaze izvan ili na rubovima tradicionalnih kolonijalnih središta moći, upravo podcrtavaju značaj adresiranja ove teme, kao i potrebu stvaranja demokratičnijih i inkluzivnijih prostora rasprave te novih oblika učenja i proizvodnje znanja.

Znakovita je u tom smislu, primjerice, burna reakcija hrvatskih političkih struktura i kulturne javnosti na otvaranje javne rasprave o suvremenoj recepciji Meštrovićevih skulptura s prikazom američkih Indijanaca u Chicagu iz 1928., koju su tamošnje gradske vlasti pokrenule početkom 2021. godine.1 Unisonost defenzivnih reakcija službenih državnih i akademskih institucija i limitiranost kritičke rasprave na ovu temu ukazuje na slijepe pjege uspostavljenih nacionalno-umjetničkih kanona. Ono što zabrinjava nije samo

nemogućnost diferenciranja konteksta i uvažavanja prava za raspravom o reprezentativnim obrascima rase unutar američkog društva, rasprava koje su višestruko usložene strukturnim uzrocima američkog rasizma i hipokrizijom tamošnjih politika identiteta. Problem prvenstveno leži u posljedicama kakve, takvim impulsima ogoljeni stavovi, mogu imati u širenju sljepila na javnu percepciju nepravdi, nejednakosti i diskriminacije u suvremenom društvu. Fetišizacijom artefakata prošlosti, njihovom komodifikacijom i izuzimanjem od društvenih i materijalnih uvjeta proizvodnje i suvremene recepcije, održavaju se strukturne pozicije moći i reproducira se ideologija vladajućih elita, čineći ujedno plodno tlo manipulaciji baštine u svrhu zadovoljenja kratkoročnih političkih interesa.

Ovaj primjer tek je jedan u nizu manifestacija dominantnog baštinskog diskursa, ni po čemu jedinstvenog za hrvatski kontekst. No, dok su političke borbe marginaliziranih zajednica, primarno u Latinskoj Americi, poslužile kao ishodišta kritičkog mišljenja kolonijalnosti i razvoja teorijskog aparata dekolonizacije, na poluperiferiji Europe često i dalje prevladava nemogućnost prepoznavanja vlastite uronjenosti u višestoljetne kolonijalne odnose moći. Kritički aparat čitanja tih odnosa stoga je uglavnom bio posredovan zapadnocentričnom epistemološkom optikom, koja se u postsocijalističkom kontekstu često percipira kao (jedina) legitimna i poželjna.2 Međutim, činjenica je da se različitim tokovima ekonomskih i ideoloških utjecaja, konstrukt rasne hijerarhije nezaustavljivo prelijevao čak i u one društvene zajednice europskog ekonomsko-kulturnog kruga, koje su i same trpjele despotizam kolonijalno-kapitalističke eksploatacije. Iako posljednjih godina svjedočimo proliferaciji kritičkog akademskog diskursa koji zagovara nužnost epistemološke dekolonizacije tzv. „istočne Europe“, ona predstavlja tek inicijalne obrise, primarno akademskog


interesa za ova pitanja, koja nisu lišena potrebe aktivnog, kritičkog odnosa spram niza kontradikcija i nedosljednosti upisanih u teorijski diskurs o dekolonizaciji.

Ovaj temat nema ambiciju da proizvede sustavan teorijski pristup spomenutim fenomenima, već prilozima pozvanih autorica i autora različitih profila, metoda analize i disciplinarnih uporišta, nastoji univerzalizirati i diversificirati diskurzivni prostor za koji vjerujemo da se mora odvijati onkraj zapadnih binarnih kategorija, poput umjetničkog vs. teorijskog, Istočne i Zapadne Europe, identiteta vs. klase, itd. Stoga se povezivanjem umjetničkih priloga, razgovora te kritičkih tekstova i analiza fenomena iz različitih konteksta na (polu)marginama ili izvan samog europskog kontinenta, nastoji osigurati horizontalniji kontekst promišljanja (i) proizvodnje znanja i kritičkih refleksija suvremenih društvenih i ekonomskih simptoma spomenutih tabua i kontradikcija.

Ovakav hibridan urednički pristup, kakav primjenjujemo od prvog broja časopisa GSG, sada dobiva puniji smisao. Uz nešto veći broj i opsežnije tekstualne kontribucije, u ovom su se broju umnogostručili umjetnički prilozi. Jedan od razloga povećanog interesa za umjetničke radove jest i činjenica da se upravo kroz umjetničko istraživanje – radi manje restriktivnih istraživačkih metoda, kao i difuznijih načina produkcije i cirkulacije – lakše i neposrednije bilježi i progovara o temama koje pripadaju dekolonijalnoj kritičkoj paradigmi.

Područje današnje Hrvatske i nekadašnje Jugoslavije kroz veći dio svoje povijesti bilo je u podređenom političkom i ekonomskom položaju, dok je njezino stanovništvo bilo predmetom primjena rasnih teorija. To se, međutim, ne kosi s činjenicom da su novovjekovne ideje o rasi prisutne i u klasno raslojenim društvima „predziđa kršćanstva“. Barem od rođenja ideje Barbarogenija3, u osvit Drugog svjetskog rata moguće je pratiti kako se globalno fluktuirajuće ideje o rasi na ovom području interpretiraju i implementiraju: ponekad

idiosinkratski, kao kod spomenutog pojma Barbarogenija umjetnika Ljubomira Micića, u vidu prihvaćanja teze o rasno drugačijim ljudima s Balkana, koji su pozvani da regeneriraju ustajalu Europsku kulturu; ili pak, mnogo češće, kroz samoidentificiranje s europskom „bjelačkošću“ te kroz aproprijaciju rasnih teorija u svrhu relativne ekonomske i političke (nad)moći.

U krajnjoj liniji, naučeni obrasci ponašanja kod susreta s „rasno“ drugim u našim se krajevima ispoljavaju po istom principu, iako u manjoj mjeri, nego u historijskim središtima kolonijalne ekspanzije, gdje je prisutnost mješovitog stanovništva kroz povijest dovela do rasne segregacije i bjelačke supremacije. Dok je u tim kontekstima kolonijalno nasljeđe eklatantno vidljivo i sablasno prisutno u svakodnevnom životu, pa samim time polučuje aktivnije oblike osvještavanja i borbe protiv (normalizacije) tog naslijeđa, na marginama imperija, nekada kao i danas, teže je razlučiti, te stoga i lakše prikriti, mehanizme dvostruke eksploatacije i specifičnih modusa racijalizacije.

U razgovoru s Anom Sladojević4, Catherine Baker naglašava da je ovo područje, pripadajući mediteranskom kulturno-ekonomskom krugu, oduvijek bilo na sjecištu susreta i ekonomsko-kulturne razmjene različitih predmodernih kultura, europskih i izvaneuropskih utjecaja, ili pak na razmeđi apsolutističkih centralnoeuropskih carevina i Osmanskog carstva. Tim su se tokovima kapitala ljudi raznih podrijetla tijekom stoljeća susretali, a tim je kontaktom, odnosno kroz medije, kulturu i robu koji su kolali Europom, rasizam, kao ideologija koja pravda kapitalističke i imperijalne ciljeve, prenesen te – više ili manje svjesno – prihvaćen u svim krajevima i marginama Europe i svijeta, pa tako i na južnoslavenskom prostoru. Tako je, usprkos perifernoj poziciji i ekonomskoj eksploataciji te orijentalizaciji njegovog stanovništva od strane imperijalnih europskih sila, riječ o


području čije se stanovništvo ipak primarno samoidentificira kao „bjelačko“. Usprkos političkoj podređenosti, kroz trgovinu i kolanje dobara, ovdašnje su političke i ekonomske elite također profitirale od kolonijalizma, a njegovi su se derivati slijevali u svakodnevnicu života nižih slojeva i radničke klase na ovim prostorima.5

Suprotno geopolitičkom konceptu srednje i jugoistočne Europe kao sjecištu kultura, nacionalistička desnica nastoji konsolidirati ovaj prostor kroz perpetuirano iznalaženje i iscrtavanje granica. U njihovom su imaginariju jugoistočna Europa i Balkan branik europske „bjelačkosti“. Tematiziranjem europskog slikarstva koje prikazuje osmanske ratove, umjetnički prilog Ferenca Grófa govori o pozivanju mađarske ekstremne desnice na isti taj imaginarij u novim povijesnim okolnostima, kada na granice Europske unije dolaze izbjeglice u bijegu od ekonomske deprivacije prouzročene neoliberalnim kapitalizmom i posljedicama imperijalnih ratova zapadnih zemalja.

Izuzimanje jugoslavenskog prostora iz pitanja koja se tiču nasljeđa kolonijalnih odnosa i suvremenog rasizma, postaje jasnije u komparaciji s nekim od srodnih fenomena iz drugih, poluperifernih dijelova Europe. Prilog Minna Henriksson ukazuje na prakse implementacije rasne znanosti u finsku modernu kulturu posredstvom likovne umjetničke produkcije tijekom kasnog 19. i ranog 20. stoljeća. Izloženo rasnim teorijama, kojima se vršila kontrola stanovništva kroz nacionalnu i etničku konsolidaciju, nordijske zemlje same postaju plodno tlo reprodukcije rasističke ideologije.

Koristeći se arhivskim snimkama Radio Televizije Novi Sad u Vojvodini, umjetnički duo Doplgenger otvara pak prostor kritičkom čitanju jugoslavenske, očekivano europocentrične slike Pokreta nesvrstanih. Posrijedi je, naime, uvriježena teza o iznimnosti jugoslavenske pozicije unutar ovog globalnog antiblokovskog pokreta, preciznije, sintagma kojom se

Jugoslavija, kao jedina europska članica, imenuje „vođom Nesvrstanih“, pored činjenice da su značajnu ulogu u Pokretu imali mnogo moćniji i veći svjetski akteri Globalnoga juga. Iako je jugoslavenska vanjska politika snažno strateški podupirala dekolonizacijske procese i oslobodilačke pokrete, Doplgengeri svojim radom zadiru u širi značaj razlikovanja kolonijalizma i kolonijalnosti,6 odnosno u modus djelovanja potonjeg mimo ili čak unutar deklarativnih antikolonijalnih politika.7

S druge pak strane, nekadašnje kolonijalne sile poput Portugala i danas se ograđuju od bilo kakvog udjela u razvoju suvremenog rasizma. Od 1950-ih godina, koncept luzotropikalizma postaje ključan za legitimaciju portugalskog poznog imperijalizma. Tvrdnja da su Portugalci razvili posebno

„benevolentni“ oblik kolonijalizma i dalje rezonira u javnoj sferi. Inês Beleza Barreiros, Rui Gomes Coelho, Patrícia Martins Marcos i Pedro Schacht Pereira, na primjeru javnih polemika pokrenutih oko recentno podignutog spomenika misionaru Antóniu Vieiri u Lisabonu, razotkrivaju diskurzivne akrobacije održavanja luzotropikalnog koncenzusa u Portugalu.

Behzad Khosravi Noori u svojem se pak tekstu bavi fenomenom kojeg naziva „nesvjesnim kolonijalnim“. Odmičući se izvan povijesnih geografskih granica europskog kontinenta, Behzad govori o prisutnosti Europe u Iranu, koja se manifestira kroz aproprijaciju pozicije „drugoga“, odnosno samoegzotizacijom pripadnika teheranske radničke klase kroz figuru derviša. Iščitavajući moguće razloge i okolnosti nastanka ovih fotografija, Behzad govori o iranskoj modernizaciji 1960-ih te o ugnjetavanju na dvostrukoj, rasnoj i klasnoj osnovi.

Časopis otvaramo i zatvaramo umjetničkim prilogom Jasmine Cibic koja zamišlja izgled dviju izumrlih sorta ruža. Njihovi izvorno rasistički nazivi [ za više informacija okreni stranicu → ] razlog su njihovog nestanka kroz drugu polovicu dvadesetog stoljeća. Ovaj rad nam, zajedno s ostalima u


ovom tematu, ukazuje, međutim, na činjenicu da brisanjem rasističkog govora iz javne komunikacije, ne možemo otkloniti teret prošlosti niti riješiti problem suvremenog rasizma u društvu. U toj, kao i u svakoj drugoj borbi za društvenu pravdu i jednakost, potrebno je poznavati i razumjeti uzroke i mehanizme širenja te opstanka rasizma na svim razinama i u različitim društvima diljem svijeta, osvještavajući njegovu vezu s materijalnim životnim uvjetima te stvarajući nova epistemološka utemeljenja antirasizma. Nadamo se da će prilozi u ovom broju pridonijeti izgradnji kompleksnijeg i horizontalnijeg pristupa različitim oblicima i manifestacijama kolonijalnog nasljeđa i suvremenih antikolonijalnih pozicija na poluperiferiji Europe.

1 Osim službenog priop-ćenja Ministarstva kulture i medija Republike Hrvatske, ovaj je događaj polučio niz tekstova, analiza i izjava eminentnih znanstvenika, kulturnjaka i političara, kao i dvije online javne tribine. Za cjelovit pregled napisa o ovoj temi, vidi: „Javna rasprava o skulpturama Indijanaca Ivana Meštrovića u Chicagu“, Historiografija.hr, 15. ožujka 2021., URL: https://historio-grafija.hr/?p=25408

2 Vidi primjerice: Katarina Kušić, Philipp Lottholz, Polina Manolova, „From dialogue to practice: Pathways towards decoloniality in Southeast Europe“, dВЕРСИЯ, spe-cial issue: Decolonial Theory & Practice in Southeast Euro-pe (2019.) 3, URL: https://dia-loguingposts.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/special-issue.pdf

3 Ljubomir Micić, Barbaro-genije civilizator, Filip Višnjić, Beograd, 1993., URL: https://www.youtube.com/wat-ch?v=HeNk5EQjOrs

4 Ana Sladojević bavi se temom rase u jugoslaven-skom prostoru, izučavajući i kontekstualizirajući povijest i suvremene uporabe zbirke koja čini fundus Muzeja afrič-ke umetnosti u Beogradu. Vidi: Ana Sladojević, Muzej afričke umetnosti, Konteksti i reprezentacije, Muzej afričke umetnosti, Beograd, 2014., URL: http://mau.rs/images/publications/Epublications/Muzej_africke_umetnosti_konteksti_i_reprezentacije/Ana_Sladojevic_Muzej_afric-ke_umetnosti_kontek-sti_i_reprezentacije.pdf; Ana Sladojević, „Anticolonial re-presentation at the Museum of African Art“, TrAIN Open Live Event, travanj 2021., URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvnbxEHO-Sg

5 Fokus Grupa u svojemu radu „Soba s pejzažem: Vedute iz Palače privile-girane tršćansko-riječke kompanije“ govori o velikom ekonomskom napretku Rijeke čija je podloga bila monopol za preradu šećera uvezen s karipskih plantaža trske. Fokus Grupa, „Soba s pejzažem: Vedute iz Palače privilegirane tršćansko-riječke kompa-nije“, ARTMargins (2021.) 10 (1): 77–92, URL: https://direct.mit.edu/artm/artic-le/10/1/77/100605/A-Ro-om-with-a-landscape-Vedu-te-from-the-Palace-of

6 Vidi: Aníbal Quijano, „Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality“, Cultural Studies (2007.) 21:2-3: 168-178.

7 Umjetnik Naeem Moha-iemen, u suradnji s Urošem Pajovićem, u umjetničkom prilogu za ARTMargins još je izravnije ukazao na taj problem analizirajući Titovu samouvjerenu izjavu povo-dom podjele Pakistana 1971 godine: „Nikada više neće biti pitanja Balkana nasvijetu.“ Uroš Pajović, Naeem Mohaiemen, „Southward and Otherwi-se“, ARTMargins (2019.), 8 (2): 79–89., URL: https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/8/2/79/18089/Sout-hward-and-Otherwise

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Ilustracije na unutarnjim stranicama naslovnice i po-leđine časopisa adaptiran su rad Jasmine Cibic iz serije Ornamental Rash (2018.). Izostavljeni su rasistički nazivi ruža, koji su inače integralni dio rada. Ilustra-cije su nastale u suradnji s botaničkom ilustratoricom Beatriz Inglessis.

Nigger Boy Rose (R. Hennessy, 1931.), tintni ispis na pamučnom papiru, 100 x 70 cm

Gypsy Rose (Van Rossem, 1931.), tintni otisak na pamučnom papiru, 100 x 70 cm

14 15 Toward a Horizontal DecolonizationSanja Horvatinčić, Iva Kovač

The third edition of GSG magazine was assembled for over a year, amid tempestuous political events, civil movements and protests. The increasing inability to establish a meaningful political resistance resulted in efforts to, at least, symbolically remove signifiers of centuries lasting imperialistic politics. If, during the earlier stages of capitalism, the problem of racism was perhaps geographically circumscribed, the contemporary dynamics of the global flow of capital, goods and labor make such efforts utterly pointless. This issue focuses on matters derived from current social and political events and debates. We were primarily interested in subjects pertaining to the contemporary utilization of historical narratives and cultural artifacts, the ideology of heritage and cultural production, along with their role in the process of normalization and reproduction, or in revealing and resisting, forms of inequality and violence.

On the fringes of the European continent deliberation on such issues is still confined to progressive, yet inherently privileged academic and cultural circles. Although the incentive for increasing their inclusiveness is commonly the result of a mere ‘western’ trend emulation, ignoring these issues is equally problematic and unproductive. By doing so, we are neglecting the opportunity to address important social topics, while simultaneously removing responsibility for critical examination of an increasingly dynamic and influential field of discussion. We are also missing an opportunity to create preconditions for an analytical, culturally situated and class-conscious debate on structural causes and stakeholders, a debate not solely concerned about symptoms of inequality within a prevalent system of knowledge production. Any discussion about history and heritage is conditioned by current economic and social relations. Therefore, not only does the discussion about causes and legacy of imperialistic policies, colonialism and racism in contemporary circumstances

Toward a Horizontal Decolonization


have a large critical and emancipatory potential; it is equally important in broadening the horizons of the cultural-political alternative of the present moment.

It is not particularly surprising that within a local context, pervaded with nationalistic mythologies, there is little room for a critique of heritage, which is dominated by euro-centric and capitalist values. The reactions of representatives of the cultural and academic elites to occasional and nearly timid critical interpretations of these phenomena in Croatia, are regularly manifested through self-imaging as ‘guardians’ or ‘defenders’ of canonical national cultural values. The ideological grounds of contemporary heritage policies is evident not only in the inauguration of a new set of heritage values during the so-called post-socialist transition, but also in the omission of analysis and criticism of expert selection and valorization criteria – an analysis which was to a large extent also absent during the socialist period – which is, however, crucial to understand heritage as a phenomenon predominantly conditioned by the imperative to create and justify national, class, race and gender divisions. Therefore, discussions on the need or adequacy of examining racism, or even the very possibility of the manifestation of racism and colonial heritage in contexts which are geo-historically located outside, or on the margins of traditional colonial centers of power, further underscore the importance of addressing this subject, as well as the necessity of forming more democratic and more inclusive forums of discussion, along with new forms of learning and knowledge production.

Within this context one might find indicative the volatile reaction to the public debate on the present reception of Meštrović’s sculptures of Indians erected in Chicago in 1928, initiated by the city authorities at the beginning of 2021.1 The resulting unanimous defensive disposition of official state and academic institutions and the limited critical debate on

the subject suggests a myopic viewpoint and blind spots in the established national-artistic canons. What is troubling is not merely the inability of differentiating context and recognizing the right to debate the representative racial forms within the American society, debates that are layered with structural patterns of racism and the hypocrisy of identity politics in the United States. The problem lays primarily in the potential consequences that the attitudes, exposed by such impulses, may have on generating further blind spots in the public perception of injustice, inequality and discrimination in contemporary society. By fetishizing artifacts of the past, by their commodification and exemption from social and material circumstances of production and contemporary reception, the structures of power are thusly maintained and the ideology of the ruling elites reproduced while creating fertile ground for heritage manipulation for short term political goals.

This example is just one of many manifestations of the dominant heritage discourse, in no way particular to the Croatian context. Yet, while political struggles of marginalized societies, primarily in Latin America, originated decolonial critical thought and the development of the theory of decolonization, the semi-peripheral context of Eastern Europe is still dominated by the inability to recognize the consequences of their own involvement in centuries-long colonial power relations. Therefore, critical theoretical tools for reading these relations have been mainly imported through a western epistemological prism, which, within the context of post-socialism is often perceived as (exclusively) legitimate and desired.2 However, the fact remains that by way of different modes of economical and ideological influences, the construct of racial hierarchy has been insuppressibly entering even those communities of the European economic-cultural circle which have themselves suffered colonial-capitalist exploitative despotism. Even though we have lately been


witnessing the proliferation of critical academic discourse advocating the necessity of epistemological decolonization of so-called ‘Eastern Europe’, it represents merely initial outlines, of a primarily academic interest in these matters, which are in need of an active, critical stance towards a number of contradictions and inconsistencies included in the theoretical discourse of decolonization.

This issue of the GSG magazine has not the ambition to assemble a systematical theoretical approach to the aforementioned occurrences. Through contributions of invited authors with various backgrounds, methodologies and disciplinary foundations, it aims to generalize and diversify a discussion that should transcend western binary categories, such as artistic vs. theoretical, Eastern and Western Europe, identity vs. class, etc. Therefore, the intention of this assemblage of artistic works, discussions, critical texts and analysis of phenomena originating in different contexts located on the (semi)margins or outside the European continent, is to ensure a more horizontal context to consider and produce knowledge, as well as to activate critical reflections on contemporary social and economic symptoms of the previously mentioned taboos and contradictions.

The hybrid editorial approach, which has been employed since the first issue, has with this issue achieved its fuller potential. Apart from a greater number and variety of texts, this volume also sees an increasing number of artistic contributions. One of the reasons for this is the fact that it is precisely through artistic research – due to the wider scope of its research methods, as well as a multifaceted mode of production and circulation of the artwork itself – one can more easily and directly respond to and speak of topics belonging to the critical paradigm of decolonization.

Through most of its history, the territories of modern Croatia and other former Yugoslav republics were in a

subordinate political and economic position, while population itself was subjected to racial theories. This, however, does not contradict the fact that modern ideas on race have been present in class differentiated societies comprising the ‘bulwark of christendom’. At least as far back as the ‘birth’ of the notion of Barbarogenij3, at the dawn of World War II, it is possible to trace the regional interpretation and implementation of the globally fluctuating notion of race: sometimes distinctive, like the aforementioned Barbarogenij created by artist Ljubomir Micić, in terms of accepting the premise of racially exceptional Balkan folk, who are called to regenerate a stagnant European culture; or, perhaps more often, it was a form of self-identification with European ‘whiteness’ or the appropriation of racial theories as a means to economic and political empowerment and/or superiority.

In the end, learned forms of behavior upon encountering the ‘racial’ other, manifest themselves locally in the same manner as in historical centers of colonial expansion, where the presence of diverse populations throughout history had led to racial segregation and white supremacy. While these contexts have an acute and eerie everyday presence of colonial heritage, causing more engaging forms of raising awareness and opposing (the normalization of) such a heritage, at the edge of empires, – then as now – it is more difficult to differentiate, and as such easier to conceal, the mechanisms of double exploitation and specific modes of racialization.

In conversation with Ana Sladojević4, Catherine Baker emphasizes that the region, belonging to the Mediterranean cultural-economic circle, was always at an intersection of encounters and economic-cultural exchange of various pre-modern cultures, European and beyond European influences, or the dividing line between Central European rule and the Ottoman Empire. Because of this flow, people of different


origins met through the ages. Their contact, or the exchange of culture and goods circulating throughout Europe, resulted in the transference and – more or less conscious acceptance – of racism as an ideology justifying all capitalistic and imperial aims across Europe, including the Slavic south. So, despite its peripheral position and the orientalization of its population, the region’s people primarily self-identify as ‘white’. Even though they were politically subordinated, the local political and economic elites also profited from colonialism by means of trade and the circulation of goods, with its consumer products permeating everyday lives of the lower and working classes5.

Contrary to the geopolitical concept of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as an intersection of cultures, the right wing nationalists attempt to consolidate this region by perpetually establishing and drawing borders. In their vision, Southeastern Europe and the Balkans are the front lines defending European ‘whiteness’. Researching European paintings depicting the Ottoman wars, Ferenc Gróf’s work discusses the Hungarian extreme right’s invocation of identical imagery in current historical circumstances, as immigrants arrive at the European Union’s borders, trying to escape economic deprivation caused by neoliberal capitalism and the aftermath of imperial wars of the capitalist West.

The exclusion of the Yugoslav region from issues of inherited colonial relations and contemporary racism becomes more evident, when compared to similar phenomena from other semi-peripheral parts of Europe. Minna Henriksson contribution identifies customs of implementing racial science in Finnish modern culture by way of visual art production during the late 19th and early 20th century. Exposed to racial theories, Nordic countries became fertile ground for the reproduction of racist ideology employed to stratify and control their population through national and ethnic consolidation.

Using archival footage from the Radio Television Novi Sad in Vojvodina (Serbia), the artistic duo Dopelgenger introduces a critical interpretation of Yugoslavia’s view of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was unsurprisingly euro-centric. At the center of discussion is the established proposition of Yugoslavia’s exceptionality within NAM as the global anti-block movement. They examine the position from which Yugoslavia, as the only European member of the Movement, has been commonly referred to as the „leader of the Non-Aligned“, disregarding the fact that important roles were played by more powerful and larger countries of the Global South. Even though Yugoslav foreign politics strongly supported decolonization processes and liberation movements, Dopelgengers delve into the broader meaning of differentiating colonialism and coloniality6 by examining the latter’s manner of application alongside, or even within, declared Yugoslav anticolonial politics.7

On the other hand, former colonial powers such as Portugal continue to distance themselves from any role in the development of modern racism. Starting in the 1950s, the concept of lusotropicalism became central in the legitimization of Portugal’s late empire. According to this concept, the Portuguese built an exceptionally ‘benevolent’ form of colonialism, an idea that continues to resonate in today’s public sphere. Inês Beleza Barreiros, Rui Gomes Coelho, Patrícia Martins Marcos and Pedro Schacht Pereira used the example of debates triggered by the recent statue of missionary António Vieira in Lisbon to shed light on current discursive acrobatics by those who continue to support the so-called Portuguese lusotropical consensus.

Behzad Khosravi Noori explores and elaborates on the phenomenon he calls “the colonial unconscious”. Stepping outside the historically laid geographical borders of the European continent, Behzad discusses the European presence


in Iran as manifested through the appropriation of the position of the other, the Teheran’s working class photographic self-exoticization in the figure of a dervish. In determining possible reasons for the creation of such photographic imagery, Behzad talks about Iranian modernization in the 1960s and the simultaneous racial and class oppression.

The magazine opens and closes with the work of Jasmina Cibic who imagines the appearance of two extinct types of roses. The reasons for their disappearance in the second half of the 20th century are their racist names [ for more see below ↓ ]. This work, along with others published in this issue, indicates, however, the fact that by simply removing racist speech from public communication, or by removing statues of racists and colonists, we cannot unburden ourselves of the past nor solve the problem of society’s contemporary racism. In this, as with every other struggle for social justice and equality, it is necessary to know and understand the reasons and mechanisms behind, its longevity at all levels of various societies worldwide, and its connection with material living conditions, in order to contribute to the new antiracist epistemological foundations. It is our hope that the articles and work contained in this issue contribute to the construction of a more complex approach to various forms and manifestations of colonial heritage and contemporary anticolonial stances on the semi-periphery of Europe.

1 Apart from the offical statement of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, this event triggered numerous texts, analyses and state-ments from scientists, cul-ture workers and politicians, as well as two online public panels. For an overview of articles on the subject see: “Public discussion on Ivan Meštrović’s Indians sculptures in Chicago“, Historiografija.hr, 15 March 2021, URL: https://historio-grafija.hr/?p=25408

2 See, for example: Katarina Kušić, Philipp Lottholz, Polina Manolova, “From dialogue to practice: Pathways towards decolo-niality in Southeast Europe”, dВЕРСИЯ, special issue: Decolonial Theory & Practice in Southeast Europe (2019), 3. URL: https://dialogu-ingposts.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/special-issue.pdf

3 Ljubomir Micić, Bar-barogenije civilizator, Filip Višnjić, Beograd, 1993, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeNk5EQjOrs

4 Ana Sladojević herself researches the subject of race within the region of Yugoslavia, examining and contextualizing history and contemporary use of the Museum of African Art’s col-lection in Belgrade. See: Ana Sladojević, Museum of Afri-can Art, Contexts and Rep-resentations, Muzej afričke umjetnosti, Belgrade, 2014, URL: http://mau.rs/images/publications/Epublications/Muzej_africke_umetnosti_konteksti_i_reprezentacije/Ana_Sladojevic_Muzej_afri-cke_umetnosti_konteksti_i_reprezentacije.pdf; Ana Sladojević , “Anticolonial representation at the Mu-seum of African Art“, TrAIN Open Live Event, April 2021, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvnbxEHO-Sg

5 Fokus Grupa made a research on Rijeka’s con-siderable progress, whose basis was a monopoly on re-fining sugar imported from Caribbean cane plantations. Fokus Grupa, “A Room witha landscape: Vedute fromthe Palace of the PrivilegedCompany of Trieste andRijeka“, ARTMargins (2021), 10(1): 77-92., URL: https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/10/1/77/100605/A-Room-with-a-landscape-Vedute-from-the-Palace-of

6 See: Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”, Cultural Studies (2007) 21:2-3: 168-178.

7 The artist Naeem Mo-haiemen, in collaboration with Uroš Pajović, in the art section of ARTMargins has even more directly pointed out the issue analyzing Tito’s self-confident statement prompted by the division of Pakistan in 1971: “There will be no Balkan question ever again in the world.” Uroš Pajović, Naeem Mo-haiemen, “Southward and Otherwise”, ARTMargins (2019), 8 (2): 79–89., URL: https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/8/2/79/18089/South-ward-and-Otherwise

[ ↓ ]

Illustrations on the inside of the front and back covers of the magazine are an adapted work by Jasmina Cibic from the series Ornamental Rash (2018). The racist names of the roses, which are an integral part of the work, are omitted. The illustrations were created in collaboration with botanical illustrator Beatriz Inglessis.

Nigger Boy Rose (R. Hennessy, 1931), inkjet print on cotton paper, 100 x 70 cm

Gypsy Rose (Van Rossem, 1931), inkjet print on cotton paper, 100 x 70 cm

25

Naša

oDMeT-Nička

DržavaFerenc Gróf

26 27 Naša odmetnička državaFerenc Gróf

Ljeto 2015. godine u Budimpešti je bilo posebno iscrpljujuće. Nakon prve godine drugog mandata Orbanove vlade takozvana „europska migracijska kriza“ dodatno je rasplamsala rasističku propagandu državnih medija. Tisuće je migranata čekalo vla-kove na glavnom budimpeštanskom kolodvoru Keleti. Krajem kolovoza austrijska je policija na autocesti u blizini mađarske granice, u mjestu Parndorf, pronašla napušteni kamion s mrtvim tijelima 71 izbjeglice iz Iraka, Sirije i Afganistana. Ubrzo nakon toga Mađarska je dovršila proces podizanja ograde na svojoj južnoj granici, čime se žilet-žicom zatvorila prema Srbiji i Bal-kanskoj migracijskoj ruti. Prvi je dio ograde podignut u blizini malog sela Ásotthalom čiji je gradonačelnik László Toroczkai, ekstremno desničarski agitator i osnivač etnicističkih pokreta, bio glasnogovornik antimigrantskih snaga. Toroczkai se zalagao za još drastičnije intervencije protiv izbjeglica koje prelaze zelenu granicu. U svom je videozapisu na YouTubeu predstavio paravojne snage svog sela, spremne za hvatanje migranata i obranu domovine, Europe i kršćanstva od barbara. Mađarska ima dugu tradiciju prikazivanja sebe na ovakav način. Jedan od kultnih prikaza pokreta za nacionalno oslobođenje od kraja 17. stoljeća prikazuje ratnika iz graničnih dvoraca koji čak i sa sjekirom u glavi siječe neprijatelja na komadiće, boreći se do posljednjeg daha. Čak je i socijalistička Mađarska održala na životu ovu domoljubnu tradiciju koja je postala norma u svim nasljednim režimima. Rad Naša odmetnuta država propituje ovu tradiciju borbe protiv Drugoga, nekršćanina, osvajača, za-kletog neprijatelja, sveprisutnoga u europskom slikarstvu. Ova je fraza igra riječi s pojmom „odmetnuta država“, specifičnog američkog izraza iz Reaganovog doba koji opisuje „neposlušne“, „odmetničke“ zemlje čije su kulture gotovo uvijek zasnovane na nelatinskom pismu. „Piši latinicom ili umri“ moglo bi biti otisnuto i na majicama Ásotthalomovih paravojnih snaga.

29our

roGuesTaTe

Ferenc Gróf

30 31 Our Rogue StateFerenc Gróf

The summer of 2015 was particularly suffocating in Budapest. After the first year of the second mandate of the Orbán government, the so called ‘European migrant crisis’ further fueled the racist propaganda of state media. Thousands of migrants had been waiting for trains at Budapest’s Eastern railway station. At the end of August, Austrian police discov-ered an abandoned truck on the motorway near the Hungarian border, at Parndorf, with 71 dead bodies of refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Soon afterwards, Hungary finalized the construction of its Southern border barrier, separating itself from Serbia and from the Balkan’s migrant routes with razor wire. The first section of the barrier was constructed near a small village, Ásotthalom, whose mayor, László Toroczkai, an extreme-right agitator and founder of ethnicist movements, was a spokesperson of anti-migrant forces. Toroczkai argued for an even more drastic intervention against refugees crossing the green border. In a YouTube video he presented the militia of his village, ready to track migrants, to defend the fatherland, Europe and Christianity against the barbarians. Hungary has a long tradition of depicting itself as this type of warrior. One of the iconic images of national liberation movements since the end of 17th century, is the warrior of the border castles, cutting the enemy into pieces even with an axe in his head, fighting to the last breath. Even socialist Hungary has kept alive this pa-triotic tradition and it has become the norm with succeeding regimes. The work Our Rogue State interrogates this tradition of fighting the Other, the non-Christian, the invader, the arch-enemy, omnipresent in European painting. This phrase is a pun on ‘rogue state,’ a special US expression dating from the Reagan era to label ‘non-obedient,’ ‘outlaw’ countries that happen to be almost always ‘non-Latin script-based’ cultures. Write Latin or die, one might read on a T-shirt of of Ásotthalom’s militiamen.

32 Ferenc Gróf

Gyula Benczúr PONOVNO OSVAJANJE BUDIMSKOG DVORCA

1686. GODINE / THE RECAPTURE OF BUDA CASTLE IN 1686,

1896

33

Charles de Steuben KARLO MARTEL U

BITCI KOD POITIERSA / CHARLES MARTEL IN

THE BATTLE OF POITIERS, 1837

Adam Stefanovic BITKA NA KOSOVU POLJU

/ BATTLE OF KOSOVO,1870

3534

Horace Vernet BITKA KOD SOMAHA / BATTLE OF SOMAH,

1840

3736

Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury BALDUIN I. OD JERUZALEMA

ULAZI U EDESSU U VELJAČI 1098. GODINE

/ BALDWIN OF BOULOGNE ENTERING EDESSA IN

FEBRUARY 1098,1840

Charles-Philippe Larivière PRESTANAK

OPSADE MALTE / LIFTING OF THE SIEGE OF MALTA,

1843

3938

Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz KAPITULACIJA GRANADE

/ THE CAPITULATION OF GRANADA,

1882

Theodor Aman VLAD III. DRAKULA I TURSKI IZASLANICI

/ VLAD THE IMPALER AND THE TURKISH ENVOYS,

1864

4140

George W. Joy POSLJEDNJA BITKA

GENERALA GORDONA / GENERAL GORDON’S

LAST STAND,1893

4342

Pauwel Casteels BITKA KOD BEČA

/ BATTLE OF VIENNA,1683

Mikhail Avilov DVOBOJ NA

KULIKOVOM POLJU / DUEL ON THE

KULIKOVO FIELD,1943

4544

Sándor Wagner SAMOPOžRTVOVNOST TITUSZA DUGOVICSA

/ THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF TITUSZ DUGOVICS,

1859

Jan van Huchtenburg PRINC EUGEN SAVOJSKI ZAUZIMA BEOGRAD 16.

KOLOVOZA 1717. GODINE / PRINCE EUGEN OF SAVOY CAPTURES BELGRADE ON

16 AUGUST 1717, 1720

4746

48 49 Our Rogue State48

51

intervju s Catherine Bakerrazgovarala ana sladojević

PosT-juGo-slaveNska reGija

i Teo-rijski

PojaM rase

52 53 Post-jugoslavenska regija i teorijski pojam raseIntervju: Catherine Baker

ožujak/travanj 2020.

Na poziv urednica ovog temata, Ana Sladojević, autorica knjige Muzej afričke umetnosti, Konteksti i reprezentacije i nekadašnja kustosica u istoimenom muzeju u Beogradu, razgovarala je s povjesničarkom Catherine Baker, s britanskog sveučilišta Hull. Catherine Baker je u svojim istraživanjima usredotočena na regiju bivše Jugoslavije, kojoj pristupa iz rakursa međuna-rodnih odnosa i kulturalnih studija. Kroz ovaj dijalog otvorena su brojna pitanja koja se tiču specifičnog statusa pojma rasa u studijima Jugoistočne Europe i koja, unatoč pojačanom aka-demskom interesu za ulogu SFRJ u Pokretu nesvrstanih, i dalje često izmiču ili se nalaze na marginama interesa, analitičkih pristupa i interpretativnih dometa suvremenih istraživačica i istraživača ove teme. Sam problem prijevoda teorijskih pojmo-va poput blackness na BHS (bosanski/hrvatski/srpski jezik), s kojim smo se susrele uređujući ovaj intervju, ispostavio se kao eklatantan simptom kritičnog epistemološkog deficita kada je riječ o lokalnoj recepciji i uporabi teorijskog pojma rase.

U svojoj knjizi Rasa i jugoslavenska regija: postsocijalističko, postkonfliktno, postkolonijalno? (Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial?, Manchester University Press, 2018.) Catherine Baker tako argumentira potrebu za većom uporabom teorijskog pojma rase u kontekstu studija o jugoistočnoj Europi;

„U vrijeme kada je spoj ‚postsocijalističkih‘ i ‚postkolonijalnih‘ okvira za razumijevanje bivše Jugoslavije, ‚Balkana‘ i ‚istočne Europe‘ nadahnjivao nova tumačenja transnacionalne i globalne povijesti regije koja se umnožavala čak i tijekom nastajanja ove knjige, više nije moguće tvrditi – niti je ikad trebalo biti - da se jugoslavenska regija na neki način nalazi ‚izvan‘ rase. Pitanje je gdje se nalazi i zašto je to tako dugo ostalo neizrečeno.“

Ana Sladojević Catherine, kada sam prvi put čitala tvoju knjigu, imala sam snažni dojam kako tvoj rad predstavlja neophodnu intervenciju u vlastito aka-demsko polje. Na koliko si otpora, možda čak i nerazumijevanja, naišla kod kole-gica i kolega iz istog područja, a koliku si podršku u tom pogledu imala kada si započela ovo istraživanje?

Catherine Baker Zasad sam naišla na puno više podrške nego otpora. Recenzije tek počinju pristizati, ali one koje sam do sada pročitala pune su srdačnih pohvala i konstruktivnih kritika – pri-mjerice, Dafina Paca je u svojoj recenziji objavljenoj u Sociologiji rase i etniciteta (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity), a koja proizlazi iz njezina vlastita istraživačkog iskustva, napravila važnu uspo-redbu o tome kako su se kosovski Albanci, u vrijeme kada su bili meta dehumanizirajuće ideologije i Miloševićeve policije, poisto-vjećivali s afroameričkim hip-hop tradicijama. Igrom slučaja, od 2018. godine manje idem na velike međunarodne konferencije gdje se najčešće i pojavljuje izravni otpor prema istraživanjima temeljenim na kritičkim studijama rase (a i prema istraživačicama i istraživačima koji ih provode, posebice onima koji nisu bijele rase) – ponekad i u uvredljivim oblicima kojima se naše aka-demske udruge i čelnici trebaju odlučno oduprijeti. Izazov kojim se trenutno najviše bavim je argument da se „bjelačkost“1 kao koncept koji se promišlja u SAD-u, ne može pretočiti u prouča-vanje srednje i jugoistočne Europe bez počinjenja jednog oblika kulturnog i intelektualnog imperijalizma kojemu se pokušavamo oduprijeti. Smatram da su kulturna estetika i politika znanja o gore spomenutom konceptu sada već toliko globalizirane da su se u jugoistočnoj Europi učvrstile i prije nego što smo mi kao istraživačice i istraživači počeli koristiti kritičke alate u njihovom proučavanju – i u konačnici se nadam da će istraživanja o rasi u jugoistočnoj Europi i, jednako važno, istraživanja iz nje, igrati ulogu u promjeni načina promišljanja rase i u društvima iz kojih proizlaze ključne kritičke studije o rasi.

AS Nekome tko nije toliko izravno uklju-čen u povijesna istraživanja, isprepleteni odnosi između pojmova etniciteta i rase nisu toliko samorazumljivi kao onome tko je već duboko uronjen u suvremena povi-jesna istraživanja iz perspektive studija o

1 Bjelačkost se u teo-rijskom smislu ne odnosi na nečiju boju kože, kako bi se inače ta riječ mogla kolokvijalno koristiti, već na strukture znanja, emocija te, prije svega, moći, putem kojih se naturalizira ideja rasizma. Prema Charlesu W. Millsu, filozofu rase i bje-lačkosti, „bjelačkost“ znači „skup normi i pretpostavki [...] kojima se osigurava legitimitet bijele dominacije [...] i nepravde koje proizlaze iz njezina propitivanja [te dominacije]“ iz Charles W. Mills, „Piercing the Veil“, u: V. Watson, D. Howard-Wa-gner & L. Spanierman (eds.). Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century; Global Manifestations, Transdis-ciplinary Interventions. (1st ed.). Lexington Books, Lanham-Boulder-NewYork-London, 2014., 77-88.


jugoistočnoj Europi (Southeast European Studies). I Aniko Imre i Miglena Todorova pišu o tome, no ako se osvrnemo na tvoju knjigu i možda na recepciju koju je doživjela u međuvremenu, što misliš što je posebice doprinijelo ovom obliku normalizacije zamjene etniciteta rasom te smatraš li to još uvijek problemom u studijima o jugoistočnoj Europi?

CB Jedan od razloga bio bi način razmišljanja koji se u sociologiji naziva izuzimanje rase (racial exceptionalism) – uvjerenje kako rasa i rasizam nisu važni za razumijevanje određene regije, nacije itd. Perspektive koje polaze od premise da je „rasa“ kao inter-pretativni okvir već raširen i preveden diljem svijeta polaze od suprotne pretpostavke: rasa jest važna, pitanje je samo kako. Od prikaza Afrike u islandskim udžbenicima s početka 20. stoljeća pa sve do estetike konzumerizma u postkolonijalnoj Gani, rasa je pri-sutna daleko izvan okvira društava u kojima je rasizam najkonven-cionalnije proučavan pa stoga perspektive o rasi kao globalnom pitanju smatram uvjerljivijima. Pod izuzimanjem rase ne mislim samo na spremnost (premda ona postoji) ili na svjesni izbor da se poistovjetimo sa zapadnjačkim oblikom „bjelačkosti“ (premda i on često postoji), nego primarno na strukturne i povijesne čimbe-nike koji su proučavanje jugoistočne Europe držali razdvojenim od proučavanja rase na globalnoj razini. Umjesto toga, povijest i antropologija prvenstveno su tumačile kolektivne identitete regije u etničkim ili etno-nacionalnim pojmovima (i u religijskim pojmovima tamo gdje je religija simbol etno-nacionalnog iden-titeta, posebno u Bosni i Hercegovini). Te su nacije, utemeljene na etničkim pripadnostima, znanstvenici i antropolozi uključeni u projekte izgradnje nacije u prvoj polovici dvadesetog stoljeća i sami rasno tumačili. Tako su, primjerice, Tomislav Longinović za Jugoslaviju, a Nevenko Bartulin za Hrvatsku tvrdili kako su se hrvatska nacija i sinkretička jugoslavenska nacija obje razlikovale od svojih susjeda pozivajući se na rasnu znanost. Tako su ideje o etnicitetu i rasi zamućene davno prije nego je to učinila struka u posljednjih nekoliko desetljeća. Kad je rasa pridodana proučavanju jugoistočne Europe, to je obično bilo kroz analogiju: ono što je „crnačkost“ (blackness) u SAD-u ili Britaniji, to je ovdje etnički Drugi ili sam pojam „Balkana“. To je pomoglo pri identificiranju strategija stigmatizacije i Drugosti, a opet, sljedeći je korak postav-ljanje konkretnog pitanja o, primjerice, značenjima „crnačkosti“ na samom Balkanu.

AS Općeniti pomak područja istraži-vanja prema pitanjima rase u posljednjih nekoliko godina podudara se s izrazito zakašnjelim akademskim zanimanjem za povijest Pokreta nesvrstanih, posebice njegovih kulturalnih posljedica. Ja sam osobno duboko uvjerena da je zatiranje povijesti Pokreta nesvrstanih kao u suštini antikolonijalne tvorbe (zanemarivši sve njegove nedostatke) izravno povezano sa zataškavanjem kolonijalne povijesti, kao i njezinog naslijeđa, koje je nastavljeno kroz obrazovanje, kulturalne stereotipe i repre-zentacije. Ti si ovaj problem oblikovala u pitanjima „zašto je moj kurikulum bijel?“ ili „zašto moja profesorica nije crna?“ u svojoj komunikaciji sa studenticama i stu-dentima. Slažeš li se donekle s ovim?

CB Pitanja „zašto je moj kurikulum bijel?“ i „zašto moja profe-sorica nije crna?“ bili su slogani korišteni u kampanji na University College London (UCL) koju su studenti/ce i istraživači/ce iz afričkih i azijskih dijaspora organizirali 2014. godine kada su se borili za to da crnačka, autohtona, i znanja globalnog juga po-stanu zastupljenija u njihovom kurikulumu te za rasnu pravdu na najvišim i najzaštićenijim razinama akademskih zvanja. Studirala sam i predavala na UCL-u, na Školi slavističkih i istočnoeuropskih studija (School of Slavonic and East European Studies), pa me je njihova online kampanja potaknula na razmišljanje o tome kako bih ja reagirala da još uvijek radim tamo. Jedan od glavnih proble-ma kojima su se bavili u kampanji bilo je zataškavanje kolonijalne povijesti, što se posebno isticalo u okruženju poput UCL-a, na kojemu je eugeničarima Francisu Galtonu i Karlu Pearsonu odana počast imenovanjem prestižnih zgrada njihovim imenima.2 To je bila borba koja je utemeljena u Velikoj Britaniji, a koja je imala mnoge poveznice sa sličnim pokretima u Južnoj Africi3 i u SAD-u.

Slažem se s tezom Vedrane Veličković da je u post-jugosla-venskom kontekstu povijest Pokreta nesvrstanih pala u „post-komunistički zaborav“ zbog odlučnosti država nasljednica bivše Jugoslavije da njihova povijest bude priznata kao „europskija“. I uistinu, iz istraživanja poput onoga Konstantina Kilibarde, možemo primijetiti da su se intelektualci i dužnosnici Partije u Sloveniji i Hrvatskoj već počeli udaljavati od antikolonijalnih solidarnosti Pokreta nesvrstanih tijekom 1980-ih. Fascinantno je da je upravo

2 „UCL denames buildings named after eugenicists“, University College London, 22. lipnja 2020. URL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/headlines/2020/jun/ucl-de-names-buildings-named-af-ter-eugenicists (pristupljeno 24. studenog 2020.).

3 Drugu, raniju borbu, Rhodes mora pasti (Rhodes Must Fall), koja se iz Južne Afrike preselila na Sveuči-lište u Oxfordu, spominje tekst Nepodnošljiva lakoća anakronizma: Prakse podiza-nja spomenika i čuvari povi-jesnog konsenzusa, također objavljen u ovom broju.


pitanje rase u državnom socijalizmu, čije su nam proučavanje omogućili transnacionalni susreti koji su bili dijelom Pokreta nesvrstanih, ono što nam je, izgleda, omogućilo uspostavljanje opsežnijeg projekta proučavanja rase u jugoistočnoj Europi.

AS Tvoja knjiga predstavlja vrijedan repozitorij studija slučaja koje si sama istražila ili citirala iz recentnih radova drugih istraživačica i istraživača, a što pokazuje kako je struka već prepoznala i spremno usvojila važnost takvog istra-živanja. Nastojeći argumentirati važnost teorijskog pojma rase koji se uvodi u stu-dije o jugoistočnoj Europi, smatraš li da si se kroz svoj rad usredotočila na očitije primjere koji prvenstveno potvrđuju kako su rasa i njezine implikacije postojale i još uvijek postoje u regiji, dok su neki ne toli-ko očiti i suptilniji primjeri (i rasizma i an-tirasizma, koji se također mogu analizirati dublje od njihove deklarativne ili političke uloge) izgubljeni u procesu probiranja?

CB Svakako se slažem da su neki od primjera koje sam upotrije-bila u knjizi mogli postati samostalne studije, a neke od njih sam dijelom i svjesno uvrstila kao popis želja – teme koje se provlače kroz knjigu kao okvirne ideje i koje zahtijevaju daljnje istraživanje, ali nisu još napisane. Nadala sam se da će knjiga olakšati neke od puteva koji vode prema njihovom budućem teoretiziranju te se veselim vidjeti koje će ona nijanse značenja još dodati. Primjerice, u jednom dijelu posljednjeg poglavlja iznijela sam neke prijed-loge o ulozi transnacionalnih džihadista u bosanskom sukobu u okviru povijesti jugoslavenskih ratova, skicirajući neke poveznice sa svjetskom sigurnosnom politikom nakon 11. rujna; od tada je knjiga Darryla Lia Univerzalni neprijatelj (The Universal Enemy), temeljena na višegodišnjim intervjuima i etnografiji, izgradila majstorsko djelo na sličnim temeljima. Slažem se da ima još prostora, posebice za pomirenje kritičkog aparata o sudioništvu sa strukturama rasizma koji proistječe iz anglofonog globalnog sjevera s intelektualnom i materijalnom marginalizacijom jugoi-stočne Europe i njezinih proizvođača/ica znanja.

U budućim istraživanjima rase i jugoistočne Europe jedan od izazova bit će zadržavanje fokusa na povijestima antikolonijalne i transverzalne solidarnosti regije pritom ne zanemarujući (često

nesvjesnu) privrženost strukturama misli i osjećaja koje kritičke studije rase nazivaju „bjelačkost“, s obzirom na to da nam je po-treban uvid u moguće alternative koje te povijesti sadrže kako bi mogli kritički sagledati društveni i globalni poredak današnjice.

AS Bi li rekla da se izražavanje rasne „sljepoće“ (racial ‚blindness‘),4 promovi-rano tijekom socijalističke Jugoslavije, na ovaj ili onaj način, još uvijek osjeća kao historizirani diskurs5? Naime, bez obzira što socijalistička Jugoslavija, kao mnoge zemlje pripadnice Pokreta nesvrstanih, nije uspjela u razvoju teme-ljitije i dosljedne kulturne suradnje među zemljama pripadnicama Pokreta te joj je svakako nedostajalo autorefleksije kada govorimo o rasi i rasizmu, ovaj „dalto-nistički“ socijalizam ostavio je traga u kolektivnoj memoriji, s obzirom na to da naslijeđe nekadašnje solidarnosti još uvijek postoji, u koliko god nejasnom i ne uvijek razumljivom obliku?

CB „Daltonizam“ je opstao dulje od socijalizma – možda zato jer nije bio u sukobu s postsocijalističkim nacionalizmima na način na koji je to bio socijalizam. Riječ je o nacionalizmima koji su počeli preuzimati prostor legitimiteta koji je socijalizam napustio i prije nego su upravne strukture državnog socijalizma doživjele konačni slom. Slovenski i hrvatski nacionalizmi morali su reagirati protiv jugoslavenske ideje u kakvu se pretvorila u sustavu kojeg je Milošević iskorištavao, a srpski nacionalizam morao je reagi-rati protiv jugoslavenskog ideala koji je omogućio zamišljanje Jugoslavije s višestrukim centrima moći, ali se niti jedan od tih nacionalnih projekata krajem 1980-ih nije trebao izravno suprot-staviti ideji da je Jugoslavija postojala izvan „rase“ kao sklop koji je povezivao kapitalistički, imperijalistički Zapad s izrabljivanim Trećim svijetom. Iako se mogu iščitati poveznice s europejstvom i stoga (do one mjere u kojoj ideja Europe kao „bijelog“ prostora ostaje neupitna) s idejom „bjelačkosti“ tijekom postkolonijalnih projekata izgradnje nacionalnog identiteta, nijedan od njih nije morao srušiti spomenuti „daltonizam“ iako su često rušili solidar-nosti koje je slavio državni socijalizam.

4 Termin racial ‘blindness’ koji opisno prevodimo kao rasna „sljepoća“ ili kasnije u tekstu kao „daltonizam“ (colour blindness) se u engleskom jeziku koristi kada se tvrdi da nečija rasna pripadnost ne ograničava njegove/njezine životne mogućnosti.

5 Pojam historizirani diskurs je iskorišten kako bi se istaklo da je rasna „slje-poća“ u kolektivnoj memoriji povezana sa socijalističkom Jugoslavijom i njenom ulo-gom u Pokretu nesvrstanih, odnosno tadašnjim govorom o antikolonijalizmu i solidar-nosti. Ona se i danas javlja kao „naslijeđeni“ pristup pitanjima rase i rasizma, a oni koji je upotrebljava-ju najčešće nisu svjesni negativnih konotacija kakve ona nosi (poput negiranja ili relativiziranja utjecaja nečije rasne pripadnosti na njegove/njezine životne mogućnosti), već je zbog njenog povijesnog konteksta smatraju afirmativnom.


AS Koliko god je izuzimanje bilo opće-prihvaćeno kao strategija vlastitog izu-zeća čak i promišljanja vlastitog mjesta u globalnijoj cirkulaciji stereotipa povezanih s rasom, aktiviranje odnosa unutar Pokreta nesvrstanih izložilo je neke Jugoslavene iskustvu racijalizacije. Evo primjera Oskara Daviča, pisca i dopisnika koji je tijekom 1960. – 1961. posjetio zapadno-afričke zemlje, i njegovih žalopojki iz putopisa:

„Bivši belac – Besmisleno je, ali šta mogu, stid me. Narod kom pripadam i klasa čiji sam sin nisu nikad morili, robili, ubijali. Stolećima smo sami robovali. Da, ali ja sam beo, to je sve što prolaznici vide. Kad bih na reveru mogao da nosim sažetu istoriju svoje zemlje!“.6

CB Ovaj Davičov odlomak posljednjih godina živi drugi život. Prvi put sam ga čula kada ga je pročitao Nemanja Radonjić, koji proučava jugoslavenske putopise o Africi, na konferenciji o „(Pro)mišljanju jugoslavenskog internacionalizma“ ((Re)Thinking Yugoslav Internationalism) na kojoj smo oboje sudjelovali 2016. kada sam ja radila na knjizi Rasa i jugoslavenska regija. Jelena Subotić i Srđan Vučetić spominju ga kao tekst koji „je najbliži održivoj kritici rasizma“ od svih onih koje su proučavali za svoj članak7 o „bjelačkosti“ i „težnji za ugledom“ pristupa razvoju Trećeg svijeta među jugoslavenskim čelnicima. Potonji, prema njihovom sudu, zasigurno nisu posjedovali Davičovu sposobnost promišljanja svih povijesnih ostavština koje su nastale kad su Afrikanci doživjeli Jugoslavene kao bijelce. Pa ipak, istodobno su britanski diplomati u zapadnoj Africi tijekom 1960-ih bili zabrinuti da će Jugoslavija postati suparnik tamošnjim britan-skim trgovinskim interesima, jer su Jugoslaveni imali iskustvo industrijalizacije bez kolonijalnog tereta – Britancima je povijest nekih od tih Jugoslavena već bila puno očitija nego što je Davičo mislio da može sam napisati.

AS Parafrazirajući Frantza Fanona, već je 2004. godine Dejan Sretenović, tadašnji glavni kustos Muzeja savremene umetnosti u Beogradu, napisao knjigu kao prilog istoimenoj izložbi Crno telo,

6 Oskar Davičo, Crno na belo, Prosveta, Beograd, 1969., 13.

7 Jelena Subotić, Srđan Vučetić,, „Performing solidarity: whiteness and status-seeking in the non-aligned world", u: Jour-nal of International Relations and Development, (2017.), 22:722-743. DOI: 10.1057/s41268-017-0112-2

bele maske. Kritički se osvrnuo na položaj Jugoslavije prije Drugog svjetskog rata u odnosu prema problemu rase i rasizma, a izložbu je postavio u Muzeju afričke umetnosti – zbirci Vede i dr. Zdravka Pečara u Beogradu, koji je kontekstualno i nominalno bio povezan s Pokretom nesvrstanih. Na ovaj je način pridodao segmente kolonijalnih imaginarija koji su kružili ovom regijom prije Drugog svjetskog rata onome što se smatralo antirasističkim i antikolonijalnim stavom jugoslavenskog socijalizma, uvodeći pita-nja rase, rasizma, kolonijalnog naslijeđa, „crnačkosti“ i „bjelačkosti“ u muzej koji ih je uspješno izbjegavao od svog osnivanja. Sretenović u jednoj rečenici sažima odnose socijalističke Jugoslavije prema afričkim dvojnicima:

„Titoistička politička figura Afrike nije figura apsolutno drugog, isključenog i distanciranog, već figura partnera i ‚mlađeg brata‘ na putu u socijalizam koji je leopardovu kožu zamenio radničkim kombinezonom.“8

CB Ovakva vrsta paternalizma je nešto što, prema mišljenju Jelene Subotić i Srđana Vučetića u gore spomenutom članku, često karakterizira odnos Jugoslavije s Trećim svijetom – i što, kao što to sugerira Sretenovićev citat, u konačnici proizlazi iz rasnog shvaćanja „Europe“ (prostora s kojim su se identificirali kao Jugoslaveni) kao mjesta koje će neizbježno biti napredni-je od „Afrike“. Ovakve pretpostavke, kao što to tvrdi Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, proizvode „rasizam bez rasista“ – toliko su postale dijelom općeg shvaćanja globalnog poretka da će ih reproduci-rati vjerojatno čak i mnoge pojedinke i pojedinci koji se bore za rasnu jednakost. U nedavnom razgovoru sa socijalnim povjesni-čarkama i povjesničarima koji se bave poviješću rada u socijali-stičkoj Jugoslaviji zaintrigiralo me je u kolikom su opsegu ovakvi stavovi bili dijelom radne svakodnevice, posebno u poduzećima koja su izvozila u ili trgovala s Afrikom, pa se nadam da ćemo moći nastaviti s tim istraživanjem.

8 Dejan Sretenović, Crno telo, bele maske, Muzej afričke umetnosti, Beograd, 2004., 26.


AS Neznanje s kakvim pojedini suvre-meni mediji ili političke osobe koriste otvoreno rasistički rječnik odaje duboko ukorijenjene društvene probleme po-vezane sa svim oblicima nasilja. Kako onda razlikovati rasizam od drugih oblika diskriminacije i nasilja?

CB Ključne teoretičarke i teoretičari rasizam vide ne samo kao ideologiju ili predrasudu, već kao strukturalno povijesno naslijeđe – povijesnu posljedicu načina na koji su europski imperijalizam, naseljenički kolonijalizam i porobljavanje Afrikanaca prikaza-ni kao prirodni i predodređeni u vrijeme kada su se događali. Naše moderne ideje o rodu, seksualnosti, tijelu, higijeni, razvo-ju, znanosti, moralu, pa i o samoj modernosti, oblikovane su u interakciji s idejom „rase“ – iako se detalji tih kategorija i njihove karakteristike razlikuju od mjesta do mjesta. Danas to znači da rasizam ne možemo razdvojiti od drugih oblika diskriminacije i nasilja – kontekst rasizma uvijek je relevantan za razumijevanje raznorodnih oblika diskriminacije i nasilja, čak i kada se čini da rasne razlike ne igraju u njima nikakvu ulogu. Kada doživljavam diskriminaciju kao queer žena, a način na koji je doživljavam uvjetovan je činjenicom da sam bijela queer žena – izložena sam mizoginiji i homofobiji, ali ne i naglašenom rasnom ušutkavanju, nepovjerenju i strukturno nepovoljnijem položaju kakvom bi isto-vremeno bila izložena queer nebjelkinja. Naravno, to govorim iz pozicije anglofone govornice, što znači da društvo moju „bje-lačkost“ smatra bezuvjetnom – mnogo više borbe vodilo se oko toga smatra li Zapad jugoistočne europske nacije „bijelima“ zbog romofobije, orijentalizma i klasne hijerarhije koje su zapadnjaci projicirali na ovu regiju.

AS Catherine, tvoj pristup pisanju ove knjige pokazuje izraženu dozu autore-fleksije i prema vlastitom prijašnjem akademskom radu. Osim uvođenja novih perspektiva u tumačenju teme koja ti je već dobro poznata, odnosno popularne glazbe, osobito u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih, u svoj pristup uvela si i neke (inter- ili trans-disciplinarne) metodološke promjene.

CB Prijelaz s moje prve knjige o popularnoj glazbi i nacionalnom identitetu u Hrvatskoj Zvuci granice (Sounds of the Borderland)9 na drugu, Rasa i jugoslavenska regija, može se činiti izraženim, no ja nisam svoj pristup promijenila isključivo kako bih napisala ovu knjigu, nego je moj pristup bio promijenjen već i zbog razli-čitih akademskih i intelektualnih krugova kojih sam bila dio svih ovih godina. Knjiga Zvuci granice sama je po sebi interdisciplinar-na, temeljena na disciplinama koje teoretičarke i teoretičari glaz-be u jugoistočnoj Europi i sami vrlo ležerno spajaju, tako da je di-jalog među njima već postojao. Glavna promjena u akademskom smislu koja se u međuvremenu dogodila je ta da sam se oko 2013. godine, netom po dovršetku projekta o očuvanju mira i o prevo-ditelji(ca)ma/tumači(teljica)ma u Bosni i Hercegovini, puno više bavila feminističkim i postkolonijalnim međunarodnim odnosima, važnima za razumijevanje očuvanja mira, ali i koji su se također počeli pretvarati u pitanja popularne kulture i militarizma. Prve bilješke koje sam zapisala, a koje će kasnije postati Rasa i jugo-slavenska regija, nastale su nakon mojeg sudjelovanja na konfe-renciji organiziranoj od strane International Feminist Journal of Politics u Sussexu na kojoj su globalna politika rase i „bjelačkost“ bili među važnijim temama. Uslijedila je radionica o rodu i građan-stvu u jugoistočnoj Europi – tijekom prezentacije Julije Sardelić o postjugoslavenskim Romima i politici multikulturalizma, počela sam sastavljati popis drugih važnih tema u istraživanju jugoistoč-ne Europe koje je bilo potrebno preispitati ako ćemo o njima po-stavljati istu vrstu pitanja kakva sam čula i u Sussexu. Pišući ovo usred karantene u Ujedinjenom Kraljevstvu, svjesna sam koliko je način na koji se moj intelektualni okvir razvio tijekom posljednjeg desetljeća ovisio o mojoj mogućnosti da podnesem financijski i vremenski trošak putovanja u svrhu istraživačkog umrežavanja tijekom akademskog semestra – i svjesna sam činjenice kako je i tu posrijedi nepravedna raspodjela dobara. Tako da i to zaslužuje biti dijelom moje samorefleksije.

AS U knjizi ističeš (najmanje) tri načina stavljanja u suodnos rase s jugoslaven-skim prostorom, neke od kojih smo već spomenuli: daltonizam (ravnodušnost ili „bijela nevinost“), analogiju i povezivanje. Zanimalo bi me kako bi, uz odmak od dvije godine od izdavanja knjige, dodatno pojasnila pojam povezivanja kao najanga-žiranijeg od ova tri načina.

9 Objavljene 2010.


CB Kako ne bih previše dužila, reći ću da je povezivanje onaj način koji odbija konvencionalno razgraničenje postjugoslaven-ske regije, pa čak i ostatka postsocijalističke Europe, kao područja koje se nalazilo izvan tokova globalne povijesti kolonijalnosti i rase – budući da su one i tamo imale odjeka i čak su utjecale i na oblike dominacije koji su se najneposrednije manifestirali u regiji. Gledajući preko tih granica, sposobniji smo vidjeti manifestacije globalnih fenomena u regiji i načine na koje je regija sastavni dio globalnih fenomena čak i kada su najkonkretnije manifestacije tih fenomena negdje drugdje. Ali naravno, ove su veze istraživane, i što je važnije življene, i prije nego je itko ovakav način razmišljanja o istima nazvao nekakvim akademskim pojmom.

65

THe PosT-YuGoslav reGioN

aND THeo-reTiCal

CoNCePT oF raCe

interview with Catherine Bakerconducted by ana sladojević

66 67 The Post-Yugoslav Region and Theoretical Concept of RaceInterview with Catherine Baker

Ana Sladojević Catherine, a really strong impression that I had while read-ing your book for the first time was of your writing as a necessary intervention into your own academic field. How much resistance and, perhaps, misunderstand-ing did you actually encounter from the colleagues in the field, and how much support for that matter, when you em-barked on this particular research?

Catherine Baker So far I’ve encountered much more support than resistance. Reviews are only just starting to come out, but those I’ve read so far have been enthusiastic in their praise and constructive in their critique—Dafina Paca’s review in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, for instance, added some important context, from her own experiential knowledge, about Kosovo Albanians’ identifications with African-American hip-hop tradi-tions when they had been targets of dehumanising ideology and Milošević’s police. By chance, since 2018 I’ve been presenting less at large international conferences, which is where outright resistance to research based on critical race studies (and to the researchers who do it, especially when they’re scholars of colour) is probably most likely to emerge—sometimes in abu-sive ways that our scholarly associations and leaders need to take strong stands against. The challenge I’m giving deepest thought to at the moment is the argument that ‘whiteness’,1 as a concept theorised in the US, can’t be exported into the study of central and south-east Europe without committing the kind of cultural and intellectual imperialism that we are trying to resist. Personally, I’d argue that the cultural aesthetics and knowledge politics of ‘whiteness’ had already been globalised so far that they had already become grounded in south-east Europe before we as researchers started to employ the critical tools for study-ing them—and ultimately I hope research on race in, and just as importantly from, south-east Europe will play a part in chang-ing how race is theorised in the ‘core’ societies for critical race studies as well.

AS From the point of view of some-one not as directly involved in historical research, the overlapping relations be-tween notions of ethnicity and race are not as self-explanatory as perhaps they

March/April 2020

Upon being invited by the editors of this issue, Ana Sladojević, the author of the book The Museum of African Art, Contexts and Representations, and former curator of the museum of the same name in Belgrade, talked to Catherine Baker, a his-torian from the University of Hull. In her research, Catherine Baker focuses on the region of former Yugoslavia, approaching it from the perspective of international relations and cultural studies. The conversation addressed numerous issues re-garding the particular status of the term race within studies in Southeastern Europe, which, despite a growing academic interest in SFRY’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement, are still largely disregarded or marginalized in terms of interest, analytical approach and interpretive reaches of contemporary researchers. The issue of translating theoretical terminology such as blackness into Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, which occurred while editing this interview, presented itself as the quintessential symptom of a critical epistemological deficit in regards to local reception and application of race as a theoretical term.

In her book Race and the Yugoslav Region, Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester University Press, 2018), Catherine Baker argues the need of increased application of the theoretical term race in the context of Southeastern European studies;

“At a time when the juncture of ‘postsocialist’ and ‘postco-lonial’ lenses for making sense of ex-Yugoslavia, ‘the Balkans’ and ‘eastern Europe’ has been inspiring reinterpretations of the region’s transnational and global history that multiplied even as this book was being written, it is no longer possible—and never should have been—to contend that the Yugoslav region stands somehow ‘outside’ race. The question is where it stands, and why that has gone unspoken for so long.”

1 Whiteness as a thero-retical concept does not apply on someone's skin color, as the word would be otherwise colloquially used, but on knowledge structures, emotions and, above all, power, through which the idea of racism is naturalized. According to Charles W. Mills, a philoso-pher of race and whiteness, “whiteness” is “a set of norms and assumptions [...] which insures the legitimacy of white domination [...] and the injustices that arise from the interrogation [of that domination]”. Charles W. Mills, “Piercing the Veil”, in: Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century; Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interven-tions (1st ed.). V. Watson, D. Howard-Wagner & L. Spanierman (eds.), Lexing-ton Books, Lanham-Boul-der-New York-London, 77-88.


are when you are already deeply rooted in contemporary historical research of Southeast European Studies (SEE). Both Aniko Imre and Miglena Todorova write about this, but looking back at your writing, and perhaps the reception it received in the meantime, what would you say particularly contributed to this kind of normalization of substituting ethnicity for race, and would you say that it still represents an issue within the SEE studies?

CB One reason would be the way of thinking that sociologists call racial exceptionalism—the belief that race and racism aren’t important for understanding a particular region, nation, and so on. Perspectives which take it as their point of departure that frameworks of ‘race’ have already been spread and translated all around the world start from the opposite assumption: race is relevant, the question becomes how. Since there’s evidence all the way from representations of Africa in early 20th cen-tury Icelandic textbooks to the aesthetics of consumerism in postcolonial Ghana of race being salient far beyond the socie-ties where racism has been most conventionally studied, I find those perspectives on race as global more convincing. By racial exceptionalism I don’t just mean individual wilfulness (though that exists) or active choices to identify with a Western kind of whiteness (though those often exist too) so much as structural and historical factors that have kept the study of south-east Eu-rope separate from the study of race in a global sense. Instead, history and anthropology have primarily interpreted the region’s collective identities in ethnic, or ethnonational, terms (and reli-gious terms as well where religion is a symbol of ethnonational identity, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina). Those very ethnic nations were themselves interpreted in racial terms by scientists and anthropologists involved in the nation-building projects of the first half of the twentieth century, as Tomislav Longinović has argued for Yugoslavia and Nevenko Bartulin has detailed for Croatia—the Croatian nation and the syncretic Yugoslav nation were both being distinguished from neighbours with reference to racial science. So the ideas of ethnicity and race had been blurred long before scholarship in the last few decades blurred them. When race was brought on to the agenda for studying south-east Europe, it was typically by way of analogy: as is

blackness in the USA or Britain, so is being an ethnic other or ‘Balkan’. This helped to diagnose strategies of stigmatisation and Othering, and yet the next step is to ask specifically about (for instance) meanings of blackness in the Balkans too.

AS A general shift of the field towards questions of race in the last couple of years corresponded with a long overdue academic interest in the history of the Non-Aligned Movement, in particular its cultural implications. I myself am deeply convinced that the obscuring of the history of Non-Aligned Movement, as basically anti-colonial formation (all its shortcomings aside), was in direct relation to the obscuring of colonial history, and its legacy, that continued to work through education, cultural stereotypes and representation, as you formulated through questions of “why is my curriculum white?” or “why isn’t my professor black?” when engaging with your students. Would you agree with this to a point?

CB The questions “why is my curriculum white?” and “why isn’t my professor black?” were the slogans that a campaign group at University College London (UCL) led by students and research-ers of colour chose to organise around in 2014 when they were struggling for black, indigenous and Global South knowledges to be more central to their curriculum and for racial justice at the most senior and secure levels of the academic profession. (I’d studied and taught at UCL, at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, so following their campaign online chal-lenged me to reflect on what I’d have done in response if I’d still been working there.) One of the major issues they raised was the obscuring of colonial history, which was particularly glaring in a built environment like UCL’s (where the eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson are commemorated in prestigious plac-es)2. That was a UK-based struggle, which drew many connec-tions with similar movements in South Africa3 and the US. In a post-Yugoslav context, I agree with Vedrana Veličković that the history of the Non-Aligned Movement fell into a ‘postcommunist oblivion’ amid determination to be recognised as more European,

2 “UCL denames buildings named after eugenicists”, University College London, 22nd June 2020. URL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/headlines/2020/jun/ucl-de-names-buildings-named-af-ter-eugenicists (accessed 24th November 2020).

3 Another, earlier struggle, Rhodes Must Fall, which moved from South Africa to the University of Oxford, is mentioned in the text “The Unbearable Lightness of Anachronism: Practices of Monumentmaking and the Guardians of Historical Consensus”, also published in this issue.


and indeed we can see from studies like Konstantin Kilibarda’s that intellectuals and Party officials in Slovenia and Croatia were already pulling away from the anti-colonial solidarities of Non-Alignment in the 1980s. It’s fascinating that the question of race in state socialism, which the transnational encounters involved in the Non-Aligned Movement let us explore, is what seems to have allowed the wider project of researching race in south-east Europe to be crystallised.

AS Your book represents a valuable repository of examples, researched first hand, or cited from other researchers’ very recent writing (which shows how the field has already readily embraced the importance of such research). In building the case towards the impor-tance of a theoretical notion of race being introduced into research on SEE, would you say that perhaps you may have focused on the more obvious exam-ples that above all confirm that race, and its implications as phenomenon, did and still does exist in the region, but perhaps allowed some more understated and nuanced examples (of both racism and anti-racism, which can also be further analysed beyond its declarative or politi-cal role) pass through the sieve?

CB I quite agree that many of the examples I used in the book could have been book-length studies of their own, and some of them I somewhat consciously included as a wishlist—topics that the framework of ideas behind the book invited more studies of, but that hadn’t been written yet. I hoped the book would make some of the potential paths towards theorising them more possible, and I was excited to see what further nuances they would add. One section of the final chapter for instance raised some suggestions about the place of transnational jihadis in the Bosnian conflict within histories of the Yugoslav wars, sketching out some links with the security politics of the world after 9/11; since then Darryl Li’s book The Universal Enemy, based on years of interviews and ethnography, has built a masterful edifice on a similar scaffolding. I accept that there is still more scope, in particular, for reconciling a critical apparatus on complicity

with the structures of racism which stems from the anglophone global North with the intellectual and material marginalisation of south-east Europe and its knowledge producers. One chal-lenge as research on race and south-east Europe progresses will be not to lose sight of the region’s histories of anti-colonial and transversal solidarity while examining (often unconscious) attachments to the structures of thought and feeling that critical race studies calls whiteness, since we need sight of the potential for alternatives that those histories contain to recalibrate the social and global order today.

AS Would you say that the affirmation of racial ‘blindness’4 that was propagated during the socialist Yugoslavia still bears consequences as a historicized dis-course,5 one way or another? Because, even if the socialist Yugoslavia, as with many NAM countries, failed in develop-ing a more thorough, coherent cultural collaboration among the NAM members, and definitely lacked self-reflection in terms of race and racism, this ‘color-blind’ socialism did leave a trace within public memory, as its legacy in terms of once-felt solidarity—perhaps very vague, and not always properly under-stood— seem to continue to exist?

CB The colour-blindness has lasted longer than the socialism—perhaps because it did not unsettle postsocialist nationalisms (or rather the nationalisms that had started to take over the space of legitimacy that socialism had vacated before the administra-tive structures of state socialism finally collapsed) in the same way that socialism itself did. Slovenian and Croatian national-isms had to react against the Yugoslav idea as it had become in a system exploited by Milošević, and Serbian nationalism had to react against a Yugoslav ideal that had made it possible to imagine a Yugoslavia with more than one centre of power, but none of those national projects at the end of the 1980s needed to directly react against the idea that Yugoslavia existed outside ‘race’ as a circuit that bound the capitalist, imperialist West together with the exploited Third World. While one can read attachments to Europeanness and therefore (to the extent that the idea of Europe as a ‘white’ space goes unquestioned) to

4 The term racial ‘blind-ness’, or later in the text ‘color blindness’, is used to convey that one's racial affiliation does not limit his/her life possibilities.

5 The term ‘historicized discourse’ was used to point out that ‘racial blindness’ in the collective memory was associated with socialist Yugoslavia and its role in the Non-Aligned Movement, i.e. its discourse on anti-co-lonialism and solidarity. It still appears today as an ‘inherited’ approach to is-sues of race and racism, and those who use it are often unaware of the negative connotations it carries (such as denying or relativizing the impact of one’s racial affiliation on his/her life opportunities), but because of its historical contexts are considered affirmative.


whiteness throughout postsocialist national identity-making pro-jects, none of those needed to dismantle the colour-blindness even though they often dismantled the solidarities that state socialism had celebrated.

AS As much as exceptionalism was generally embraced as a strategy to exempt oneself from even considering one’s place in a more global circulation of stereotypes that had to do with race, the activation of relations within the NAM exposed some Yugoslavs to experi-encing racialization. Here is an example of Oskar Davičo, writer and correspond-ent who visits West African countries in 1960/61, and laments in his travelogue:

“The former white man. – It is point-less, but, alas, I am ashamed. The people I belong to and the class that brought me up have never tortured, enslaved (or) killed. For centuries, we were living as slaves ourselves. Yes, but I am white, that is all the passers-by see. If only I could carry a digest history of my country on my lapel.”6

CB That passage of Davičo’s has taken on new life in recent years. I first heard it read out by Nemanja Radonjić, who re-searches Yugoslav travel writing about Africa, at a conference (Re)Thinking Yugoslav Internationalism that we both attended in 2016, while I was drafting Race and the Yugoslav Region. Jelena Subotić and Srđan Vučetić mention it as the text7 that “comes closest to a sustained critique of racism” out of all those they studied for their article on whiteness and the “status-seeking” of approaches to development in the Third World among Yugoslav leaders (who they would argue certainly did not possess Davičo’s reflectiveness towards all the historical legacies that came to bear when Africans perceived Yugoslavs as white). And yet at the same time, British diplomats in West Africa during the 1960s were concerned that Yugoslavia would become a rival to British trade interests there because Yugoslavs had the industrialisation experience without the colonial baggage – so to those British eyes, some of those Yugoslavs’ history was already written on their lapels more than Davičo thought it could be written on his own.

6 Oskar Davičo, Crno na belo, Prosveta, Beograd, 1969, 13

AS As early as 2004, Dejan Sretenović, then Chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, wrote a book that accompanied the exhibition of the same title Black Bodies, White Masks, paraphrasing Frantz Fanon. He critically addressed the position of Yugo-slavia before World War Two, in terms of race and racism, and set the exhibition within the Museum of African Art—the Veda and Zdravko Pečar Collection in Belgrade, that was contextually and nominally related to the Non-Aligned Movement. This way he superimposed the excerpts of colonial imagery that circulated this region before World War Two on what was considered an anti-racist and anticolonial statement of Yugoslav socialism, introducing the questions of race, racism, colonial legacy, blackness and whiteness within a museum that successfully meandered around them since its inception. In one sentence, Sretenović sums up the rela-tions of the socialist Yugoslavia towards African counterparts:

“Tito’s political figure of Africa is not the figure of an absolute Other, isolated and distant, but the figure of a partner and ‘younger brother’ on his way to socialism, who traded his leopard skin for worker overalls.”8

CB This kind of paternalism is something that Jelena Subotić and Srđan Vučetić in the article I mentioned suggest often char-acterised Yugoslavia’s relationship with the Third World—and, as Sretenović’s quote suggests, it ultimately stemmed from a racialised understanding of ‘Europe’ (a space with which they identified themselves as Yugoslavs) as a place that was inevita-bly going to be more advanced than ‘Africa’. Those are the kinds of assumptions that, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argued, produce “racism without racists” – they are baked so far into popular understandings of the global order that even the many individ-uals struggling for racial equality are likely to reproduce them.

8 Dejan Sretenović, Black Body, White Masks, Museum of African Art, Belgrade, 2004; English traslation taken from: Nyimpa Kor Ndzidzi, (Re)conceptual-isation of the Museum of African Art – the Veda and Dr. Zdravko Pečar Collection, Museum of African Art, Belgrade, 2017, 148.7 Jelena Subotić, Srđan

Vučetić, “Performing solidarity: whiteness and status-seeking in the non-aligned world”, In: Journal of International Relations and Development (2017), 22:722-743. DOI: 10.1057/s41268-017-0112-2


Talking to some social historians of labour in socialist Yugoslavia recently, we have become curious about how far those attitudes also characterised the everyday workplace, particularly in enter-prises which were exporting to or trading in Africa, so I hope we can continue that work.

AS The ignorance with which some current media or political personae speak in bluntly racist terms betrays some deep societal problems that have to do with all kinds of violence that is perpetuated in everyday situations. How do we, then, distinct racism from other forms of discrimination and violence?

CB Critical race scholars see racism not just as an ideology or a prejudice but a structural historical legacy—a historical consequence of the ways in which European imperialism, settler colonialism and the enslavement of Africans were made to seem natural and predestined in the times when they occurred. Our modern ideas about gender, sexuality, the body, hygiene, devel-opment, science, morality, even modernity itself were all forged in interaction with frameworks of ‘race’—though the specifics of categories and characteristics differed from place to place. Today, that means racism can’t be separated from other forms of discrimination and violence—the context of racism is always relevant to understanding forms of discrimination and violence, even when racial difference does not appear to be a factor in them. When I experience discrimination as a queer woman, the way I experience it is influenced by being a queer white wom-an—I’m exposed to misogyny and homophobia, but not to the extra racialised silencing, disbelief and structural disadvantage that a queer woman of colour would be experiencing at the same time. Of course, I’m saying that as an Anglophone, which means society treats my whiteness as unconditional—whether or not south-east European nations count as ‘white’ in the West has been much more fraught, because of the Romaphobia, ori-entalism and class hierarchies that Westerners have projected on to the region.

AS Catherine, your approach to writing this book showed a thorough self-reflection in terms of your own previous academic work. Apart from introducing new angles in interpreting what was already a well-known topic for you, namely popular music, in particular in Croatia of the 1990s, you have introduced some (inter- or transdisciplinary) methodological changes to your approach.

CB They probably do seem like changes if one moves straight from Sounds of the Borderland (my first book, on popular music and national identity in Croatia) to Race and the Yugoslav Re-gion, but from my perspective it doesn’t feel as if I changed my approach specifically to write this book, more that my approach had already changed because of the different academic and in-tellectual spaces I’d been part of in the years in between. Sounds of the Borderland itself was interdisciplinary, just based on disciplines that scholars of music in south-east Europe are very comfortable putting together, so the dialogue between them was already ongoing. The main academic change in between is that since 2013 or so, when I’d just finished a project on peace-keeping and translators/interpreters in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I’ve become much more involved with feminist and postcolonial International Relations, which were important for understanding peacekeeping but which were also starting to turn to questions about popular culture and militarism. The first set of notes I made for what became Race and the Yugoslav Region came after I’d just been at the International Feminist Journal of Politics conference in Sussex, where the global politics of race and whiteness were high on the agenda, and was then at a work-shop on gender and citizenship in south-east Europe – during a presentation by Julija Sardelić on post-Yugoslav Roma and the politics of multiculturalism, I started trying to list other major themes in researching south-east Europe that would have to be rethought if we posed the same kinds of questions about them I’d been hearing in Sussex as well. Writing this in the middle of the UK lockdown, I’m conscious of how far the way in which my intellectual framework has evolved in the last decade has de-pended on being able to bear the financial and temporal costs of travelling for research networking during academic term time – and both of these are inequitably distributed resources. So that deserves to be part of my self-reflection as well.


AS In the book, you point out (at least) three modes for relating race to the Yugoslav region, some of which we’ve already mentioned: a mode of ‘colour-blindness’ (of indifference or ‘white innocence’), a mode of ‘analogy’, and a mode of ‘connection’. I would be inter-ested in how, from the distance of two years since your book was published, you would further elaborate the mode of connection, as the most engaged one.

CB For the sake of a brief answer, perhaps I’d say that the mode of connection is one that refuses the conventional de-limitation of the post-Yugoslav region, and indeed the rest of postsocialist Europe, as an area which has been outside the global history of coloniality and race—since they have had re-percussions there and have even influenced the forms of domi-nation that have been most immediately manifest in the region. By looking across those boundaries, we are more able to see manifestations of global phenomena at work within the region, and ways in which the region is part of global phenomena even when their most concrete manifestations are elsewhere. But of course these connections were being researched, and even more importantly lived, before anyone put an academic name on this way of thinking about it.

79

oslik

Minna Henriksson

NorDijskiH zeMalja

80 81 Oslik nordijskih zemaljaMinna Henriksson

Poznato je kako je Švedska bila pionir na području „rasne znanosti“, ne samo među nordijskim zemljama, već i na među-narodnoj razini. Već je 1735. švedski botaničar, zoolog i liječnik Carl Linnaeus u svojoj knjizi Systema naturae razvio sustav rasne taksonomije kojim ljude dijeli na četiri vrste ovisno o kontinentu i boji kože, a njihova obilježja jasno postavlja u hijerarhijski odnos. Drugi veliki nordijski doprinos „rasnoj znanosti“ dogodio se 1840-ih kada je profesor anatomije Anders Retzius izumio „cefalički indeks“ čime je ljudsku lubanju klasificirao kao dolihocefaličku (duguljasti oblik lubanje) ili brahicefaličku (kratki oblik lubanje). Prema Retziusu, zapadni su Europljani većinom imali duguljastu lubanju dok su istočni Europljani imali kraće lubanje. Granicu je na sjeveru postavio između Finske i Švedske, čime Fince i Samije nije uključio u područje na kojem obitavaju zapadni Europljani duguljaste lubanje.

Teorija Andersa Retziusa, kao i druge slične teorije popularne u 19. stoljeću – poput teorije o mongoloidnoj rasi ili turanizma – koje su promicali njemački liječnik i antropolog Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, francuski aristokrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau i francuski prirodoslovac i zoolog Georges Cuvier, „superiornu rasu“ su geografski locirali na području sjeverozapadne Europe, definirajući je time kao „germansku rasu“. Skandinavci, koji su prema ovim pretpostavkama bili izravni potomci Vikinga, smatrali su se pobjedničkom ratničkom rasom Sjevera. Premda ova teza nije znanstveno utemeljena, još uvijek prevladavaju pretpostav-ke kako današnji Šveđani i Norvežani potječu od Vikinga, što se primjerice može vidjeti u stereotipnim prikazima plavokosih, pla-vookih muškaraca i žena odjevenih u žuto i plavo, boje švedske zastave, koji na glavi nose vikinške kacige s rogovima. Desničar-ske skupine inspiraciju za svoje nazive i simbole crpe iz nordijske mitologije, te tako, primjerice, postoji međunarodna desničarska skupina pod nazivom Odinovi vojnici čiji logotip prikazuje muš-karca s vikinškom kacigom. Čekić nordijskog boga Tora često je korišten simbol među neonacistima koji koriste i runsku abe-cedu, kao što je to činila i nacistička paramilitarna organizacija Schutzstaffel za svoju skraćenicu SS. Novija znanstvena otkrića dodatno opovrgavaju mit o Vikinzima kao nordijskoj ratničkoj rasi koja predstavlja čiste europske ili predkršćanske vrijedno-sti. Jedno je od ovih otkrića nedavno izazvalo pomutnju kada je tim švedske znanstvenice predstavio nalaze islamskog teksta na drevnoj vikinškoj odjeći.1

Uz Linneovu i Retziusovu kategorizaciju, važna prekretnica koja se dogodila u Švedskoj bilo je osnivanje Švedskog državnog instituta za rasnu biologiju u Uppsali, prve takve institucije u svijetu.

Vizualna sam umjetnica i zanima me na koji se način prikazuju koncepti poput nacije, naroda ili kulture. Tko odlučuje o tim prikazima? U kojim okolnostima nastaju i čemu služe? Kako opstaju nakon što njihova izvorna svrha padne u zaborav?

Nordijske su države često predstavljene kao zagovornice ljudskih prava, ravnopravnosti, slobodoumnosti i demokracije, neukaljane kolonijalizmom i nacističkim zločinima. Kako, međutim, ova pozitivna slika potiskuje njihovu nasilnu i opresivnu povijest?

Tijekom 2015. godine istraživala sam povijest rasne pse-udoznanosti (race scinece) koja se od sredine 19. stoljeća do 1945. naširoko prakticirala u nordijskim zemljama. U okviru izložbe History Unfolds kustosice Helene Larsson Pousette, održane 2016.–2017. godine u Švedskom povijesnom muzeju, povjereno mi je vođenje umjetničkog projekta na kojem sam surađivala s arheologom i istraživačem Fredrikom Svanbergom. Kroz ovaj sam projekt osvijestila koliko je duboko ukorijenjena povijest znanstvenog rasizma kojeg su prigrlile državne in-stitucije nordijskih zemalja, a koja se – doduše ne pretjerano uspješno – zataškava od kraja Drugog svjetskog rata.

Tijekom istraživanja ove teme, na trenutke mi se činilo kao da je među vladajućom klasom postojao kolektivni koncen-zus o zataškavanju ove povijesti te da nije bilo puno pokušaja osporavanja ovakvog poretka. Spomenici posvećeni glavnim protagonistima rasističke znanosti još su uvijek bili na svojim postoljima 2016. godine, a njihovo je naslijeđe nastavilo živjeti kroz istraživačke institucije.

1 Tharik Hussain, „Why did Vikings have ‘Allah’ embroi-dered into funeral clothes?“ (Zašto je na vikinškoj pogrebnoj odjeći izvezena riječ ‚Allah‘?) BBC News, 12. listopada 2017. URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41567391 (Pristupljeno 14. kolovoza 2020.).


Osnovao ga je 1922. godine rasni biolog Herman Bernhard Lundborg s fokusom na fizičku antropologiju i ljudsku genetiku u Švedskoj. Institut je proveo obimni projekt mjerenja oko 100 000 Šveđana te prikupio mnoštvo podataka i materijala o Samijima. Ovaj Institut nikada nije službeno ukinut, već je 1958. preimeno-van u Državni institut za ljudsku genetiku i do danas djeluje kao centar za genetska istraživanja Sveučilišta u Uppsali.

I dok su Anders Retzius i Herman Lundborg zapamćeni kao ozloglašene figure rasističke pseudo-znanosti, reputacija mnogih drugih znanstvenika koji su bili uključeni u aktivnosti ove vrste u Švedskoj ostala je netaknuta. S druge strane, od nordijskih zema-lja samo je Švedska poznata po znanstvenicima koji su sudjelovali u projektima „rasne znanosti“. U Finskoj tako i danas prevladava mišljenje kako su Finci sami bili predmetom racijalizacije te da su „rasnu znanost“ koristili u svoju obranu, kako bi dokazali svoju pripadnost europskim narodima. Međutim, rijetko se spominje kako su i finski znanstvenici ove metode koristili u nastojanju pronalaska znanstvenih opravdanja za ugnjetavanje Samija ili za osvajanje novih teritorija na Istoku.

Zbirke lubanja

Tijekom 17. i 18. stoljeća osnovane su tri zbirke lubanja – na Sveučilištu u Lundu, na već spomenutom Sveučilištu u Uppsali i na Institutu Karolinska u Stockholmu.2 Početkom 19. stoljeća zbirku lubanja osnovao je i Odsjek za anatomiju pri Sveučilištu u Oslu. Na Sveučilištu u Helsinkiju zbirku lubanja je nešto kasnije, 1839. godine, osnovao Evert Julius Bonsdorff. Godinu dana nakon završenih studija kod Retziusa na Institutu Karolinska u Stockholmu, Bonsdorff osniva vlastitu zbirku, očito nadahnut Retziusovim komparativnim metodama istraživanja, kao i njegovom anatomskom zbirkom.3

Znanstvenici s ovih ustanova međusobno su razmjenjivali lubanje, a razmjena je vršena i sa sakupljačima lubanja u SAD-u, Velikoj Britaniji, Francuskoj, Njemačkoj, Estoniji i drugdje. Za-hvaljujući Bonsdorffu i njegovim sljedbenicima u Finskoj, mnoge lubanje autohtonih Samija, iskapane s grobalja unatoč protiv-ljenju lokalnog stanovništva, završile su u različitim zbirkama diljem svijeta. Danas se u Finskoj čuvaju lubanje pripadnika brojnih autohtonih zajednica, među njima i onih iz Indonezije, Australije i s Havaja.

Mnoge nordijske državne institucije još uvijek čuvaju ogro-mne zbirke ljudskih ostataka. Na Sveučilištu u Helsinkiju je 1998. godine osnovan poseban odbor sastavljen od troje medicinskih

istraživača – forenzičkog patologa, forenzičke stomatologinje i teologa – kao i od predstavnica Odbora za starine i Ministarstva obrazovanja te predstavnika Prirodoslovnog muzeja. Zadaća ovog odbora bila je izraditi smjernice za zbirke ljudskih ostataka u njihovu vlasništvu, a koje su uključivale oko 1500 lubanja i stotine kostura, druge pojedinačne kosti i kataloge, fotografije te stakle-ne negative. U izvješću odbora od 17. prosinca 1999. predlaže se repatrijacija preostalih 160 samijskih lubanja i 61 kostura iz zbirke, ali ne i njihovo ponovno zakapanje, kako bi oni i ostali dostupni za istraživanje. Prema njihovu prijedlogu ostatak zbirke je trebalo sačuvati u cjelini jer je riječ o zbirci jedinstvenoj u Finskoj i jednoj od najvećih te vrste na svijetu. Odbor je preporučio razvoj novih metoda istraživanja te mogućnost dodatnog proširenja nekih dijelova zbirke, kao i to da bi zbirka trebala ostati dostupna za istraživanje i u budućnosti.

Godine 1999. spomenuti stručni odbor ljudske je ostatke još uvijek smatrao relevantnima za istraživanje i stao je u obranu njihova prikupljanja. Također je izrazio zabrinutost da bi, jednom kada se glas o zbirci proširi, autohtone zajednice mogle početi potraživati lubanje, što bi prijetilo osipanjem ove rijetke zbirke.

U Finskoj je većina samijskih lubanja iz anatomske zbirke Sveučilišta u Helsinkiju vraćena u samijski muzej Siida već 1995., dok je ostatak vraćen 2001. godine. Slične su repatrijacije pro-vedene i u Norveškoj. Proces repatrijacije ukradenih predmeta u proteklih je nekoliko godina započet u etnografskim zbirkama Nacionalnog muzeja i Muzeja Helinä Rautavaara, a odnosi se na predmete koji pripadaju australskom aboridžinskom narodu Arrernte i narodu Pueblo s područja Mesa Verde u Sjevernoj Americi. No, prema mojim saznanjima, međunarodni procesi koji su se provodili u slučaju etnografskih zbirki nisu se provodili i u slučaju zbirki ljudskih ostataka. Od zbirki ljudskih ostataka vraćene su samo samijske lubanje, ali čak i one pod uvjetom da ostanu dostupne za istraživanje, a ne sahranjene.4

Švedski je Povijesni muzej repatrirao 25 samijskih lubanja tek 2019. godine. Taj je potez došao s priličnim zakašnjenjem i predstavlja malen korak s obzirom na činjenicu da danas čak jedanaest državnih muzeja u Švedskoj, unatoč stalnim zahtjevima samijskog parlamenta za repatrijacijom, još uvijek posjeduje samijske lubanje. I u Finskoj i u Švedskoj su odnosi s autohtonim samijskim narodom ugroženi zbog neratifikacije KonvencijeMeđunarodne organizacije rada (MOR) o autohtonim i plemen-skim narodima br. 169 iz 1989., koju je Norveška ratificirala još 1990. godine.

2 U Lundu je zbirku lubanja osnovao Arvid Henrik Flor-man (1761.–1840.). Na Insti-tutu Karolinska u Stockhol-mu prikupljanje je započelo sredinom 18. stoljeća, no tek je Anders Retzius – od 1824. učitelj, a kasnije profesor na Institutu Karolinska – osnovao muzej. U Uppsali su se ljudske kosti prikupljale još od 17. st. i vremena Olofa Rudebecka. Eva Åhrén, „Fre-drik Svanberg. Människosa-mlarna. Anatomiska museer och rasvetenskap i Sverige ca 1850–1950“, Nordisk Museologi (2016.)1:159-163. DOI: https://journals.uio.no/museolog/article/view/3071

4 Navedno u Memorandu-mu Savjetodavnog odbora za prikupljanje kostiju rek-toru Sveučilišta u Helsinkiju, 17. prosinca 1999. Centralni arhiv Sveučilišta Helsinki.

3 Ibid.


Umjetnost i znanost

„Rasna znanost“ je pseudoznanost. U kraniologiji, što se više mjerilo to su teorije bile neutemeljenije.5 Potpunu apsurdnost ovih metoda dokazao je profesor Aurel von Török sa Sveučilišta u Budimpešti, koji je 1890. godine izveo 5371 mjerenje jedne te iste lubanje. Ovakvi pokušaji s vremenom su doveli do pada popularnosti kraniologije. Međutim, početkom 20. stoljeća i dalje su provođena opsežna mjerenja na živoj populaciji. U Finskoj se, primjerice, provelo mjerenje na više od trećine samijske popula-cije, a uobičajena je praksa bila da istraživač odabere predmet proučavanja na temelju željenih zaključaka. Primjerice, ako je cilj bio dokazati kako su Samiji niski i tamnokosi, muškarci iz samijskih sela takvog izgleda bili bi odabrani za proučavanje, dok visoki, svjetlokosi muškarci iz tog sela ne bi bili uključeni u istraživanje. Tako bi empirijski rezultati dokazali da su Samiji niski i tamnokosi. Ovo je zatim poslužilo kao osnova za daljnje pretpo-stavke o njihovoj „primitivnosti“.

Umjetnost je nedvojbeno bila u uzajamnom odnosu s pseudoznanošću. Profesori anatomije u Stockholmu koji su se bavili „rasnom znanošću“, predavali su anatomiju i studentima na umjetničkim akademijama. Anders Retzius poučavao je tako ana-tomiju na Kraljevskoj akademiji umjetnosti u Stockholmu od 1839. do 1860., a naslijedio ga je Gustaf von Düben, profesor anatomije s Instituta Karolinska. Retziusov student Carl Curman došao je na istu poziciju nakon Dübena. Spomenimo i to da je Kraljevska akademija umjetnosti u Stockholmu svake godine od Instituta Karolinska dobivala po jedno truplo. U arhivima Kraljevske akade-mije umjetnosti u Stockholmu i danas se mogu pronaći crteži i slike iz 19. stoljeća. Studenti su crtežom morali imitirati četiri kategorije lubanja prema Retziusovoj klasifikaciji. Jasan je utjecaj rasnih znanstvenika na estetiku i umjetničku praksu, ali do koje su mjere umjetnici utjecali na vizije znanstvenika o „idealnim ljud-skim tipovima“, kao i o onima koji su se smatrali „primitivnijima“?

Kao primjer uključivanja umjetnika u „rasnu znanost“ može poslužiti natjecanje održano u Finskoj 1962. godine pod nazivom Finski tip žene. Natječaj je objavljen u nezavisnom tjedniku Suomen Kuvalehti, a žiri su sačinjavali Yrjö Kajava, profesor anatomije sa Sveučilišta u Helsinkiju, profesor etnologije U. T. Sirelius, slikar Vilho Sjöström, kipar Gunnar Finne i pisac Jalmari Finne. žiri – koji su velikim dijelom činili umjetnici – odluku je donio na temelju fotografija 1268 natjecateljica i traženih infor-macija o njihovoj boji kose i očiju, kao i pojašnjenja o etničkom porijeklu njihovih majki i očeva. Uvidom u fotografije određen

5 Kraniologija je discipi-narno područje istraživanja koje se bavi proučavanjem oblika i veličine glave i lubanje čovjeka, čovjekolikih majmuna i drugih životinja poredbenim analizama radi procjene evolucijskih promjena, funkcionalnih adaptacija i genetičkoga formiranja pojedinih feno-tipskih osobina kostura ili mekih tkiva glave.

Akseli Gallen-KallelaSammon puolustus, 1895.

Detalj ornamenta na kapiji nekadašnje upravne zgrade državne kompanije za opskrbu električnom energijom u Oslu. Fotografija: Minna Henriksson, 2015.


je i indeks lubanje pobjednice sa zaključkom kako ona pripada „finskoj brahicefaličkoj rasi“. Prijave, koje je trebalo nasloviti na Odsjek za anatomiju, danas se nalaze u arhivu Sveučilišta u Helsinkiju i još se uvijek mogu pregledati te je ponegdje moguće pronaći i male uzorke kose koji su bili priloženi pismima.

U 19. stoljeću u Finskoj nije postojalo visokoškolsko umjet-ničko obrazovanje pa je većina istaknutih umjetnika, koji su dolazili iz obitelji više klase, studirala u inozemstvu, često u Stockholmu ili Parizu. To je bio slučaj i s braćom Wright, koji se i danas ubrajaju među najcjenjenije finske slikare. I dok gotovo svi u Finskoj znaju za njihove ilustracije ptica, manje je poznata njihova povezanost sa znanošću. Dvojica braće pomagala su, naime, anatomima u izradi ilustracija: Magnus von Wright crtao je radove J. Bonsdorffa, a Wilhelm von Wright izrađivao je crteže o „rasnoj znanosti“ Andersa Retziusa. Bonsdorff se pojavljuje i u zapisima škole crtanja finske Umjetničke udruge kao profesor anatomije 1863., kada je Magnus von Wright bio učitelj crtanja.

Neki od najslavnijih švedskih slikara također su se bavi-li „rasnom znanošću“: Carl Larsson (1853.–1919.) i Anders Zorn (1860.–1920.), koji su studirali umjetnost na Kraljevskoj akade-miji umjetnosti u Stockholmu i bez sumnje su učili anatomiju od rasističkih anatoma. Zorn, koji je svojim slikama stekao veliko bogatstvo, bio je poznat po prikazivanju „rasnih tipova“ te je čak i financijski podržao izložbu koju je organizirao Herman Lundborg pod nazivom „Švedski narodni tipovi“. Izložba je 1919. godine go-stovala u pet švedskih gradova i bila iznimno dobro posjećena. Na toj je izložbi Lundborg geografski podijelio Švedsku na desetke područja s različitim tipovima ljudi. Najbolji „tipovi“ locirani su u područja gdje je živjelo švedsko plemstvo i viša klasa. Kao primje-re „nadmoćne rase“ odabrao je rasističke znanstvenike i njihove obitelji, čiji su portreti bili izloženi na izložbi. Finci koji govore švedskim jezikom, kategorizirani kao „istočni Šveđani“, također su našli svoje mjesto na izložbi u kategoriji „švedskih tipova“. Ove je fotografije za izložbu ustupio Florinov odbor, koji je okupljao razne istraživače manjinskog švedskog govornog područja u Fin-skoj, a koje je ujedinjavala zabrinutost zbog propadanja švedske manjine u Finskoj.

Carl Larsson posvetio je svoj rad prikazivanju života švedske više klase. U njegovu se opusu nalaze portreti nekolicine pojedi-naca koji su se nalazili u središtu „rasne znanosti“ u Švedskoj, a obrazovanje temeljeno na „rasnoj znanosti“ primijenio je i u vla-stitom radu. Posebno je problematičan njegov rad Zimska žrtva (Midvinterblot, 1915.), kojeg je smatrao svojim kapitalnim djelom. Švedski nacionalni muzej isprva je sliku odbio, da bi tamo bila

privremeno izložena 1916. godine, a zatim ponovno od 1925. do 1931. Od 1992. godine slika je trajno izložena u dvorani Švedskog nacionalnog muzeja, što je i bila Larssonova prvotna želja. Bivši glavni kustos Švedskog nacionalnog muzeja, Per Bjurström, istaknuo je 1995. kako se ova slika uvijek izlaže tijekom izraženijih šovinističkih razdoblja.

Zimska žrtva prikazuje nordijski mit o švedskom kralju Domaldu koji je žrtvovan kako bi se izbjegla glad. Kralj Domald zorno je prikazan kao pripadnik „najviše rase“, slično idealiziranim tijelima karakterističnima za nacističku umjetnost. U svojoj analizi slike, Bjurström je Larssonov prikaz Samija ocijenio pogrdnim. Kao što su židovi prikazani kao krivci za ubojstvo Isusa Krista u Ecce Homo, tako su u Larssonovom rasističkom narativu samijski čarobnjak i samijske žene u ekstatičnom plesu oni koji su doveli do smrti mitološkog kralja. Na taj način, tipično za ovo razdoblje, slika prikazuje Samije kao okrutnu „inferiornu rasu“, a Šveđane, s druge strane, kao plemenite i humane, koji bi takvu okrutnost smatrali nezamislivom čak i u svojoj mitologiji.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, najcjenjeniji finski nacionalni umjetnik i središnja figura finskog romantizma, također je kombinirao fin-sku mitologiju i „rasne tipove“. Na njegovoj slici Obrana Sampa (Sammon puolustus, 1896.), koja čini dio ciklusa s prikazima scena iz finskog nacionalnog epa Kalevala, vidimo sijedog starca duge brade koji nalikuje na Vikinga (mitološka figura Väinämöinena) u čamcu s nekoliko mladih plavokosih muškaraca s kopljima. Oni brane čarobni artefakt Sampo od zle harpijske figure i njezinih vidljivo tamnoputijih ratnika zlokobnog izgleda. Ludvig Wennervirta, jedan od najutjecajnijih finskih likovnih kritičara prve polovine 20. stoljeća, ukazao je kako ova slika prikazuje borbu između ljudi iz Kaleve i ljudi iz Sjeverne zemlje. Uspoređujući drvorez iz 1895. s finalnom verzijom slike iz 1896., Wennervirta ističe kako je umjetnik: „[promijenio] izgled čovjeka koji udara sjekirom iz ružnog Samija [sic] u plavokosog čovjeka Lemminkäinen tipa, ističući time snažan kontrast između ljudi iz Kaleve i ljudi iz Sjeverne zemlje.“6

Još jedno djelo u kojem je posebno vidljiv Gallen-Kallelin rasni fokus njegov je poznati triptih Aino (1889., druga verzija iz 1891.). U prvoj verziji slike (1889.) morao je koristiti pariške modele jer je u to vrijeme živio u Parizu. žalio se kako se za prikaz Finkinje morao oslanjati na pariške modele, zbog čega je bio nezadovoljan rezultatima. Po povratku u Finsku ponovio je sliku koristeći željene modele „finske krvi“. Tako se lik Aino, mlade žene prikazane na triptihu, može promatrati kao prikaz „rase“. Ako se u obzir uzmu tada prevladavajuće teorije o ne-europejstvu Finaca,

6 Wennervirta, L., Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1914.


postaje jasno da je Gallen-Kallela namjerno želio uvesti kukasti križ kao obilježje finačkosti (Finnishness). Koristio ga je kao dekorativni element na okvirima slike kako bi naznačio da je autentična Finkinja istovremeno i „arijevka“. Od 1870., a sve više od 1880-ih, kukasti križ koriste ariozofi, armanisti i druge völkisch skupine u Europi kao znak „superiorne“ arijske rase. Poznati njemački arheolog Heinrich Schliemann, koji je vodio iskapanja u Hissarliku u Turskoj i mislio da je otkrio antičku Troju, pronašao je kukasti križ na mnogim antičkim predmetima. Zbog ovoga, kao i činjenice da su kukasti križevi pronađeni i na antičkim predmetima u Njemačkoj, zaključio je kako su Trojanci – koji su bili začetnici europske civilizacije – bili „proto-arijska teutonska rasa“. Ovime je kukasti križ uveo u imagi-narij koji se koristi u diskursu o arijskoj rasi. Schliemannov prijatelj i suradnik, orijentalist i teoretičar rase Emile Burnouf, 1872. godine je izjavio da bi se: „kukasti križ trebao smatrati znakom arijske rase“.7

S obzirom na to da je kukasti križ 1870-ih usvojen u okviru diskursa arijske rase te da se u tu svrhu – izvorno od strane nacista, zatim i neo-nacista – koristi do danas, iznenađujuće je što taj simbol možemo pronaći u reprezentativnim javnim prostorima nordijskih prijestolnica poput Helsinkija, Stockholma i Osla, na građevina-ma izgrađenima 1920-ih i 1930-ih. Uobičajeni argument u obranu prisutnosti znaka u ovim gradovima je da su te građevine izgrađene prije dolaska nacista na vlast, tako da ne mogu imati nikakve veze s njima. U Finskoj se također može čuti kako je kukasti križ postao dio finskih simbola koje je osmislio spomenuti nacionalni slikar Akseli Gallen-Kallela zbog zrakoplova kojeg je švedski grof Eric von Rosen donirao finskim zrakoplovnim snagama. No, u ovom se kontekstu često izostavlja kako je Eric von Rosen bio i jedan od glavnih aktera švedskog nacističkog pokreta te bliski prijatelj i rođak Hermanna Göringa, zamjenika zapovjednika Trećeg Reicha.

Švedski istraživač i znanstvenik kritičkih studija rase Tobias Hübinette u jednom je intervjuu iz 2012. rekao da „Govoriti o šved-skoj bjalačkosti i nordijskoj bjalačkosti znači govoriti o bjelačkosti de luxe, bjelačkosti koja je najbjelija od svih bjelačkosti Zapadnog svijeta. Za to postoje povijesni razlozi, ali ne radi se samo o njima. Tu je i još uvijek vrlo snažan imaginarij nacije.“8 U istom intervjuu osvrće se i na natjecanja ljepote:

„Možete to nazivati ekonomijom želje u kojoj se švedska i norveška bijela tijela, muška kao i ženska, idealiziraju kao savr-šena tijela. Možete vidjeti da su čak i u izrazito multikulturalnom društvu, poput sjevernoameričkog gdje su ona bijela tijela koja su privilegirana, primjerice u natjecanjima ljepote i na filmu, kao i u svijetu reklama i oglasa, zapravo ona bijela tijela koja nalikuju nordijskim bijelim tijelima.“9

Takozvani „nordijski tip“, čiji su parametri davno definirani, još je uvijek dominantan prikaz naroda, stanovnika nordijskih zemalja. Što se osoba manje uklapa u tu sliku, to je više izložena strukturnom rasizmu, rasnom zlostavljanju i etničkom profiliranju.

9 Ibid.

8 Citirano u: Sezgin Boynik i Minna L. Henriksson, Counter-constructivist Model - La Fontaine Stories for Immigrants - Paper-film in nine acts, Labyrint Press,Botkyrka, 2012.

7 „Letter to H. Schliemann from Emil Burnouf, 29 Jan-uary 1872“ u: Quinn M., The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol, Routledge, London i New York, 2014., 23.

91

PaiNTeD iMaGe

oF THe NorDiCs

Minna Henriksson

92 93 Painted image of the NordicsMinna Henriksson

Sweden has clearly been a pioneer in the field of race science within the Nordic countries and internationally. Already in 1735, Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician Carl Linnaeus in his book Systema naturae had developed a racial taxonomy system dividing humans into four varieties based on continent and skin colour, assigning characteristics to them that were clearly hierarchical. The second major Nordic contribution to race science was in the 1840s with anatomy professor Anders Retzius inventing the cephalic index and classifying human crania into dolichocephalic (long skulls) and brachycephalic (short skulls). According to Retzius, Western Europeans were in general long skulled and Eastern Europeans short skulled. The dividing border in the North was placed between Finland and Sweden, leaving the Finns and the Sami people outside of the region of the long skulled Western Europeans.

Anders Retzius’ theory, and other similar theories popular in the 19th century – such as the Mongoloid theory or the Turan theory – promoted by German physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, and French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier, defined the location of the ‘master race’ in North-Western Europe, which came down to the ‘Germanic race’. Scandinavians, who in these assumptions were direct descendants from Vikings, were perceived as the victorious warrior-race of the North. Although there is no scientific proof of this relatedness, the assumptions of the ancestral lineage of today’s Swedes and Norwegians to the Vikings are still prevalent, for example in representations of blonde, blue-eyed men, and women dressed up in blue and yel-low as in the Swedish flag, wearing Viking-horned helmets. Right wing groups draw from the Norse myths in their naming and visuality, for example there is an international right-wing group called Soldiers of Odin, whose logo portrays a man with a Viking helmet. The hammer of the Norse god Thor is a common symbol among the neo-Nazis who employ the runic alphabets, as did the Nazi paramilitary organization Schutzstaffel for their acronym SS. Recently, scientific discoveries have brought into question the mythologization of the Vikings as a Nordic warrior race that represents pure European and pre-Christian values. One of these discoveries caused a stir recently when researchers presented findings of Islamic text in ancient Viking garments.1

Another important milestone from Sweden, next to Linne’s and Retzius’ categorizations, was the founding of the world’s first race biological institute in Uppsala, The Swedish state-institute of race biology. It was founded by race biologist Herman

1 Tharik Hussain, “Why did Vikings have ‘Allah’ embroi-dered into funeral clothes?”, BBC News, 12th October 2017. URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-eu-rope-41567391 (assessed 14th August 2020).

As a visual artist I am interested in how concepts such as nation, people, or culture are represented. Who determines these representations? Under what kind of circumstance are they produced, and what ends do they serve? How do they continue to exist after their original cause has been forgotten?

The Nordic countries are usually promoted as pro human rights, egalitarian, open minded, and democratic, innocent of colonialism and free from Nazi atrocities. But how does this positive image suppress their sometimes violent and oppressive history?

In 2015, I engaged in a research of the pseudo-scientific race science history practiced widely in the Nordic countries, from mid-19th century to 1945. I had been commissioned to do an art project about the topic in the Swedish History Museum, where I was working together with archaeologist and researcher Fredrik Svanberg in the context of the exhi-bition History Unfolds curated by Helene Larsson Pousette in 2016–2017. This project brought to my awareness the deep history of scientific racism embraced by state institutions in the Nordic countries, which has been hidden since the end of the Second World War, but not very well.

When researching the topic, it felt at times that there had been a collective agreement among the ruling class to silence this history and that there hadn’t been many attempts at challenging this order. In 2016, statues commemorating the main protagonists practicing racist science were still in place and their legacy was continued in research institutions.


Bernhard Lundborg in 1922 with a focus on physical anthropolo-gy and human genetics in Sweden. The institution ran a massive project of measuring approximately 100 000 Swedes and col-lected an abundance of data and material on the Sami people. The institution was never really closed down, but in 1958 it was renamed as the State Institute for Human Genetics, and to this day it continues as the genetic center of Uppsala University.

Whereas Anders Retzius and Herman Lundborg are known as notorious figures of racist pseudo-science, the reputations of many others who were involved in it in Sweden remain unaf-fected. Furthermore, of all Nordic countries, only the Swedish scientists are known for their involvement in race science. Still today, predominantly researchers in Finland argue that Finns were themselves the subjects of racialization, and that they only employed race science in their defense, in order to prove that they were also European. It is rarely mentioned, however, that the Finnish researchers too practiced such methods, aiming to come up with a scientific reasoning for oppressing the Sami or for gaining new territories in the East.

Cranial Collections

The three cranial collections, the one at Lund University, the already mentioned Uppsala University, and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, were founded in the 17th or 18th Centuries.2 At the University of Oslo, the Department of Anatomy started their collection in 1815. At Helsinki University, the cranial collections started a bit later, in 1839, by Evert Julius Bonsdorff. Having studied under Retzius at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm in 1838, Bonsdorff initiated his collection only a year later, clearly inspired by Retzius’ comparative research methods, as well as by the anatomical collection.3

Skulls were exchanged among researchers in these institu-tions, as well as with cranial collectors in the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, Estonia, and other places. Via Bonsdorff and his followers in Finland, many indigenous Sami skulls that had been dug up from graveyards despite the resistance from local people, ended up in various collections around the world. There are skulls of members of various indigenous communities in Finland today, among them in Indonesia, Australia, and Hawaii.

Many Nordic state institutions still keep enormous human remains collections. At the University of Helsinki, a special com-mittee was established in 1998 consisting of three medical re-searchers, a forensic doctor, a forensic dentist, and a theologist,

2 In Lund the collections were started by Arvid Henrik Florman (1761–1840). In Karolinska in Stockholm the collecting had started from mid-18th Century, but it was Anders Retzius, a teacher at Karolinska from 1824 and later a professor, who founded the muse-um. In Uppsala human bones were collected ever since 17th Century during Olof Rudebeck’s position there. Eva Åhrén, “Fredrik Svanberg. Människosam-larna. Anatomiska museer och rasvetenskap i Sverige ca 1850–1950”, Nordisk Museologi (2016)1:159-163. DOI: https://journals.uio.no/museolog/article/view/3071

3 Ibid.

as well as representatives from the Board of Antiquities, the Natural History Museum, and the Ministry of Education. The task of the committee was to create guidelines for the human remains collections in their possession, which included some 1500 skulls and hundreds of skeletons, other individual bones and catalogues, photographs, and glass negatives. The report of the committee, dated December 17, 1999, recommended the repatriation of the remaining 160 Sami skulls and 61 skeletons in the collections, but not of their reburial, so that they might still be kept accessible to researchers. The rest of the collections, it was suggested, should be kept as a whole, due to the unique-ness of the collection in Finland and its outstanding size on the global level. The committee recommended that the collections should also be kept accessible for researchers in future, that new research methods should be developed, and that some parts of the collections could be further expanded.

Therefore, in 1999 the committee still regarded human remains relevant for research and defended their collection. The committee also expressed their concern that when word about the collection was spread, indigenous communities would perhaps start claiming back the skulls, which could put the rare collection in danger of dispersing.

In Finland, most of the Sami skulls have been repatriated from the anatomical collection in Helsinki University to the Sami Museum Siida already in 1995, and the rest of them in 2001. Similar repatriations have been done in Norway. The process of repatriations of looted objects has slowly begun over the past couple of years in the ethnographic collections of the Nation-al Museum and the Helinä Rautavaara museum regarding the objects belonging to Australian Arrernte-peoples and the Mesa Verde in North America. But to my knowledge, there have not been similar international processes at the human remains col-lection as there have been in the ethnographic collections. Of the human remains collections, only the Sami skulls have been repatriated, and even those with the condition that they are still kept available for research and not buried.4 In 2019, the Swedish History Museum finally repatriated 25 Sami skulls, but it was a late start and a small step as even today eleven state-owned mu-seums in Sweden have Sami skulls in their possession, regardless of the continuous repatriation demands by the Sami Parliament. The relations with the indigenous Sami people are hindered in both Finland and Sweden by the failure to ratify the ILO 169 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, established in 1989, which Norway has ratified already in 1990.

4 Stated in the Memoran-dum of the Bone Collection Advisory Board to the Rector of the University of Helsinki, December 17, 1999. Helsinki University Central Archive.


Art and Science

‘Race science’ was a pseudo-science. In craniology, the more measurements that were taken, the less solid the theories became.5 The total absurdity of the field was made apparent by professor Aurel von Török of Budapest University who in 1890 took 5371 measurements of a single skull. Such attempts caused craniology to gradually fall out of fashion. In the early 20th century living populations were measured on a massive scale. In Finland, for instance, over one third of the Sami population was measured while the common practice was that the researcher would select the subject based on the desired conclusions. For example, if the aim was to prove that the Sami people are short and dark, men from Sami villages who looked this way were se-lected while tall, blonde men from the villages were not included in the study. Thus, the empirical results would prove that the Sami are short and dark. From this, further assumptions were made of their ‘primitiveness’.

Art surely had a reciprocal relationship with this so-called science. In Stockholm, anatomy professors involved in race science taught anatomy to students at art academies. Anders Retzius taught anatomy at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Stockholm from 1839 to 1860, followed by Gustaf von Düben, another anat-omy professor of the Karolinska Institutet. Carl Curman, who was a student of Retzius, took over the same position after Düben.Furthermore, the Royal Academy of the Arts in Stockholm re-ceived one corpse every year from the Karolinska Institutet. In the archives of the Royal Academy of the Arts in Stockholm one can find drawings and paintings dating back to 19th century. Students had to repeat the four skull categories, which had been devised by Retzius. The influence the race scientists had on aesthetics and art practice is clear, but to what extent did artists influence the scientists’ visions of the ‘ideal human types’ as well as those considered ‘more primitive’?

An example of artists’ involvement in race science is the competition held in Finland in 1926, titled the Finnish Female Type. It was announced by the Suomen Kuvalehti independent weekly periodical, but the jury of the competition was headed by Helsinki University anatomy professor Yrjö Kajava along with professor of ethnology U. T. Sirelius, painter Vilho Sjöström, sculptor Gunnar Finne, and writer Jalmari Finne. The jury – consisted dominantly of artists – made their decision based on photographs submitted by the 1268 applicants, along with requested information of eye and hair colour, as well as a

5 Craniology is a disci-plinary field of studying the shape and size of the head and skull of humans, apes and other animals by comparative analysis to as-sess evolutionary changes, functional adaptations and genetic formation of indi-vidual phenotypic traits of the skeleton or soft tissues of the head. Craniology was especially popular in the 19th century and preferred method of ranking inferior and superior “races”.

Street signs at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. Photo by Minna Henriksson, 2016.

The Bust of Anders Retzius at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. Photo by Minna Henriksson, 2016.

A detail of an ornament at the main entrance of the Stockholm

City Library. Photo by Minna Henriksson, 2016.


clarification of the ethnic origin of the applicants’ mother and father. They even determined the skull index of the winner based on her photograph and concluded that she is of “Finnish brach-ycephalic race.” The applications, which had to be addressed to the Anatomy department, are today in the archives of Helsinki University and one can still browse through them and occasional-ly find small hair samples attached to the letters.

In 19th century Finland there was no higher education in art, and most of the notable artists, who came from upper class families, went to study abroad, often to Stockholm or Paris. Such were the von Wright brothers, who are today among the most praised painters in Finland. While almost everyone in Finland knows their illustrations of birds, it is not acknowledged that they had a deeper involvement in science as well. Two of the brothers assisted anatomists in illustrating their works: Magnus von Wright illustrated E. J. Bonsdorff’s works, and Wilhelm von Wright made race-scientific illustrations for Anders Retzius. Bonsdorff’s name also appears in the records of the Finnish Art Association’s drawing school as its anatomy professor in 1863, when Magnus von Wright was the drawing teacher.

Some of the most celebrated painters in Sweden, Carl Larsson (1853–1919) and Anders Zorn (1860–1920), who studied art in the Royal Academy of the Arts in Stockholm and without a doubt learned anatomy from racist anatomists, also were involved in race science. Zorn, who became very wealthy from his paintings, was known for depicting racial types and he even financially supported the exhibition organized by Herman Lundborg, titled Swedish People’s Types, which toured in five Swedish cities in 1919 and was extremely well visited. In that exhibition, Lundborg categorized Sweden geographically into dozens of areas consisting of different people types. The best types were portrayed as being in areas where the Swedish nobil-ity and upper-class lived. He picked as examples of the ‘master race’ racist scientists and their families, whose portraits were displayed in the exhibition. Swedish speaking Finns, categorized as Eastern Swedes, also found their place at the exhibition and within the categorization of Swedish types. These photographs were provided for the exhibition by the Florin’s Committee, which was a coming together of various researchers in Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, who were united by the concern of degeneration of the Swedish minority in Finland.

Carl Larsson dedicated his work to depicting Swedish upper-class life. Included in this work were portraits Larsson painted of several people central to race science in Sweden

and he applied the race science education into his own work. Especially problematic is his work Midwinter Sacrifice (Midvin-terblot, 1915), which he regarded as his main work. The Swedish Nationalmuseum first rejected the painting, but since then it has been temporarily displayed there in 1916 and from 1925 to 1931. Since 1992 it has been permanently displayed in the hall of the Swedish Nationalmuseum, where Larsson had intended it. A previous chief curator at the Swedish Nationalmuseum, Per Bjur-ström pointed out in 1995 that the painting is displayed always during increasingly chauvinistic periods.

Midwinter Sacrifice depicts a Norse myth of Swedish king Domalde being sacrificed to avert famine. King Domalde is clearly depicted as the “highest race”, similar to the idealized bodies char-acteristic of Nazi art. In his analysis of the painting, Bjurström accused Larsson of portraying the Sami in a derogatory manner, and, as the Jews have been portrayed as responsible for the murder of Jesus Christ in Ecce Homo, similarly in Larsson’s racist narrative, the Sami wizard and the ecstatic dancing Sami wom-en become those bringing the mythological king to his death. Thus, typical of the period, the painting presents the Sami as an ‘inferior race’ responsible for cruelties, and presents the Swedish people, by contrast, as noble and humane, and as a group that would find these cruelties unimaginable even in their mythology.

In Finland, the most appreciated national artist, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, who was central in Finnish national romanticism, also combined Finnish mythology and ‘racial types’. In his painting Sammon puolustus (The Defense of the Sampo, 1896), part of the series of paintings depicting scenes from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, we see a gray haired and long bearded Viking-type old man (the mythological figure of Väinämöinen) in a boat with several young blonde men holding spears. They defend a mag-ical artifact, the Sampo, from an evil harpy type of figure and her clearly darker, evil-looking warriors. Ludvig Wennervirta, one of Finland’s most powerful art critics of the first half of the 20th century, wrote about the painting, noting that it depicts the struggle between the Kalevala people and the Northland people. Comparing a woodcut from 1895 and the final version of the painting from 1896, he points out that the alteration which the artist has made is: “[to change] the appearance of the man striking with the axe from an ugly Sami [sic] to a blonde Lem-minkäinen-type, thus highlighting the stark contrast between the Kalevala people and the Northland people.”6

Another work in which Gallen-Kallela’s racial focus is espe-cially visible is in his famous Aino-triptych (1889, second version

6 Ludvig Wennervirta, Akseli Gallen-Kallela,Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1914.


in 1891). In the first version of the painting (1889), he had to use Parisian models, as he lived in Paris at the time. He complained about having to draw on Parisian models to depict Finnish women and was dissatisfied with the results. Upon returning to Finland, he repainted the painting using real Finnish-blooded models. Thus, the figure of Aino, the young woman in the trip-tych can be seen as a depiction of a race. And when taking into consideration theories about the non-Europeanness of the Finns, which were prevalent in those days, it is clear that Gallen-Kallela wanted to intentionally introduce the swastika as a symbol of Finnishness. He used it in the frames of the painting to signify that the authentic Finnish woman is at the same time also Aryan. After all, since 1870, and increasingly in the 1880s, the swastika had been used by ariosophists, armanists, and other völkisch groups in Europe as a sign of the ‘superior’ Aryan race. Famous German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who made exca-vations in Hissarlik of Turkey and thought he found the ancient Troy, had found swastikas on many ancient objects. Because of this and the fact that swastikas had been found in ancient objects in Germany as well, he concluded that the peoples of Troy—who were the originators of European civilization—were of the proto-Aryan Teutonic race. With this he brought the swastika into imagery pertaining to the Aryan race discourse. Schliemann’s friend and his collaborator, the orientalist and race theorist Emile Burnouf, stated in 1872: “the swastika should be regarded as a sign of the Aryan race.”7

Considering that the swastika was adopted in the 1870s by the Aryan race discourse, and has continued in that purpose until these days, first by the Nazis, then the neo-Nazis, it is jarring that we can find swastikas in prominent public spaces in the Nordic capitals of Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo, in buildings erected in 1920s and 1930s. The common argument in defense of the pres-ence of the sign in these capitals is that the building or the gate in question was built before the Nazis, so it cannot have anything to do with them. In addition, in Finland one commonly hears that the swastika became part of Finnish emblems designed by aforementioned national painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela because of an aeroplane, which the Swedish count Eric von Rosen donated to the Finnish air force. But it is not usually mentioned in this con-text that Eric von Rosen was also one of the main figures in the Swedish Nazi movement and close friend and relative of Hermann Göring, the second-in-command of the Third Reich.

Swedish researcher and critical race scholar Tobias Hübinette said in an interview in 2012, “Talking about Swedish whiteness

7 “Letter to H. Schliemann from Emil Burnouf, 29 Janu-ary 1872” in: Quinn M., The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, 23.

and the Nordic whiteness is to talk about the whiteness de luxe, the whiteness that is the most white of all whitenesses in the Western world. There are historical reasons for this, but it is not just about history. It is also still very strongly the imaginary world of the nation.”8 In the same interview he continues, about beauty contests:

“You can call it economy of desire, where the Swedish and Nordic white bodies, both female and male, are idealised as the perfect bodies. You can see that even in such a profoundly multicultural society as the US where the white bodies that are privileged, for example in beauty contests and in cinema, and in the world of commercials and ads are the white bodies that resemble the Nordic white bodies.”9

The so-called Nordic type, the parameters of which were defined a long time ago, is still the dominant representation of the people, the citizens in the Nordic countries. The less one fits the image, the more one experiences structural racism, racial harassment, and ethnic profiling.

8 Quoted in: Sezgin Boynik and Minna L. Henriksson, Counter-constructivist Model - La Fontaine Stories for Immigrants - Paper-film innine acts, Labyrint Press,Botkyrka, 2012.

9 Ibid.

103Behzad khosravi Noori

PoD kriNkoM Derviša

— kratka priča o ne-svjesnom

kolonijalnom sjećanju

104 105 Pod krinkom dervišaBehzad Khosravi Noori

1 Anglo-sovjetska invazija Irana, poznata i kao anglo-sovjetska invazija Perzije, bila je zajednička invazija Ujedinjenog Kraljevstva i Sovjetskog Saveza na neu-tralni Kraljevsku državu Iran u kolovozu 1941. Vođena pod kodnim imenom Soglasie, ova operacija uglavnom nije naišla na značajniji otpor malobrojnih i tehnološki inferiornih iranskih snaga. Koordinirana invazija na više frontova izvršena je uz granicu Irana s modernim Irakom, Azerbejdžanom i Turkmenistanom, a trajala je od 25. do 31. kolovoza kada se iranska vlast službeno odlučila predati, nakon prethodno dogovorenog pri-mirja 30. kolovoza. Steven R. Ward, Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces, Georgetown Univer-sity Press, 2009., 169.

Ovaj se članak bavi povijesnom analizom arhivskih fotografija koje je snimio pripadnik zajednice teheranskih radničkih imi-granata, u razdoblju od 1956. do 1970. Fotografije koje je zabi-lježio lokalni putujući fotograf Gholamreza Amirbegi prikazuju raznovrsnost aktera urbanog života jugozapadno od Teherana u doba kada je grad udomio velik broj pripadnika radničke klase iz manjih općina kao posljedicu zbivanja Drugog svjetskog rata i ekonomske devastacije uzrokovane anglo-sovjetskom okupacijom Irana.1

Stvarajući nov narativ temeljen na arhivskom materijalu, a time i revalorizirajući povijest podređenih i potisnuta sjećanja, istražujem potencijalne veze između (i unutar) društava koje suštinski dijele istu povijest, tragove nesvjesnog kolonijalnog sjećanja i proletarizma.

Putujući fotograf

Gholamreza Amirbegi je bio fotograf-putnik. Od kraja Drugog svjetskog rata do 1956. bilježio je životni put proletera koji su migrirali u Teheran i našli novi dom u 10. okrugu, na jugozapadu grada. Smješten nedaleko od Emamzadeha Hasana, svetog ma-uzoleja jednog od sinova imama Hasana (drugog imama prema vjerovanju šijita), ovaj okrug je među najnaseljenijim okruzima Teherana s četverostruko većom populacijom od svih drugih gradskih okruga.

Ključne odlike Gholamrezinog malog, putujućeg obrta bile su kostimiranje mušterija i uprizorenja scena, najčešće onih pove-zanih željom za putovanjem u nepoznato ili bivanjem drugom osobom. Zamišljeno odredište nije sadržano u subjektu fotogra-fije već u pozadinskoj kulisnoj slici. Za razliku od ranije prakse izrade portreta u Iranu, koja su uobičajeno koristila pozadine s europeiziranim interijerima ili romantičnim pejzažima, Gholamreza je za pozadinu koristio Emamzadeh Davoud – sveti mauzolej sa sjeverozapada Teherana, koji je tada među radničkom klasom postajao sve popularnijim turističkim odredištem2. Pripovjedač (storyteller), kakvoga opisuje Walter Benjamin, povezuje putova-nja sa slobodom i smatra ih vrstom emancipacije koja mu omogu-ćava odlaske na druga mjesta i reimaginaciju samog sebe.

Posebno plijeni pažnju jedna fotografija, vjerojatno snimljena sredinom ljeta, kada su sjene kratke, a miris sunca s plaža podno ulice proteže se zrakom. Na slici vidimo Gholamrezu kako sjedi ispred camere obscure, tada mlad, mišićavi radnik - seljak. Sjedi sa šeširom i osmijehom na licu, odjeven u odjeću nalik dervišovoj, pripadnika često stereotipiziranog reda sufija. Moguće da je posudio kostim kako bi iskušao novi koncept koji će ubrzo postati njegova najčešća tema i osnova uspješnog poslovanja.

U pozadini se nalazi likovno naivni prikaz zrakoplova s natpisom Nastaligh (Iran), ispisan staroperzijskom tipografijom. Krila su naslikana van perspektive, prkoseći realnosti. Avion leti iznad još jednog svetog mauzoleja, onog šaha Abdol-Azima u Rayu, smještenog južno od Teherana. Fotografija je ponovno spoj vjerovanja i želje, mobilnosti i zaigranosti.

Mauzolej i avion su dva motiva temeljena na srodnoj želji za sredstvima prijevoza koja vas odvode drugdje. Jedan motiv nas transportira fizički, dok drugi čini to prostorno. Različiti elementi u Gholamrezinim fotografijama sugeriraju želju za kretanjem i putovanjima koristeći rekvizite, bilo namjerno ili nenamjerno. Zrakoplovi, bicikli i motocikli često se pojavljuju u njegovim slika-ma kao atributi modernog života okarakteriziranog pokretljivošću

2 Shahram Khosravi, The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole, Exhibition Cata-logue, ed. Behzad Khosravi Noori, Arran Gallery, Tehran, 2016., 53.


i brzinom. Antropolog Shahram Khosravi tumači upotrebu razno-vrsnih prijevoznih sredstava kao potencijalno nesvjesnu gestu. Čineći subjekte mobilnima, Gholamreza ističe ne samo njihovu urbanost već i njihov položaj u društvu: „Svakako, prostorna mo-bilnost i društvena mobilnost su u korelaciji. One utječu jedna na drugu.“3 želja za pokretljivošću je očita prisutnošću heterogenih motiva: zrakoplov, sveti mauzolej i čovjek u kostimu derviša.

Što je dovelo do korištenja lika derviša u njegovom putu-jućem fotografskom zanimanju? I zašto su se imigranti seljačke radničke klase jugozapadnog Teherana toliko zainteresirali za poziranje u odjeći derviša?

Nesvjesna kolonijalna sjećanja

Derviši imaju dugu povijest na području Bliskog Istoka, Sjeverne Afrike i Otomanskog carstva, gdje su ikonografski često korišteni u prikazima emancipacije i spasenja od mnogobrojnih izazova materijalnog svijeta. Derviš se pokušava osloboditi okova svje-tovnog prelaskom u sferu duhovnog. Trčeći kroz grad sa svojom sufijskom zdjelom kashkool (doslovni prijevod: nositi na ramenu), on pjeva pjesmu istine, usmjeravajući i prosvjetljujući ljude o abominacijama, mržnji i opscenosti. On je, zapravo, čovjek istine.

Stereotipsko poimanje derviša je ono lutajućeg starca koji moli za hranu na ulici. On postoji u drugom svijetu. On je sufi – asketski musliman, sljedbenik specifičnog tarikata, koncepta mističnog učenja i duhovne prakse čiji su cilj hakikat – ultimativna istina. Lako se prepoznaju po iznimnoj oskudici i skromnosti. Dervišev životni put se temelji na ljubavi i umjerenosti, a istovre-meno stremi iskorijeniti iluzije ega kako bi spoznao Boga.

Naziv „derviš“, koji se u zapadnom svijetu najčešće odnosi na muslimana mistika ili sufija s Orijenta, prvi put se pojavljuje u obliku dermschler/durmishlar u knjizi o Otomanskom carstvu koju je 1481. napisao putnik Georges iz Mađarske.4 Prema povjesničaru Thierryju Zarconeu, riječ derviš ima perzijsku inačicu (drigu, driyosh, daryosh), te se u zoroastrističkoj kulturi koja je pretho-dila Islamu, jednim dijelom odnosi na na siromašnog čovjeka, a drugim dijelom na onoga tko traga za razumijevanjem moralih načela.5 Originalno značenje se nije izgubilo s padom zoroastriz-ma, no njegovo poimanje se sada više povezuje s asketizmom i misticizmom.6

Zarcone započinje svoje izlaganje o povijesti europskog poimanja derviša s prikazima putničkih dnevnika o Otomanskom carstvu iz druge polovine šesnaestog stoljeća.7 U Europi lik derviša utjelovljuje muslimanski Orijent, te ne samo misticizam

3 Ibid., 52.

4 Klauss Kreiser, „Die Derwische im Spiegel abend-ländischer Reisebe-richte“, u: Istanbul und das osmanische Reich. Derwis-chwesen,Baugeschichte, Inschriftenkunde, Isis Verlag, Istanbul, 1995., 2.

već i religijski ekstremizam, odnosno orijentalni despotizam. Tako određeno poimanje derviša pojavljuje se u pisanju poznatih fran-cuskih autora kao što su Molière, Montesquieu, Voltaire i Hugo, te u mnogim slikama, crtežima, fotografijama i razglednicama.

Zanos Orijentom na prijelazu iz osamnaestog u devetnaesto stoljeće, koji u 1820-ima rezultira „orijentalnim turizmom“, kao i kasniji fotografski prikazi Otomanskog carstva koji se pojav-ljuju 1839., rasplamsuju zanimanje za derviše u novootkrivenim estetskim domenama.8 Prema Zarconeu, derviša se poimalo kroz paradoksalnu prizmu ljepote i straha. Njegovi prikazi, napominje, „utjelovljuju ne samo subliminalnu ljepotu, već i osjećaj strave.“9 Njegova mističnost potencirala je osjećaj eksplicitnog zadovolj-stva koje proizlazi iz socijaliziranja s „drugim“. Primjerice, Victor Hugo, bez da je ikada posjetio Orijent, naslovio je poglavlje svo-jega djela Istočnjakinje iz 1829. upravo „Darvishe“.10

U ikonografiji devetnaestog stoljeća derviš je u očima putnika sa zapada predstavljao paradigmatski primjer „drugog“: nježan, tankoćutan i ekscentričan, boraveći u uskim sporednim uličicama napučenog dijela grada ili u kutku kakvog sajmišta. Njegova vrtnja i zavijanje predstavljaju začudnost života i povije-sti. Bio je dijelom banalnosti svakodnevnog života, a time i lako prepoznatljiv. Istovremeno, bio je i spektakl koji je pobuđivao fantaziranje zapadnjačkih turista. Europski putnici su rado crtali, slikali i fotografirali derviša.11

Iz perspektive zapadnjačkog, orijentalističkog fotografa, derviš je predstavljao i percipiran je kao iskonski „drugi“, simbo-lizirajući drugačiji vid postojanja. No, izgled derviša predstavlja u potpunosti drugi svijet, iako posjeduje odlike europskog roman-tizma devetnaestog stoljeća, makar na podsvjesnoj razini. Očaj, neimaština, pognuto tijelo, izmučeno lice i penetrirajući pogled dovodi u vezu orijentalizam, pojam „drugog“ i slike ruina roman-tizma devetnaestog stoljeća, odražavajući nesvjesnu istovreme-nost onoga što su znali i onog što su tek otkrili.

Poimanje identiteta, „njih“ i „nas“, u bliskoj vezi je s per-cepcijom mjesta, u smislu odnosa na relaciji „ovdje“ i „ondje“. No, nikada nije utvrđeno nezavisno značenje lokalnog i stranog, kao odvojenih i nepovezanih predjela, već se implementirao diskurzivni odnos inkluzije i ekskluzije, privlačnosti i odbojnosti, prihvaćanja i odbacivanja, drugim riječima fundamentalno suko-bljen odnošaj između onoga što zovemo „ovdje“ i „ondje“.

Ovakve interpretacije postavljale su prikaze „drugih“ di-jelova svijeta i „drugih“ ljudi unutar nebitnih relacija činjenica i fabrikacija, sa svrhom poticanja eurocentrične žudnje za otkri-ćem fantastičnog u „drugim“ zemljama, a tu fantaziju koristile

5 Thierry Zarcone, „We-stern Visual Representations of Dervishes from the 14th Century to the Early 20th“, u: Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies 6 (ožujak 2013.): 43–58.

6 Vidi: Mansur Shaki, „Darvîš“, u: Encyclopae-dia Iranica, sv. 7, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, CA, 1996., 72–73.

7 Zarcone, „Western VisualRepresentations of Dervis-hes“, 43.

8 Ibid., 45.

9 Ibid., 50.

10 Victor Hugo, Istočnjaki-nje, 3. sv.,Charles Gosselin, Pariz, 1829., 151–156. Vidi: Georges Thouvenin, „Le ‘Derviche des Orientales’. Les sources de Victor Hugo“, u: Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 37 (jesen 1930.): 347–367.

11 Zarcone, „Western Visual Representations of Dervishes.“


kao temelje za izgrađivanje stvarnosti. Sredinom devetnaestog stoljeća snoviti „drugi“ postao je područjem istraživanja vizualne etnografije, a ona je pak postala dokumentaristikom. Slijedom toga, sklonost fiktivnome unutar dokumentarizma ponudila je novi realitet.

Stoga ne čudi što su zapadnjački fotografi, primjenjujući tehnološka dostignuća fotografije, perpetuirali ovaj uspostav-ljeni povijesni obrazac. Što je započelo kao povijesna znatiželja preraslo je u industriju reprodukcije slika, s rijetkom iznimkom onih fotografā koje je više zanimalo stvaranje realističkih slika i vizualizacija. Nova industrija produkcije slika trebala je stalan i stabilan odnos s lokalitetom interesa kako bi se uspješno ilustri-rao svakodnevni život derviša za putopise, razglednice i istraži-vanja prvih europskih istraživača. Time su se vizualna etnografija i fantazmagoričnost „drugih“ još efikasnije etablirali. Do 1840. jedan je poduzetan fotograf sa Zapada već otvorio fotostudio u Istanbulu i, nedugo nakon, još jedan u Teheranu. Nova tehnolo-gija je uspješno zadovoljavala interes i potražnju koju je europski putnik imao prema Zapadu i Istoku. Metamorfoza derviša iz društvenog fenomena u fotografski subjekt odigrala se ispred kulisne slike Istoka koja je oponašala europsko htjenje za tehno-loškom inovacijom. I zaista, žitelji Istoka počeli su primjećivati banalnost njihovog portretiranja posredstvom nove tehnologije. Je li moguće da je u tom trenutku, kroz kolonijalnu interpretaciju njihova postojanja, započeo proces internalizacije i subjektifi-kacije vlastitih života? Ili se on činio kao oblik gostoprimstva, prilagođavanja željama i potrebama gosta? Ili je pak riječ o amal-gamu tehnološke fascinacije i istočnjačke gostoljubivosti?

Europski čitatelji koji su bili izloženi tekstovima i prikazima derviša u časopisima, na slikama, ilustracijama i fotografijama, s vremenom su ih poželjeli dovesti na Zapad. I tako je 1899. organiziran događaj u Parizu koji se podudarao sa zoološkom i etnografskom izložbom postavljenom u parku izvornog naziva Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation.12 Na vrhuncu francuskog kolonijalizma, znatiželju Parižana zagolicali su običaji i životi stranih naroda. I zaista, „primitivna“ plemena su bila izložena u zoološkom vrtu za ljudska bića. Izložbeni prostor je uključivao i „paviljon derviša“ s dvadesetak sufija, u kojem se priređivao Teatar derviša (Théatre des derviches).

Popularnost derviša proteže se i u dvadeseto stoljeće kada je proizveden velik broj razglednica, uglavnom u Perziji, od kuda su se slale u Europu.13

Predmeti odraženi u ogledalu su bliže no što se čine 14

U kasnom osamnaestom stoljeću putnici sa Zapada su tražili porijeklo svoga identiteta. Njihov primarni cilj bio je pronalazak europskog identiteta; zagledani u ruševine prošlosti, vršili su arheološka iskapanja samih sebe. Točnije, tražili su teorije porijekla ljudi i prirode vodeći se grčkom mitologijom. Takve tendencije rezultirat će europskim političkim identitarijanizmom suvreme-nog doba, odnosno polaganjem prava Europljana na specifičan kulturni identitet ukorijenjen u bjelačkoj supremaciji.

Povjesničar Robert Lacey navodi: „Španjolci su uveli vjero-vanje da je aristokratska krv plava, a ne crvena. U to doba plemići su demonstrirali svoj pedigre podižući ruku kojom drže mač kako bi se ocrtao splet plavih vena ispod blijede puti, time dokazujući da njihovu lozu nije kontaminirao tamnoputi neprijatelj“.15 Ova metonimija nastala je na pretpostavci da su elite dovoljno moćne i imućne da sebi priušte upošljavanje seljaka i urbane sirotinje za obavljanje „prljavih“ poslova. To im je omogućavalo da ostaju u kući, izbjegavajući sunčeve zrake.

U svojoj marksističkoj povijesti eurocentrizma, Victor Kiernan tvrdi da je većina stavova o barbarstvu i prijetećoj tami vanjskog svijeta, koje je Europa odlučila iskorijeniti, posljedica pomaknutog straha i osjećaja nesigurnosti od lokalnih narodnih masa.16 U svrhu razrade ovog stajališta on raspravlja o načinima prikazivanja seoskih prostora, kao što su slamovi i sajmišta, koji imaju brojne sličnosti s onima u kolonijama. Koristi slično viđenje, čak i iste pojmove, kako bi opisao obje grupacije: „druge“ izvan i „druge“ unutar. Ovakve usporedbe pojmova ovdje i ondje ili domaći i autsajder, konstruiraju „prostor drugih“ koji je prema istraživaču Irvinu C. Schicku17 definiran kao „heterotopičan“ ili nepripadajući, pogrešno smješten, onaj koji se nalazi na razmeđu utopijske identifikacije i distopijske materijalizacije. Ovo je srodno petom principu heterotopije Michela Foucaulta kojeg opisuje kao gostinjsku sobu u velikom plantažnom imanju iz doba portugalskog kolonijalizma, koja samo naizgled omogućava ulazak u glavni životni prostor, no u realnosti ona ostaje potpuno izolirana. Naglašava se proces izdvajanja koji unutar sebe sadrži element inkluzivnosti. Ulazna vrata nisu vodila u središnju sobu gdje živi obitelj, te su svi pojedinci ili putnici koji su prolazili tuda imali pravo otvoriti ova vrata kako bi ušli u spavaću sobu i otpočinuli jednu noć. Ove spavaće sobe nisu bile konstruirane na način da pojedinac koji ih koristi ikada može pristupiti obiteljskom dijelu. Posjetitelj je samo gost u prolazu, a ne srdačno pozvan gost.18

12 Park je od 1877. do 1912. nosio naziv l'Acclimatation Anthropologique.

13 Među fotografima koji su otkrivali Orijent subjekti-fikacijom ljudskog tijela bili su Charles Harvey Stileman, anglikanski svećenik koji je postao prvim anglikanskim biskupom Perzije od 1912. do 1917.; Nijemac Ernst Hoeltzer, jedan od pionira fotografije tijekom vladavine Qajara (radio je za šaha Qajara gotovo 20 godina, do svoje smrti 1911.); W. Orden; Dmitri Ivanovich Ermakov iz Tiflisa, Gruzije; Antoin Sevruguin; i Joseph Papa-zian, fotograf armenskog porijekla koji je za vladavine Qajara radio na kraljevskom dvoru. Papazian je bio među prvim fotografima koji je imao svoj studio u Teheranu, otvoren 1875. Svi oni su stvarali i reproducirali lik derviša te drugih aspekata orijentalnog života. Dalo bi se zaključiti da je njima lik derviša bio izvor sigurne zarade, jer je tržišna vrijed-nost takvih slika uvijek bila povoljna.

14 „Predmeti odraženi u ogledalu su bliže no što se čine“ je sigurnosno upozoranje koje se nalazi na suvremenim automobilima. Prema navodima US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Stan-dards, dio 571.111, konveksna ogledala nužno moraju imati tekst neizbrisivo napisan u donjem dijelu reflektirajuće površine ogledala koristeći slova koja nisu manja od 4.8 mm ili veća od 6.4 mm.

15 Robert Lacey, Aristo-crats, Little, Brown & Com-pany, New York, 1983., 67.

16 Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age, Zed Books, London, 2015., 316.

17 Irvin C. Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Disco-urse, Verso, London - New York, 1999., 25.

18 Michael Foucault, „Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias“, (Jay Miskowiec, prijevod), u: Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, listopad 1984.; originalno objavljeno u ožujku 1967. kao „Des Espace Autres.“


Sukladno tome, antropolog George W. Stocking Jr. navodi da među onima koji su putovali u udaljene krajeve, kao i onima koji su kod kuće upoznali „druge“ putem književnosti i slika, iskustvo „drugog“ u inozemstvu je oblikovano iskustvom promje-na međuklasne dinamike u Britaniji.19 Time se, Stocking navodi, iste promjene događaju unutar hijerarhije britanskog društva u odnosu na mijene identiteta društvenih klasa. „Tamni drugi“ su se poistovjećivali s „tamnom“ stranom vlastitog društva.

Razvoji međuklasnih odnosa u ovom kontekstu su važni čimbenici pošto ilustriraju kako je „potamnjivanje“ nižih slojeva slijedilo istu logiku koju se primjenjivalo na „divljake“ i barbarizam „tamnog“ afričkog kontinenta i Orijenta. Proces transformacije domaćeg stanovništa u „druge“ odvijao se istovremeno s rasnom institucionalizacijom i studijama „bjelačkosti“ (whiteness) kasnog devetnaestog stoljeća, kao i dodjeljivanjem atributa „drugog“ različitim geografskim predjelima i stanovništvu. Ironičnost ovog društvenog razvoja leži u činjenici da se bjelačka privilegija nikada nije odnosila na niže klase. Ona je bila pokušaj redefiniranja privilegija onih koji su vladali njima.

Alastair Bonnett u svojem opsežnom geografskom istra-živanju bjelačkosti i identiteta radničke klase iznio je povijesne dokaze o tome kako je britanska radnička klasa postala bjelač-ka.20 On razjašnjava kako i zašto je britanska radnička klasa, u tran-sformaciji svog marginalnog statusa u bjelački identitet tijekom devetnaestog stoljeća, usvojila i prisvojila upravo ovaj identitet u dvadesetom stoljeću.21 Navodi kako inkorporiranje bjelačkog identiteta u radničke politike počinje u vrijeme dolaska drugih rasa u Britaniju.22 Rasizam radničke klase razvio se radi percipi-rane konkurencije između „ne-bjelačkih imigranata“ i „bjelačkog stanovništva“ za pristup društvenim resursima poput stanovanja i zaposlenja.23

U svojoj knjizi Značenje rase (The Meaning of Race) Kenan Malik istražuje kako su se crnačka populacija i engleska radnička klasa rutinski klasificirale kroz međusobno zrcaljenje.24 Bonnett donosi još jedan primjer koji naglašava sukobljeni odnos pojmova „unutarnji“ i „vanjski“. On citira Daily Telegraph objavljen 21. kolovoza 1866., u kojem se sudionike nereda bjelačke radničke klase naziva „crncima“: „Postoji popriličan broj crnaca u Southamptonu, koji imaju plemenske sklonosti prema remećenju mira za koje smatraju da može proći nekažnjeno, te koji najvjero-jatnije smatraju da je pristojno vikati i urlikati na gospodu koja je na putu k svečanoj večeri.“ U nastavku razlaže da napad Daily Telegrapha nije bio slučaj zablude niti grubog rječnika već samosvijesno ironične poslušnosti sve dominantnije metafore

19 George W. Stocking Jr., „What’s in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Ant-hropological Institute (1837-71.)“, New Series, 6, 3, rujan 1971., Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland: 370.

socijalne različitosti, one boje kože, u odnosu na dva podijelje-na entiteta.“ Bonnett navodi da je proces pobjeljivanja radničke klase u vezi sa strahom od uspona politički buntovne, proleterske kulture koja je pod utjecajem svjetonazora stranaca.25

Predstavljanje pučkih prostora kao što su slumovi ili sajmišta putem medija, među koje spadaju i produkcija slika i književnost, često se oslanjalo na kolonijalne stereotipove. U suštini, pred-stavljanje „vanjskog“ i „vanjskih“ bio je pokušaj predstavljanja „unutarnjeg“ i „unutarnjih“. Stvaranje ove dihotomije podrazumi-jeva sličan oblik odbijanja reprezentacije suburbanog unutar su-vremenog urbanog zapadanjačkog načina života, što samo znači da će se zapadnjački turisti okretati nekim novim istraživačkim pohodima u nepoznato.26

Na svojem avanturističkom pohodu u „drugost“ istraživač ignorira snažnu vezu Orijenta i Zapada koja je utkana u europ-ski povijesni kontekst, pokušavajući repozicionirati sebe čineći druge „drugima“. Oni „drugi“ nastajali su u procesu formiranja europskog identiteta. Eurocentrizam ne započinje eliminaciju veze s „drugim“ aktivnim uništavanjem povijesti Orijenta, već zaboravljanjem povijesti same Europe i njene duboke veze sa zapadno-azijskom kulturom prije osamnaestog stoljeća. Ne radi se samo o procesu prepoznavanja neprijatelja, već i o redukciji identiteta „drugog“ na razinu neljudskog; upravo je to istovjetno razumijevanju identiteta na kojem se temelji eksplicitna kseno-fobija suvremenog doba.

Identitet se iskazuje činjenjem, djelovanjem, putem akcije i reakcije. Tehnologije proizvodnje identiteta tako postaju dije-lom duge povijesti dijalektike između jastva i „drugog“, ili mene i ne-mene, započete u osamnaestom stoljeću. Sustav „činjenja drugim“ i kolonijalizam su komplementarni sustavi. Prokazivanje „drugog“ i „činjenje drugim“ nije samo intelektualno nastojanje kolonijalnog pothvata kako bi se prokazali „drugi“ iz dalekih ze-malja, već proces samopredstavljanja i izmjene vlastitog identiteta unutar konteksta Zapada.

Je li putujući fotograf Gholamreza pokušao redefinirati svoj identitet kako bi utjelovio esenciju značenja „biti svoj znači nužno biti onaj drugi“? Ili se radi o povijesnoj predstavi, izvučenoj iz konteksta – uprizorenje kasnog devetnaestog i ranog dvadesetog stoljeća na ulicama Teherana u kasnim pedesetima i ranim šezdese-tima? Ili je on jednostavno bio nesvjesni pripovjedač, očito slijedeći povijest produkcije fotografija, implementirajući je u svoj ulično-izvedbeni poslovni model? Gholamreza je poslovao u vrijeme urba-ne modernizacije i formiranja novog identiteta iranskoga društva, koji su utirali put teherano-centričnom mentalitetu poratnog doba.

20 Alastair Bonnett, „How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbo-lic (Re)formation of Raciali-zed Capitalism“, u: Journal of Historical Sociology, 11:3 rujan 1998.: 316–340.

21 Ibid., 316.

22 Ibid., 317.

23 Theodore W. Allen, „The Invention of the White Race“, sv. 1, u: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Verso, London, 1994. Dobro je primjetiti, u ovom slučaju, utjecaj i učinak romana i novinarskih izvještaja po pitanju „rasnog razgraničenja“ unutar ame-ričkog društva, koji su se po-javili u viktorijanskoj Britaniji. Uzmite u obzir, primjerice, knjigu Harriet Beecher Stowe iz 1852., Čiča Tomina koliba ili Život među robovima, koja je koristila izravne usporedbe američkih robova i engleske radničke klase, te bila najprodavanijim romanom u Britaniji u 19. stoljeću.

24 Kenan Malik, „Značenjerase", Macmillan, Basin-gstoke, 1996.; Charles Masterman, „A Weird and People", u: Peter Keating (ur.), Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers, Man-chester University Press, Manchester, 1976.

25 Bonnett, How the British Working Class BecameWhite, 323.

26 Jedan ekstremni slučaj dogodio se 2009. kada je švedska vojska koristila centar Rynkebya, četvrti u predgrađu Stockholma, kao poligon za treniranje šestero vojnika. Vojnici su morali hodati po susjedstvu u punoj borbenoj spremi i pozdavljati stanovnike te se familijarizirati sa smeđim licima prije odlaska u Afganistan. „Kritik mot militärövning i Rinkeby“, Dagens Nyheter, 2. veljače, 2009. (pristupljeno 15. ve-ljače, 2021.) <https://www.dn.se/sthlm/kritik-mot-mili-tarovning-i-rinkeby/>


Poetičnost politike

Tijekom modernizacije i razvoja novog urbanog identiteta Teherana, prisustvo derviša je postepeno jenjalo. Njegovo sitno tijelo i dronjci postali su simboli predmodernog doba. Stari koncept „drugog“ s vremenom je zamijenjen „novim drugima“. Poistovjećivanjem s modernim kretanjima društvo se željelo odmaknuti od predrasude „barbara“, reproducirajući povijest orijentalizma u svrhu čišćenja od „divljačke“ prošlosti. Postati modernim podrazumijevalo je vidjeti sebe očima zapadnjaka.

Gholamreza nije učio niti poznavao povijest fotografije, orijentalizam ili postkolonijalizam. Nije znao niti čitati, stoga, što je bio izvor ove reinterpretacije i reprodukcije kolonijalnog sjećanja? Njegova seoska obitelj nije imala drugog izbora no emigrirati u Teheran nakon Drugog svjetskog rata. Napustili su svoj dom zbog suše, gladi i siromaštva, i kao imigrantski radnici nastanili rubni dio Teherana. Bili su poslušna, jeftina, fleksibilna i potrošna radna snaga o kojoj je ovisio novi životni stil nastajućeg teheranskog srednjeg sloja. Gholamreza i njegova braća bili su migrantski radnici, seljaci bez zemlje, najniži sloj koji je živio dan za danom bez ikakvog poznavanja modernog urbanog života.

Moderna iranska nacionalna država, u svrhu egzorcizma vlastite kolonijalne stigme, morala je konstruirati svog primitivnog, domaćeg „drugog“. On je izgrađen prototipskim činom razdjeljiva-nja na „ovdje“ i „ondje“, na „nas“ i „njih“. Koristi se poznata strategija kreiranja žrtvenog jarca kojeg je nužno osuditi i držati podalje.

Društveno perpetuiranje lokalno konstruiranih predrasuda nije prekinuto s retoričkom klasifikacijom migrantskih radnika u „druge“, već se proširilo u domenu vizualnog predstavljanja u pop-kulturi. U iranskim filmovima poznatima kao Film Farsi27, prikazivalo ih se kao glupane i nesposobnjakoviće, a sličan tre-tman imali su i u novinama. Činilo se kao da se povijest ponavlja. Identičan diskurs koji je oformio incijalni odnos između Istoka i Zapada (i eurocentrizma), sada suprotstavlja lokalnu središnjicu i marginu, služeći kao mehanizam očuvanja hijerarhije na urba-nom tržištu rada.

No, ovi fotografski prikazi ne služe samo kako bi dokumen-tirali razvoj modernog društva. Oni su vrsta zabave koja služi istraživanju osjećaja bivanja „drugim“ i distrakcija od banalnosti svakodnevnog života. Gholamrezine fotografije su spoj ulične zabave i urbanog sjećanja. Možda odražavaju podsvjesnu želju nižih slojeva za postankom dervišem, kao oblik održavanja racionalnog identiteta radničke klase. Preoblačenje u derviša uistinu je snažan iskaz čežnje za predstavljanjem siromaštva kao

prihvatljivog oblika društvene participacije. Na jugu Teherana siromaštvo i nejednakost bili su sastavni dio urbanog identiteta. Oponašanje derviša imalo je ovdje drugačiji značaj u usporedbi s kolonijalnom verzijom prošlosti i percepcijom odnosa Istoka i Zapada koja bi mogla pitati: „Zašto bi se običan čovjek htio prerušiti u drugog običnog čovjeka?“. Poriv za transformacijom u derviša na ulicama Teherana, makar i na tren, urezivanje tog trenutka zauvijek u srebrni fotografski papir, sugerira razigranu ironičnost. Element performativnog je taj koji spaja nesvjesnost siromašnog radništva dvadesetog stoljeća i kolonijalno sjećanje devetnaestog stoljeća. Narativnost igra značajnu ulogu u sa-mostvaranju i reprodukciji identiteta. Njome Gholamreza sebi i drugima prenosi priču o njihovom položaju u svijetu.

Što se događa s pričom kada prijeđe granicu?

Nizom predavanja o značaju fiktivnog, spisateljica dvadesetog stoljeća, Eudora Welty, isticala je kako svaka priča može postati potpuna drugačija priča, razvedena od umjetnosti, ukoliko se njeni likovi i radnja izmjeste na neko drugo mjesto.28 Upravo čin prenošenja ponovno stvara drugi kulturni fenomen u samom procesu prenošenja. Nisu važni samo izmišljeni likovi priče. Povijesna činjenica etnografskog predstavljanja derviša sama sadrži fikciju. Iako je medij fotografije bio u začetku, a vizualna je etnografija i njeno predstavljanje realiteta podržavala neke od ranih fotografskih zahtjeva, bilo bi netočno smatrati te prika-ze izravnim dokumentiranjem svakodnevnog života. Oni su u suštini manipulirali promatračem koristeći značenjsku difuznost i preobrazbu fotomontažom, spajajući sve aspekte Orijenta koji bi mogli zadovoljiti zapadnjački ukus. Neke razglednice su, primjerice, pripisivale različita imena istoj fotografiji derviša, dok su drugi kombinirali karakteristične predmete različitih redova sufija (kalenderi, bektači i rifai), prikazujući ih kao da pripadaju jednoj osobi.29 Neki od ljudi prerušenih u derviše na fotografija-ma nisu bili lokalci nego turisti sa Zapada, vjerojatno pozirajući za egzotični suvenir. Dakle, Gholamrezine slike derviša odraža-vaju proces lažiranja onoga što je već izmišljeno. One prenose određenu fikciju u drugi kontekst i ostaju artefaktima mjesta koje leži između vidljivog i nevidljivog, viđenog i neviđenog. Njegove fotografije su karika koja nedostaje između vidljivog i razumljivog, one prikazuju mjesta iz mašte. Putovanja, nazovimo ih čak eskapizmom, su inspiracija za mijenjanje svoje životne situacije koristeći imaginaciju kako bi postali netko drugi, doduše još uvijek siromašan, no na prihvatljiv način. Trajno bi

27 „Film Farsi“ je termin koji se koristi da bi se opisao popularan žanr iranskih filmova prije revolucije 1978. Korištene su uobičajene teme kao što su heroizam, muškost, ljubav i erotičnost.

28 Eudora Welty, „Place in Fiction“, u: Collected Essays, House of Books, New York, 1957.

29 Zarcone, Western Visual Representations ofDervishes, 50.


otišli u zemlju zabave ili ostali zauvijek zabilježeni na zidu nekog muzeja ili daleko otputovali na razglednici. To je potreba za besmrtnošću koja se postiže prisvajanjem slike ili narativa koji su prihvatljivi promatraču.

Gdje se nalazi priča? Gdje se odvija praksa? I što se dogodi s pričom i praksom kada prijeđu granicu?

116 Behzad Khosravi Noori

119 Pod krinkom derviša

Fotografski aparat Gholamreze Amirbeigija Hvatač Duša. Izgradio ga je Rajab Akbari sredinom 50ih godina. / Gholamreza Amirbeigi's Camera Soul Catcher. Built by Rajab Akbari, mid-50s.

Centar za fotografiju (CFF) / Center of Photography (CFF), Stockholm, 2018. Fotografija / Photo: Anna Zimmerman

120

123 Behzad khosravi Noori

iN THe DisGuise oF a DervisH

— a short story

about an uncon-scious

Colonial Memory

124 125 In the Disguise of a Dervish Behzad Khosravi Noori

An Itinerant Man of Images

Gholamreza Amirbegi was an itinerant photographer. From the close of the Second World War until 1956, he narrates the life of a proletariat that migrated to Tehran. They found a place to live in District 10, in Tehran’s southwest. Situated near Emamzadeh Hasan, a sacred mausoleum of one of the sons of Imam Hasan (the second imam, according to Shia belief), it is the most popu-lous district in Tehran, with four times the population of any other.

Central to Gholamreza’s tiny, peripatetic business were acts of imagination and reenactment—in particular, ones based on the desire to travel to other places or to inhabit other bodies. Importantly, the imagined place presents itself not in the subject of the image but via the medium of backdrop painting. Dissimilar to earlier studio portraiture in Iran, in which the common back-drops were European-inspired interiors or romantic landscapes, he used a backdrop of Emamzadeh Davoud—a sacred mau-soleum in the northwest of Tehran that has become a popular holiday destination among the working class.2 The storyteller, in Benjamin’s sense, finds freedom in such itinerancy; it is a form of emancipation, allowing him to move to other places and to reimagine himself.

One photo is especially eye-catching: perhaps taken in the middle of summer, when the shadows are short and the smell of sunshine on the beach beneath the street is pungent, Gholamreza sits in front of a pinhole camera. He is a young, masculine laborer; a peasant. He is smiling, wearing a hat and attire resembling that of a dervish, an oft-stereotyped Sufi order. Perhaps he has borrowed the costume to test out the concept; in fact, it was to become his most repeated theme, and the basis of a successful business model.

In the background is a naive painting: an airplane, bearing the name Nastaligh (Iran) in Old Persian typography, whose wings have been drawn out of perspective, in a melee with reality. The plane is flying above another sacred mausoleum, the Shah Abdol-Azim in Rey, south of Tehran. The image is again an amalgamation of belief and desire, mobility and playfulness.

The appearances of the mausoleum and the plane are both based on a similar desire—one for objects that transport you, that lead you somewhere else. One of these images in the backdrop does so physically, while the other accomplishes this spatially. Other elements in Gholamreza’s photographs suggest the desire for mobility and itinerancy through the use of props—either intentionally or unintentionally. For instance, airplanes,

This article undertakes a historical analysis of archival images produced by a working-class immigrant community in Tehran between 1956 and 1970.

The images, captured by a local itinerant photographer, Gholamreza Amirbegi, reveal diverse subjects within the con-text of urban life in the southwest of Tehran, at a time when the city had just seen a major influx of working-class immigrants from the country’s smaller municipalities—the outcome of the Second World War and the ensuing economic devastation that accompanied the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran.1

By re-narrating the archival materials, and thus re-signifying subaltern histories and dormant memories, I explore possible correspondences between (and within) societies that share in-terconnected histories, traces of unconscious colonial memory and proletarianism.

1 The Anglo-Soviet inva-sion of Iran or Anglo-Soviet invasion of Persia was the joint invasion of neutral Imperial State of Iran by the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union in August 1941. The invasion, codenamed Operation Countenance, was largely unopposed by the numerically and tech-nologically inferior Iranian forces. The multi-pronged coordinated invasion took place along Iran’s borders with modern Iraq, Azer-baijan and Turkmenistan with fighting beginning on August 25th and ending on August 31st when the Iranian government formally agreed to surrender, having already agreed to a ceasefire on August 30th. Steven R. Ward, Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces, Georgetown University Press, 2009, 169.

2 Shahram Khosravi, The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole, Exhibition Cata-logue, ed. Behzad Khosravi Noori, Arran Gallery, Tehran, 2016, 53.


bicycles, and motorbikes frequently appear in his images as sig-nifiers of a modern lifestyle characterized by mobility and speed. Anthropologist Shahram Khosravi interprets such use of diverse mobile machines as perhaps an unconscious gesture. He argues that by framing his subjects as mobile, Gholamreza demonstrates not only their urbanity, but also their class position: “Indeed, spatial mobility and social mobility are interrelated; they alter one another.”3 Moreover, the desirability of mobility is notably present in the bricolage of diverse subjects: the airplane, the sacred mausoleum, and the man in the dervish costume.

How is it that the figure of the dervish became the subject of his itinerant photography business? And why did the working-class peasant immigrants of southwestern Tehran become interested in dressing up as one of them?

An Unconscious Colonial Memory

Dervishes have a long history in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, serving as an iconography of eman-cipation and salvation from the substantive challenges of the material world. The dervish attempts to liberate himself by crossing into the spiritual realm. Running through the city with his Sufi bowl, the kashkool (literally, “to carry on the shoulder”), he sings the song of truth, orienting people in their lives and enlightening them about abomination, hate, and obscenity. He is, in fact, a man of the truth.

The stereotypical image of a dervish is that of an old man who lives the life of an itinerant, begging for food in the street. He breathes in another world. He is a Sufi; a Muslim ascetic following a particular tarighat, a concept for the mystical teaching and spiritual practices of such an order whose aim is hagighat: ultimate truth. They are identifiable by their tremendous insufficiency and austerity. Their emphasis is on the comprehen-sive values of love and provision, and desertion of the illusions of the ego in order to reach God.

The term ‘dervish’—the most common term in the West to designate the Muslim mystic or Sufi in the Orient—appeared for the first time in the book dedicated to the Ottoman Empire by the traveler Georges of Hungary, in 1481, in the form dermschler/durmishlar.4 According to historian Thierry Zarcone, the word has a Persian derivation (drigu, driyosh, daryosh), and in the Zoro-astrian culture before the emergence of Islam, it refers, on one hand, to a poor and impoverished man, and on the other, to a man searching for moral comprehension.5 The original meaning

of this term was not lost with the collapse of Zoroastrianism; but its sense has become more ascetic and mystical.6

Zarcone begins his discussion of the history of the dervish’s European representation in the second half of the sixteenth cen-tury, when they were pictured in travelogues about the Ottoman Empire.7 In Europe, the figure of the dervish exemplifies the Muslim Orient, and it is repeatedly pondered as an embodiment not only of mysticism but also of religious extremism or Oriental despotism. The word appears in this capacity in the writing of renowned French authors like Molière, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hugo, as well as in various paintings, drawings, photo-graphs, and postcards.

The Orientalist fever at the turn of the nineteenth century, followed by ‘Orient tourism’ in the 1820s, and the subsequent appearance of the Ottoman Empire in photography beginning in 1839, generated attentiveness to the dervish in newfangled aesthetic realms.8 According to Zarcone, the dervish was viewed through the paradoxical lens of beauty and fear; the figure’s por-trayal, he notes “embodied not only their latent beauty, but also a sense of dread.”9 Their mystical identity signified the explicit pleasure taken in the other. For instance, Victor Hugo, without ever visiting the Orient, gave the title Darvishe to a chapter of his 1829 Les Orientales.10

In nineteenth-century iconography, the dervish served as a virtuous example of a figure who carried all the aspects of the other in the eyes of the Western traveler: frail, fragile, and eccen-tric, taking shelter in a narrow alley in a crowded part of the city, or in the corner of a bazaar. His whirling and howling represented the queerness of life and history. He was visible in the banality of everyday life, and hence easy to capture. At the same time, he was a spectacle that aroused desire in the Western tourist. Euro-pean travelers drew, painted, and photographed the dervish.11

From the perspective of Western Orientalist photographer, the dervish has been presented and perceived as a pure ‘other,’ representing another mode of existence. The appearance of der-vishes, however, represents a different world entirely—though it does hold a relationship to nineteenth-century European roman-ticism, if unconsciously. Desperation, poverty, a gaunt body, a haggard face, and a deep gaze led to an association between Orientalism, othering, and nineteenth-century romantic paint-ings of ruins—reflecting the unconscious simultaneity of what they knew and what they had just discovered.

The notion of identity, of “them and us,” was closely relat-ed to a sense of place—a relationship between here and there.

3 Ibid., 52.

4 Klauss Kreiser, “Die Derwische im Spiegel abend-ländischer Reise-berichte”, In: Istanbul und das osmanische Reich. Der-wischwesen, Baugeschichte, Inschriftenkunde, Isis Verlag, Istanbul, 1995, 2.

5 Thierry Zarcone, “West-ern Visual Representationsof Dervishes from the 14thCentury to the Early 20th”, In: Kyoto Bulletin of IslamicArea Studies 6 (March2013): 43–58.

6 See: Mansur Shaki, “Darvîš,” In: Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 7, Mazda Pub-lishers, Costa Mesa, CA, 1996, 72–73.

8 Ibid., 45.

11 Zarcone, “Western Visual Representations of Dervishes.”

7 Zarcone, “Western Visual Representations of Dervishes”, 43.

9 Ibid., 50.

10 Victor Hugo, Les Orien-tales, Vol. 3, Charles Gosse-lin, Paris, 1829, 151–156. See: Georges Thouvenin, “Le ‘Derviche des Orientales’. Les sources de Victor Hugo”, in: Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 37 (Fall 1930): 347–367.


But there was no uncontaminated meaning of here and there, as isolated and disconnected territories; rather, one always engages in a discursive relationship of inclusion and exclusion, attraction and repulsion, acceptance and rejection—the fundamentally agonistic relationship between what we call here and there.

Such narratives located these representations of other territories and other people within the insignificant relationship between fact and fiction; the desire to discover the fantastic in other lands and claim it as the reality. In the mid-nineteenth century, the exploration of a dreamland of the other became a field of visual ethnography, and visual ethnography became documentary. The fictional capacity of documentary, in turn, proposed a new reality.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Western pho-tographers, as they applied the new technology of photography, reiterated this historical pattern. And what began as historical curiosity eventually became an industry of image reproduction, with one minor distinction: some photographers were more attracted to making realistic pictures and providing visualization. The new industry of image production demanded a permanent and stable relationship to place in order to illustrate the day-to-day lives of the dervishes for travelogues, postcards, and studies by the first European researchers. And the visual ethnography and phantasmagoria of otherness only became more concerted. By 1840, one enterprising Western photographer opened a studio in Istanbul, and immediately after, another one in Tehran. The new technology disseminated the European traveler’s interest in both the West and the East. The metamorphosis of the der-vish from a social phenomenon into a photographic subject took place against the backdrop of an East that was emulating a European desire for technological innovation. Indeed, Eastern-ers began to observe the banality of their portrayal from behind the lens of the new technology. Could it be that the process of internalization and subjectification of their own lives departed from here—a juncture at which a colonial body projected a new mode of valuation onto their lives? Or did it appear as a form of hospitality, an accommodation of the guest’s desires and needs? Or perhaps it was an amalgam of technological fascination and Eastern hospitality?

European readers, who had read and seen so much about dervishes in magazines, paintings, illustrations, and photographs, eventually sought to bring them to the West. And so, in 1899, an event was organized in Paris, coinciding with the zoological and ethnographic exhibition at the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation.12

In the heyday of French colonialism, the curiosity of Parisians was piqued by the customs and lifestyles of foreign peoples; in-deed, they exhibited ‘primitive’ tribes in a human zoo. Among them was a “pavilion of the dervishes,” with about twenty Sufis, which also included the Theatre of Dervishes (Théatre des derviches).

The representation of the dervish as a desirable subject continued into the beginning of the twentieth century. Large numbers of postcards, mainly arriving from Persia, were produced and sent to Europe.13

An Object in the Mirror Is Closer Than It Appears14

Western travelers in the late eighteenth century had sought the origins of their identity. Their primary aim was to discover Euro-pean identity, to undertake an archaeological excavation of the self by looking at the ruins of the past: specifically, ideas about the origins of humans and nature based on Greek mythology. This view forms the foundation of European identitarianism in today’s politics—an assertion of the right of European peoples to a distinct cultural identity based in white supremacy.

As historian Robert Lacey explains, “It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat’s blood is not red, but blue. At the time, a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his lineage had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy.”15 The metonym stemmed from the notion that the elite had enough power and wealth that they could afford to have peasants and the urban poor do their dirty work for them—and thus could stay inside, avoiding the sunlight.

Victor Kiernan, in his Marxist history of Eurocentrism, argues that much of the talk of barbarism and darkness of the outer world, which it was Europe’s mission to rout out, was the transmutation of its fear and distress about the masses at home.16 He thus discusses the representation of peasant spaces, such as the slum or the fairground, as having much in common with that of colonies. He uses a similar narrative, and even the same terms, to describe both groups: the other on the outside, and the other on the inside. Such comparisons of here and there, insider and outsider, constructed a “space of otherness,” as researcher Irvin C. Schick defines it17—a heterotopic place that lies in between utopian identification and dystopian materialization. This is akin to Michel Foucault’s fifth principle of heterotopia, which he describes as a guest room in one of the large plantation houses

13 Among the photogra-phers who were discov-ering the Orient via the subjectification of human bodies were Charles Harvey Stileman, an Anglican clergyman who became the first Anglican bishop of Persia from 1912 until 1917; the German Ernst Hoeltzer, one of the pioneering photographers during the Qajar period (indeed, he worked for Shah Qajar for close to twenty years, until his death in 1911); W. Orden; Dmitri Ivanovich Ermakov from Tiflis, Georgia; Antoin Sevruguin; and Joseph Papazian, a royal court photographer of Armenian origin during the Qajar peri-od. Papazian was one of the first photographers to have a studio in Tehran, which he opened in 1875. All of them produced and reproduced the image of dervishes while they documented other aspects of Oriental life. It seems that for them, the images of the dervish served as a means of financial security—their market value was all but guaranteed.

14 The phrase “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear” is a safety warning that appears on modern cars. According to US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards Section 571.111, convex mirrors are required to have the mes-sage indelibly marked at the lower edge of the mirror’s reflective surface, in letters not less than 4.8 mm nor more than 6.4 mm high.

15 Robert Lacey, Aristo-crats, Little, Brown & Com-pany, New York, 1983, 67.

12 From 1877 to 1912, the park was called l'Acclimata-tion Anthropologique.

16 Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age, Zed Books, London, 2015, 316.


of the Portuguese colonial era, which offers merely the illusion of an entrance to the main living area, but in fact remains fully isolated. He emphasizes a process of exclusion where inclusion also takes place: The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to open this door, to enter into the bed-room and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family’s quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest.18

Correspondingly, anthropologist George W. Stocking Jr. writes that among those who traveled overseas, as well as those at home who encountered the other through literature and images, the experience of others abroad was framed in terms of their own experience of shifting class dynamics in Britain.19 Thus, he argues, the same shifts obtain within the hierarchal structure of British society in relation to changing class identity. The ‘dark’ other came to be equated with the ‘dark’ part of their own society.

Such developments in class relationships are an important factor here, for they show how the darkening of the lower classes followed the same logic applied to ‘savages’ and barbarism on the ‘dark’ African continent and in the Orient. This process of “domestic self-othering” took place at the same time as the institutionalization of race and whiteness studies in the late nineteenth century, and the otherization of various geographies and agencies. The irony is, however, that white privilege didn’t pertain to the lower classes; rather, it was an attempt to rede-fine the privileged subjectivities of those who ruled over them.

Alastair Bonnett, in his wide-reaching geographic research on whiteness and working-class identity, brings forth the histor-ical evidence regarding how the British working class became white.20 He elucidates how and why the British working class, in the shift from being marginal to gaining white identity during the nineteenth century, came to adopt and adapt to this identity in the twentieth century.21 He argues that white identity arrived in working-class politics when, and because, people of color ar-rived in Britain.22 Working-class racism thus developed out of a perceived competition between ‘white residents’ and ‘nonwhite immigrants’ for access to resources such as housing and jobs.23

In his book The Meaning of Race, Kenan Malik examines the way Black people and the English working class were routine-ly characterized with reference to each other.24 Bonnett brings another example to draw attention to the relationship between inside and outside. He quotes the Daily Telegraph from August

21, 1866, as referring to white working-class rioters as ‘negroes’: “There are a good many negroes in Southampton, who have the taste of their tribe for any disturbance that appears safe, and who are probably imbued with the conviction that it is the proper thing to hoot and yell at a number of gentlemen going to a dinner party.” He further discusses that “[t]he Daily Telegraph’s attack was not a case of misguided identity, nor merely one of harsh language, but rather the self-consciously ironic obedience of an increasingly influential metaphor of social difference—namely, color—in relation to two divided entities.” Bonnett thus argues that the process of whitening the working class is related to the fear of the rise of a politically rebellious, foreign-influenced proletarian culture.25

Representations of plebeian spaces such as the slum or the fairground, in forms ranging from image production to literature, had much in common with those depicting the colonies. In fact, the representation of outside and outsider was an attempt to rep-resent inside and insider. The creation of this dichotomy entailed a similar defiance toward the representation of the suburban in contemporary Western multicultural urban life today, which makes it all the more likely Western adventurists will prepare further explorations for the investigators traveling to an unknown land to prepare for even further itinerancy and exploration.26

In his adventure into otherness, the explorer ignores the resilient relationship between the Orient and the West that is imbedded in the European historical context, instead attempting to reposition himself by othering the other. The other became otherized in the process of the formation of European self-identity. Eurocentrism begins to erase this relationship to the other by actively obliterating not the history of the Orient, but the history of Europe’s own deep-seated entanglements with Western Asian culture prior the eighteenth century. It is not merely a process of recognizing the enemy, but one of reducing the identity of the other to the subhuman; indeed, it is this same identitarian notion that undergirds explicit espousals of xenophobia in recent times.

Identity represents itself through enactment, through performativity, through action and reaction. Technologies of identification production enter the long history of the dialec-tic between self and other, or I and not-I, from the eighteenth century. In this conception, othering and colonialism go hand in hand; representation of the other and othering was not just an intellectual arm of the colonial enterprise to represent the others from far-off lands, but part of a process of self-representation and self-reidentification within the Western context.

17 Irvin C. Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse, Verso, London - New York, 1999, 25.

24 Kenan Malik, “The Meaning of Race”, Mac-millan, Basingstoke, 1996; Charles Masterman, “A Weird and People”, in: Peter Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selec-tions from the Social Explor-ers, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1976.

25 Bonnett, “How the British Working Class Became White,” 323.

26 One extreme example took place in 2009 when the Swedish military used the center of Rynkeby, a suburb in Stockholm, as a training field for six soldiers. They were supposed to walk around the neighborhood fully armed, say hello to the inhabitants, and become familiar with brown faces before they were sent to Afghanistan. “Kritik mot militärövning i Rinkeby”, Dagens Nyheter, February 2nd 2009. (assessed Feb 15, 2021) <https://www.dn.se/sthlm/kritik-mot-mili-tarovning-i-rinkeby/>

23 Theodore W. Allen, “The Invention of the White Race”, Vol. 1, in: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Verso, London, 1994. It is worth noting, in this respect, the influence and effectiveness of novels and journalistic accounts concerning the ‘color divide’ in American society that appeared in Victorian Britain. Consider, for instance, that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly—which made direct comparisons between American slaves and the English working class—was the best-selling novel in nineteenth-century Britain.

18 Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, (Jay Miskowiec, translator), in: Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984; first published in March 1967, as “Des Espace Autres.”

19 George W. Stocking Jr., “What’s in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthro-pological Institute (1837-71)”, New Series, 6, 3, September 1971, Royal AnthropologicalInstitute of Great Britain and Ireland: 370.

20 Alastair Bonnett, “How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbol-ic (Re)formation of Racial-ized Capitalism”, in: Journal of Historical Sociology, 11:3 September 1998: 316–340.

21 Ibid., 316.

22 Ibid., 317.


Did Gholamreza the itinerant photographer attempt to reidentify himself—to embody the essentialism that “to be your-self, you need to be the other”? Or was it a historical act of play, snatched from its context—a reenactment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the streets of Tehran of the late ’50s and early ’60s? Or was he, rather, an unconscious storytell-er, obliviously shadowing the history of image production via his street-performative business model? These acts took place during a time of urban modernization and new identity formation in Iranian society, giving way to a Tehran-centric mentality in the post–World War II era.

The Poetics of Politics

During Tehran’s modernization and the development of its new urban identity, the presence of the dervish gradually faded. His tiny body and tattered clothes came to serve as icons of pre-modernity; in effect, the old other began to be replaced by new others. Society began to distinguish itself from “barbarism” via the claim to modernity, reproducing the history of Orientalism as a means to purify itself from a “ferocious” past; to become modern was thus to see oneself through the Western gaze.

Gholamreza had no education or knowledge regarding the history of photography, Orientalism, or post-colonialism. He couldn’t read—so what was the source for this reinscription and reproduction of colonial memory? His was a family of peasants; they had no option but to immigrate to Tehran after the Second World War. They left home because of drought, famine, and poverty, ending up on the fringes of Tehran as migrant work-ers—a docile, cheap, flexible, and disposable labor force on which the emerging middle-class Tehrani lifestyle would come to depend. Gholamreza and his brothers were among the un-landed peasantry, subalterns who lived day to day without any modern urban expertise, migrant workers.

The modern Iranian nation-state needed to construct a primitive domestic other. This self-identification was thus built on a prototypical act of partition: here and there, us and them. It is a classic strategy, calling for a scapegoat who is to be condemned and kept at a distance.

Social reproduction of the stigma didn’t stop with their rhetorical classification as migrant workers but extended into their visualization in popular culture. For instance, they were portrayed as foolish and backward in the Iranian films known as “Film Farsi,”27 as well as in the newspapers. It seemed that history

was repeating itself. The same discourses that had formed the initial relationship between East and West (and Eurocentrism) now pitted center against margin once again—this time as a mechanism to preserve hierarchy in the urban labor market.

But these images do not serve merely to document an incipient modern society. They are also playful: a form of en-tertainment that explores what it feels like to be the other; a distraction from the banality of the everyday. Gholamreza’s photographs are an amalgamation of street amusement and urban memory. Perhaps they reflect an unconscious desire of the lower-class community to become dervishes, a continuation of down-to-earth working-class identity. Indeed, to adopt the costume of the dervish signified a strong desire to represent poverty as an acceptable form of social participation. In the south of Tehran, poverty and inequality were integral elements of urban identity. To impersonate a dervish had a different meaning here, as compared to the colonial history and the rela-tionship between East and West; why would a commoner want to represent himself as a commoner? Such an urge to become a dervish, if only for a moment, in the streets of Tehran, and to etch this image forever in the silver photography paper, sug-gests an ironic playfulness. It is a performativity that connects the unconsciousness of twentieth-century working poor iden-tity to nineteenth-century colonial memory. Narrative plays an important role in this self-creation and reproduction of identity. It is a signifier, the channel through which Gholamreza tells him-self and others the story of their location in the world.

What Happens to Narration when It Crosses the Border?

In a series of lectures on the importance of place in fiction, the twentieth-century novelist Eudora Welty argues that every story could be another story entirely—and unrecognizable as art—if its character and plot were displaced somewhere else.28 It is an act of translation that re-creates another cultural phenomenon in the process of translation. And it is not only the artistic and fic-tional characters of a story that are important. The historical fact of ethnographical representations of the dervish holds fictional capacities: although photography was still in its nascency, and visual ethnography and its representations of reality supported some of the latter’s early claims, it would be incorrect to consid-er those images as straightforward documentation of everyday life. They were in fact a manipulation of the spectator, using elusiveness and conversion by photomontage to combine all the

27 Film Farsi is a term used to describe popular films in Iran before the 1978 revolution. They usually included the same familiar themes: heroism, masculin-ity, love stories, and erotic encounters.

28 Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction”, in: Collected Essays, House of Books, New York, 1957.


aspects of the Orient that seemed likely to satisfy the Western gaze. Some postcards, for instance, ascribed different names to the same photograph of a dervish; others mixed the parapherna-lia of more than one Sufi order (Kalenderi, Bektachi, and Rifai), portraying all of them as borne by the same person.29 Some of the people costumed as dervishes in the photos were not even locals, but Western tourists, seemingly posing for an exotic souvenir. Hence, Gholamreza’s dervish photos reflect a process of fictionalization of that which is already fictional; they effect the displacement and translation of one fiction into a second context. They are artifacts of a place that lies between the visible and the invisible, the seen and the unseen. The photos serve as a missing link between what is visible and what is intelligible, the place of imagination. Itinerancy, or even escapism, is an aspiration to change one’s conditions through an act of imagi-nation—to become someone else, still poor, but in a way that is acceptable; to depart permanently for the land of amusement, preserved for eternity on museum walls, or as a postcard, able to travel elsewhere. It is the urge to attain immortality, not by being oneself, but by adopting an image or narrative that is deemed acceptable in the eyes of the beholder.

Where is the site of discourse? Where is the site of practice? And what happens to both when they cross the border?

29 Zarcone, “Western Visual Representations of Dervishes,” 50.

137

kroz NoĆ Bez zvezDa

Doplgenger

TaMNu i GusTu kao

MasTilo*

138 139 Kroz noć bez zvezda, tamnu i gustu kao mastiloDoplgenger

Video Doplgengera interveniše u snimke jugoslovenske televizije, koja je beležila procese jugoslovenske radne migracije u zapadnoevropske zemlje 1960-ih i jugoslovenski izvoz tehnologije u zemlje Pokreta nesvrstanih početkom 1970-ih. Različiti pristupi u medijskoj reprezentaciji ovih pro-cesa otkrivaju različite podtekstove, pridodajući razumevanju šireg ekonomskog, istorijskog i ideološkog konteksta.

Šezdesetih godina XX veka, Evropa se susrela sa novom vrstom migracije – privremenom ekonomskom migracijom. Nosioci procesa označavani su kao imigranti, emigranti, strani radnici, ekonomski migranti, gastarbajteri, radnici na „privremenom radu“ u inostranstvu. Zapadnoevropske zemlje potraživale su radnu snagu usled uslova privrednog rasta, naglašavajući privremeni karakter useljavanja stranih radnika. Od samog početka procesa, strani radnici se prihvataju kao najamna snaga koja će se po potrebi unajmljivati, a kada je nepotrebna – otpuštati.

Liberalizacija jugoslovenskog ekonomskog sistema i približavanje tržišnoj ekonomiji stvorili su višak radne snage. Jugoslovenski državni organi privrednom reformom iz 1965. godine liberalizuju migracionu politiku i maksimalizuju odlazak u inostranstvo, te zaključuju Ugovor o zapošljavanju jugoslo-venske radne snage sa Austrijom, Francuskom i Švedskom, a zatim i SR Nemačkom 1968. godine. Više od jedne šestine radno sposobnog stanovništa živi i radi van Jugoslavije. Početkom 70-ih godina, u uslovima naftne krize i promene globalnih ekonomskih odnosa, dolazi do pojave novih modela kretanja radne snage.

Od trenutka potpisivanja državnih sporazuma, jugoslovenska televizija beleži procese privremene ekonomske migracije.

* Emil Zola - žerminal

141

BeNeaTH a sTarless skY as

Dark aND THiCk as

iNk*

Doplgenger

142 143 Beneath a Starless Sky, as Dark and Thick as InkDoplgenger

The Doplgenger’s video intervenes into the footages of Yugoslav television that covered the processes of Yugoslav labour migration to Western European countries in the 1960s, as well as the Yugoslav export of technology to the Capitalised countries in the early 1970s. Different approaches in the media representation of these processes reveal different subtexts, which contributes to the understanding of the broader eco-nomic, historical and ideological context.

In the 1960s, Europe encountered a new type of migration – temporary economic migration. The bearers of the process were labelled as immigrants, emigrants, foreign workers, economic migrants, Gastarbeiters, workers on ‘temporary work’ abroad. Western European countries were in need of labour power due to economic growth, but they stressed the temporary nature of the immigration of foreign workers. From the very beginning of the process, foreign workers were accepted as a hired force that was hired and – fired – as needed.

The liberalisation of the Yugoslav economic system and adoption of the market economy created a surplus of labour force. With the economic reform of 1965, the Yugoslav state bodies liberalised the migration policy and maximised emigra-tion. Yugoslavia signed the Agreement on the Employment of Yugoslav Labour Force, first with Austria, France and Sweden, and then also with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968. More than one-sixth of the working-age population lived and worked outside Yugoslavia. In the early 1970s, amidst the oil crisis and changes in global economic relations, new models of labour migration emerged.

From the moment the state agreements were signed, Yugoslav Television started covering the processes of tempo-rary economic migration.

* Emile Zola — Germinal

144 Doplgenger

Kroz noć bez zvezda tamnu i gustu kao mastilo— Nove slike za novo vreme

145

THE ARCHIVES OF THE RADIO TELEVISION OF VOJVODINA (RTV)

ARHIV RADIO TELEVIZIJE VOJVODINE (RTV)

147146

TRŽIŠTA RAZVIJENIH SU OTVORENA ZA SIROVINE I PRIMARNE PROIZVODE IZ ZEMALJA U RAZVOJU.

NIZ ZEMALJA U RAZVOJU POSTIGAO JE ZNAČAJNE REZULTATE U INDUSTRIJI, ALI NJIHOVI PROIZVODI NE STIŽU NA TRŽIŠTA RAZVIJENIH.

THE MARKETS OF THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES ARE OPEN TO RAW MATERIALS AND PRIMARY PRODUCTS FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.

A NUMBER OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES ACHIEVED SIGNIFICANT INDUSTRIAL RESULTS, BUT THEIR PRODUCTS DID NOT REACH DEVELOPED MARKETS.

149148

IZVEŠTAJ BR.1 JUGOSLOVENSKI RADNICI NA PRIVREMENOM RADU U INOSTRANSTVU 1974.

OD 60-IH GODINA EVROPA SE SUSREĆE SA NOVOM VRSTOM MIGRACIJA - TZV. PRIVREMENOM EKONOMSKOM MIGRACIJOM.

JUGOSLAVIJA SE UKLJUČUJE U OVE PROCESE KAKO BI REŠILA PROBLEM KLASNIH NEJEDNAKOSTI NASTAO LIBERALIZACIJOM EKONOMIJE.

POTPISUJE UGOVOR SA FRANCUSKOM, ŠVEDSKOM I AUSTRIJOM 1965. I SA SR NEMAČKOM 1968. PREKO MILION RADNIKA JE BILO ZAPOSLENO VAN JUGOSLAVIJE 1974.

SINCE THE 1960S EUROPE ENCOUNTERED A NEW TYPE OF MIGRATION – THE SO-CALLED TEMPORARY ECONOMIC MIGRATION.

YUGOSLAVIA BECAME INVOLVED IN THESE PROCESSES TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE OF CLASS INEQUALITIES RESULTING FROM THE LIBERALISATION OF THE ECONOMY.

SIGNED AN AGREEMENT WITH FRANCE, SWEDEN AND AUSTRIA IN 1965 AND WITH THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY IN 1968. IN 1974, OVER A MILLION WORKERS WERE EMPLOYED OUTSIDE OF YUGOSLAVIA.

REPORT NO. 1 YUGOSLAV WORKERS ON TEMPORARY WORK ABROAD 1974

151150

DRUGOVI, DA LI SE OVDE U HANOVERU OSEĆA PODVOJENOST IZMEĐU NEMAČKIH I JUGOSLOVENSKIH RADNIKA?

ZNAŠ, OSEĆAŠ SE KAO STRANAC, SAM SI.

COMRADES, CAN YOU FEEL THE DIVISION BETWEEN GERMAN AND YUGOSLAV WORKERS HERE IN HANNOVER?

YOU KNOW, ONE FEELS LIKE A STRANGER, ALL ALONE.

153152

155154

USLOVI POD KOJIMA ZEMLJE U RAZVOJU DOLAZE DO KREDITA TAKVI SU DA NAJVIŠE KORISTI DONOSE DAVAOCIMA KREDITA.

NEODRŽIVOST MEĐUNARODNOG EKONOMSKOG PORETKA ISPOLJAVA SE I U MONETARNO-FINANSIJSKIM ODNOSIMA.

THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH THE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES GET LOANS ARE SUCH THAT THEY MOSTLY BENEFIT THE LENDERS.

THE UNSUSTAINABILITY OF THE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER IS ALSO REFLECTED IN MONETARY AND FINANCIAL RELATIONS.

157156

KADA JE 1973. POČEO ARAPSKO-IZRAELSKI RAT, CENA NAFTE JE SKOČILA I IZAZVALA RECESIJU U ZAPADNO-EVROPSKIM ZEMLJAMA.

NEGATIVNI TRGOVINSKI BILANS JUGOSLAVIJA JE POKUŠALA DA REŠI ULAGANJIMA U NESVRSTANIM ZEMLJAMA I ZEMLJAMA U RAZVOJU

IZVEŠTAJ BR.2 JUGOSLOVENSKI RADNICI NA PRIVREMENOM RADU U INOSTRANSTVU 1978.

RADNICI I STRUČNJACI BEOGRADSKOG PKB I HIDROSISTEMA DTD RADILI SU NA IZGRADNJI IRIGACIONOG SISTEMA DUĐAILA U IRAKU.

WHEN ARAB-ISRAELI WAR BEGAN IN 1973, THE PRICE OF OIL JUMPED AND CAUSED A RECESSION IN WESTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.

REPORT NO. 2 YUGOSLAV WORKERS ON TEMPORARY WORK ABROAD 1978

YUGOSLAVIA TRIED TO ADDRESS THE NEGATIVE TRADE BALANCE BY INVESTING IN THE NON-ALIGNED AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.

WORKERS AND EXPERTS FROM BELGRADE COMPANIES “PKB“ AND “HIDROSISTEM DTD“ WORKED ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF DUJAILA IRRIGATION SYSTEM IN IRAQ.

159158

VLADA PRITISNUTA ZAHTEVIMA POVERILACA UKIDA SUBVENCIJE NA POLJOPRIVREDNE PROIZVODE. POSKUPLJUJE HLEB. IZBIJAJU NEMIRI KOJI UZDRMAVAJU VLADU.

KOLIKO VELIKA ZADUŽENOST UTIČE NA POLITIČKU STABILNOST POKAZALO SE U JEDNOJ ZEMLJI.

THE EXAMPLE OF ONE COUNTRY SHOWED HOW HIGH INDEBTEDNESS AFFECTS POLITICAL STABILITY.

UNDER THE PRESSURE OF CREDITORS, THE GOVERNMENT ABOLISHED SUBSIDIES ON AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS. THE PRICE OF BREAD WENT UP. THIS GAVE RISE TO PROTESTS THAT SHOOK THE GOVERNMENT.

161 Kroz noć bez zvezda, tamnu i gustu kao mastilo160

Beneath a Starless Sky, as Dark and Thick as Ink— New Images for the New Times

162 163 Beneath a Starless Sky, as Dark and Thick as InkDoplgenger

FINAL REMARKS

1Dujaila agro-industrial complex was built between 1973 and 1987. Irrigation canal systems were upgraded with new infrastructure, including regulators and pumps for the distribution of water to agricultural areas and many canals were coated with concrete to reduce water losses and drainage issues. The government maintained this infrastructure until the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Further neglect continued during the un sanctions period (1990–2003). In 2003, USAID initiated and maintained the reconstruction and development activities called ARDI – The Agriculture Reconstruction and Development Program for Iraq.

2As a tire manufacturer, Continental was founded in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War. In 1904, Continental became the first company in the world to manufacture grooved tires. Like many other German companies, during the Second World War Continental also used forced labour in their factories provided by the Nazi Party during the 1940s. Today, Continental is a German multinational automotive parts manufacturing company and one of the four largest tire manufacturers in the world.

ZAVRŠNE NAPOMENE

1.Industrijsko-poljoprivredni kompleks Duđaila izgrađen je u periodu od 1973. do 1987. Sistemi kanala za navodnjavanje nadograđeni su novom infrastrukturom, uključujući regulatore i pumpe za distribuciju vode u poljoprivredna područja, a mnogi kanali su obloženi betonom kako bi se smanjili gubici vode i problemi sa odvodnjavanjem. Vlada je održavala ovu infrastrukturu do početka Iransko-iračkog rata (1980.–1988.). Dalje zanemarivanje nastavilo se tokom perioda sankcija UN (1990.–2003.). USAID je 2003. godine pokrenuo i održavao aktivnosti na rekonstrukciji i razvoju pod nazivom ARDI - program rekonstrukcije i razvoja poljoprivrede za Irak.

2.Kao proizvođač gume, Continental je osnovan 1871. godine nakon Francusko-nemačkog rata. Godine 1904. Continental je postao prva kompanija na svetu koja je proizvodila gume sa žlebovima. Kao i mnoge druge nemačke kompanije tokom Drugog svetskog rata, i Continental je koristio prisilni rad koji je u njihovim fabrikama obezbeđivala nacistička stranka tokom četrdesetih godina. Danas je Continental nemačka multinacionalna kompanija za proizvodnju automobilskih delova i jedan od četiri najveća proizvođača guma na svetu.

inês Beleza Barreirosrui Gomes CoelhoPatrícia Martins MarcosPedro schacht Pereira

NePoDNo-šljiva lakoĆa aNakro-NizMa: Produkcija

spomenika i čuvari

povijesnog konsenzusa

166 167 Nepodnošljiva lakoća anakronizmaI. Beleza Barreiros, R. Gomes Coelho, P. Martins Marcos, P. Schacht Pereira

Aktivizam koji je inicijalno bio okupljen oko prosvjednog pokreta Rhodes mora pasti (Rhodes Must Fall) u Južnoj Africi, 2015. godine potaknuo je razvoj šireg pokreta koji poziva na rušenje rasističkih kipova posvećenih kolonijalnim ličnostima ili događajima. Ova oslobodilačka gesta – koja vuče korijenje iz afričkih pokreta za nezavisnost – ne samo da je u posljednje tri godine dobila na snazi već je odjeknula i u pokretima za rasnu i socijalnu pravdu, poput pokreta Crni su životi važni (Black Lives Matter). Kako su pozivi na dekolonizaciju znanja, institu-cija i edukativnih programa srastali sa zahtjevima za razvojem učinkovitih antirasističkih praksi, izazov stvaranja novih imagi-narija i oblikovanja novih narativa budućnosti postao je uvelike uvjetovan razumijevanjem „prošlosti kao problema“. Ovaj se članak osvrće na razvoj te dinamike u Portugalu, s naglaskom na razdoblje nakon 2017. godine.

Dok su dekolonijalni i antirasistički pokreti zahtijevali revalorizaciju nacionalnih junaka i ponovno otvaranje povije-snih narativa novim društvenim akterima i perspektivama, u Portugalu su takvi zahtjevi često prozivani „anakronizmom“. Emblematski primjer ovih rasprava vezan je uz spomenik, podignut 2017. godine u Lisabonu, posvećen brazilskom isu-sovačkom misionaru iz 17. stoljeća, Antóniu Vieiri. Međutim, u Portugalu je ova polemika, kako ćemo pokazati, obilježena dvostrukim anakronizmom. S jedne strane, odbacujući nove perspektive sagledavanja povijesne prošlosti, predstavnici historiografske ortodoksije zagovarali su kolonijalni pogled na povijest koji je aktivno održavao retoriku portugalskog fašističkog režima (1926.–1974.).1 S druge strane, u svojoj želji za slavljenjem heroja i instrumentalizacijom nacionalnih figura, ti isti predstavnici ortodoksije oslanjali su se na mnoštvo anakro-nističkih pojmova. Stoga tvrdimo da optužbe za anakronizam ne proizlaze iz potrebe za povijesnom i analitičkom strogošću, već su tek paravan za ušutkavanje i suzbijanje novonastalih glasova povijesno marginaliziranih zajednica.

Protestni plakat, 2017.

1 Republikanski režim svrgnut je vojnim pučem 1926. godine radi uspostave Vojne diktature koja je 1928. preimenovana u Državnu diktaturu. António Salazar, koji je do tog trenutka u obje diktature obavljao samo kabinetske funkcije, 1932. godine postaje središnja, zapovjedna i centralizirajuća figura režima nazvanog Estado Novo ili Nova država. Novi je ustav usvojen 1933., čime je uspostavljena osno-va režima koji je okončan 25. travnja 1974. godine Revo-lucijom karanfila. Salazar je kao diktator vladao od 1932. do teške bolesti 1968. kada ga je zamijenio Marcelo Caetano.


Luzotropikalni konsenzus

Tijekom proteklih nekoliko godina, a posebno od 2017., različiti su događaji dali naslutiti slabljenje dominantnog narativnog kon-senzusa koji se iskristalizirao oko značenja i naslijeđa portugal-skog kolonijalnog carstva. Konsenzus, oblikovan krajem 1800-ih, dijelom je imao uporište u slavljenju ere pomorskih putovanja i kolonijalne ekspanzije 15. i 16. stoljeća, tradicionalno znanih kao „otkrića“. Istodobno je imperijalni projekt, kojeg su sanjale portugalske elite, bio popraćen fabrikacijom i diseminacijom diskursa koji je ovu prošlost tumačio „iznimnom“ u europskom kontekstu, s obzirom na njezine navodne korijene u humanističkoj, ekumenskoj viziji. Takvi diskursi, nadahnuti radom brazilskog antropologa i sociologa Gilberta Freyre (1900.–1987.) i njegovom tezom poznatom kao luzotropikalizam, s vremenom su pretrpjeli značajne promjene. Freyre je esencijalističkim pojmovima artiku-lirao obranu portugalskog dobroćudnog kolonijalnog pothvata – tvoreći time mit koji je dobio snažan zamah u Portugalu početkom 1950-ih, u vrijeme dok se portugalska diktatura (1926.–1974.) suo-čavala s rastućim valom međunarodnih kritika usmjerenih u samu srž njezine ‚civilizacijske misije‘. Očajnički tražeći argumente koji bi mogli legitimizirati kolonijalni poredak nametnut današnjim afričkim državama portugalskog govornog područja, Salazarove su se elite okrenule Freyreu.2

Ovaj kolonijalni poredak prevladavao je u Africi dok je diktatorski režim vladao nad metropolom. U kontekstu Hladnoga rata, nagon za preživljavanjem Salazarovog kolonijalnog i faši-stičkog režima uvelike je ovisio o tkanju luzotropikalne bajke. Ova je tlapnja, pak, korištena kako bi naturalizirala vlastitu moć i okrenula mitološku pređu u smjeru iznimnosti njezine navodno dobroćudne civilizacijske misije. Nijedna od ovih fikcija nije se zadržala samo u prošlosti. Sve do danas, naslijeđa kolonijalizma nekritički odjekuju portugalskom javnom sferom. Ni rušenje fašizma utjelovljeno u Revoluciji karanfila 1974. ni središnja uloga afričkih pokreta za nezavisnost nisu uspjeli okrhnuti luzotropi-kalni ideološki konsenzus skovan pod Salazarovom vlašću. Ipak, unatoč nominalnoj, političkoj dekolonizaciji koja se dogodila 1974. godine, mnogi Portugal i dalje smatraju imperijem. Dekoloniza-cija je nedovršen projekt koji i dalje predstavlja ključni problem demokratske reprezentacije portugalskih građanki i građana.

Unatoč sustavnim kritikama kojima ovaj hegemonijski narativ podliježe od 1950-ih, a koje se odnose na navodnu dobrohotnu kolonizaciju i imperijalnu ekspanziju, do javnosti su doprli samo djelići ove polemike. Situacija se nije promijenila ni pojavom novih

društvenih aktera – poglavito rasno određenih subjekata koji su oduvijek intervenirali u portugalsko društvo, ali nikada nisu dobili priznanje zatvorenih elitnih krugova koji imaju mogućnost legitimizirati njih i njihove historiografske narative. Pa ipak, upra-vo su se ti disruptivni posrednici društveno-kulturnih promjena pokazali presudnima u raskidu s dominantnim luzotropikalnim konsenzusom. Povećana mobilnost portugalskih znanstvenica i znanstvenika, rastuća internacionalizacija akademske zajednice, kao i sve veći međunarodni interes za portugalske kolonijalne arhive doprinijeli su remećenju okoštalih narativa i hegemonijskih reprezentativnih tropova.

Čuvari povijesne hegemonije

Nedavni događaji, poput inauguracije spomenika Antóniu Vieiri ili prijedloga za otvaranjem Muzeja otkrića, doveli su do inter-vencija koje kritiziraju hegemonijski, povijesni konsenzus. Takve su interpolacije izazvale oštre reakcije onih koji često igraju ulogu čuvara starih povijesnih mitova: akademika i raznih umirovljenih intelektualaca, da ne spominjemo tradicionalni arsenal konzerva-tivnih komentatora – sastavljen većinom od muškaraca, bijelaca, iz viših slojeva i urbanih sredina, koncentriranih u Lisabonu. Ključna kritika koju upućuju onima koji se usuđuju dovesti u pitanje njihovu takozvanu konsenzualnu verziju prošlosti jeste optužba za anakronizam. Oni potomke nekadašnjih portugalskih kolonijalnih subjekata i druge aktivistički usmjerene građane optužuju za nametanje vlastite vizije sadašnjosti – u njihovom pojednostavljenom prikazu opisane kao ideološke i „politički korektne“ – o tome kako bi se prošli događaji trebali iščitavati i tumačiti. Prema ovim čuvarima nacionalnog, povijesnog konsen-zusa, svi mi trenutno živimo u vremenu u kojem prošlost, sadaš-njost i budućnost postoje u potpuno odvojenim, nepovezanim vremenitostima. Međutim, čak i površan pogled na ovaj navodni protu-anakronizam, u koji se zaklinju ovi čuvari, razotkriva ga kao ništa drugo doli lažnu intuiciju. Nakon pažljivijeg prouča-vanja, razotkriva se beskrajan labirint racionalizirajuće logike i nekoherentnih slijepih ulica.

Danas, kada se spomenuti čuvari nadimaju hvaleći „velike podvige“, izvanredna „otkrića“ i nevjerojatne „revolucije“ svojih takozvanih nacionalnih junaka, to čine u istoj vremenitosti – istoj sadašnjosti koju dijele s nama. Unatoč tome, njihove instru-mentalne ekskurzije povijesnoj prošlosti služe isključivo u svrhu naglašavanja „velikih podviga“ kojima se veličaju i valoriziraju samo odabrani trenutci, datumi i/ili protagonisti na uštrb drugih.

2 Cláudia Castelo, „O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo“: luso-tropicalismo e ideologia colonial portugue-sa (1933.-1961.), Afrontamen-to, Porto, 1998.


Ovakvo zataškavanje nije tek kakva usputna urednička interven-cija, već predstavlja i moćan selektivni princip. Ipak, ono što ovi čuvari ne pojašnjavaju jest da i ti propusti konstituiraju svjestan izbor. U njihovim se glavama čini kako su samo njima suprotstav-ljene perspektive okaljane velikim grijehom „ideologije“. Naši se čuvari, nasuprot tome, smatraju autorima univerzalne i vječne povijesti: zauvijek valjane, imune na reinterpretaciju i neprobojne za polemike. Dakle, prijevara nametnuta njihovim povijesnim konsenzusom proizlazi upravo iz ove tlapnje, odnosno pokušaja da se njihovo tumačenje „povijesti“ naturalizira kao jedino moguće iščitavanje prošlosti, sadašnjosti i budućnosti.

Na taj način ovi čuvari ne nastoje samo naturalizirati vlastitu moć, nego i neutralizirati bilo kakav izazov postavljen pred njihov hvaljeni luzotropikalni konsenzus, optužujući sve kritičke glasove za promicanje ideološki motiviranog, anakronističkog povijesnog prikaza. Zanimljivo je, međutim, da se ni „veliki podvizi“ „velikih ljudi“ uključenih u nasilni proces kolonizacije, ni veličanje „civili-zirajuće“ uloge velike portugalske nacije, ovim čuvarima ne čine stvar ideološkog izbora. Ovakve proturječnosti još su očitije kada se njihovi vrijednosno-neutralni prikazi povijesti savršeno slažu sa službenom historiografijom Salazarova fašističkog, kolonijal-nog režima. Njihovi argumenti, međutim, ne zahtijevaju nikakvu koherentnost. U očima ovih luzotropikalnih stražara, anakroni-zam se javlja samo onda kada predstavnici povijesno isključenih, marginaliziranih i potlačenih zajednica dovedu u pitanje njihovu vladajuću viziju razbijanjem mita o dobroćudnim kolonijalnim pothvatima. Ovakva dinamika otvara važno pitanje: ako se otpor predvođen povijesno potlačenim i marginaliziranim narodima događao u vrijeme slavljenih „herojskih“ podviga, što je onda anakrono u otkrivanju, priznavanju i analizi otpora kolonijalizmu, ako isto ne vrijedi za same podvige „imperijalnog junaštva“? Drugim riječima, zašto se ideološkim smatra samo otpor kolo-nijalizmu, a imperijalna se ekspanzija prikazuje kao apsolutno „objektivno“ prirodno stanje?

Anakronizam na djelu: spomenik ocu Antóniu Vieiri

Anakronizam je pojam koji označava kronološku ili činjeničnu pogrešku, događaj ili stajalište pripisano vremenu s kojim je naizgled u raskoraku. Mnogi suvremeni spomenički projekti u Portugalu i diljem svijeta anakronističkog su karaktera; dok hine da predstavljaju objekte iz prošlosti, i da govore o povijesti, ovi su spomenici zapravo ili sami proistekli iz prošlosti ili su nastali u današnjosti. Kao takvi, projekti su to iluzije i ambicije.


Pokušavajući u 2020. održavati narativ smišljen kako bi služio političkim zahtjevima portugalskog fašističko-kolonijalnog režima, samoimenovani čuvari unisone slike prošlosti predlažu očuvanje okoštale vizije povijesti koja je u suprotnosti s etosom pluralističkog i demokratskog društva. Stoga noviji spomenici, poput spomenika posvećenog ocu Antóniu Vieiri (1608.–1697.) inauguriranog u lipnju 2017. u Lisabonu, ne materijaliziraju ništa više do izmaštane verzije povijesti. Vieira, isusovački misionar i važan barokni propovjednik, u svojim se propovijedima protivio dominantnoj praksi porobljavanja urođenika. Međutim, ono što čuvari često izostavljaju jeste činjenica da je Vieira bio zagovornik „crnog“, afričkog ropstva. Naglašavajući samo prvu, a izostav-ljajući pritom drugu tvrdnju, njihovi hegemoni povijesni narativi stvaraju hagiografsku priču u kojoj je Vieira isplivao kao takozvani branitelj Amerindijanaca i „gospodar portugalskog jezika“.3 Upravo su se unutar ovoga mitološkog konceptualnog prostora našli kipar i službeni sponzori spomeničkog projekta u vrijeme njegove inauguracije, u ljeto 2017. godine.

Ovaj spomenik predstavlja pokušaj prikrivanja i obmane. Tužna zelenkasta patina nanešena na novoizlivenu broncu tu je kako bi odavala dojam starosti. Predstavljajući se kao starinski ar-tefakt ili kakav obiteljski dragulj koje se nasljeđuje generacijama, spomenik se nakon pažljivijeg promatranja razotkriva kao ništa više od naručene i plaćene kopije inaugurirane u sadašnjosti. Kao takav on ne predstavlja ništa više od ezoteričnog arhaizma kojeg je prizvao luzotropikalni svjetonazor, a koji još uvijek prevladava među portugalskim elitama, šireći se javnom sferom. Stoga upravo ovaj spomenik dokazuje da povijesno vrijeme nije linearno, već proces zasićen različitim temporalnostima. Štoviše, on također pokazuje da je izgradnja kolonijalne „vizualnosti“ − osjetljive i estetske manifestacije i naturalizacije statusa quo4 − kao i njezine kontinuirane reprodukcije u vremenu, otporna diskurzivna praksa koja disciplinira načine vlastitog razumijevanja i naturalizacije zahvaljujući svom ulaganju u povijest.

Uzevši ovo u obzir, javlja se ključno pitanje: kome je u 2017. bio potreban ovaj spomenik i zašto? Svi odgovori nužno započinju istraživanjem njegovih simboličkih korijena i porijekla. Ovaj je spomenik prvenstveno rezultat dvoznačnosti; pokušaj namjernog produljenja izmišljene bajke o carstvu, sustavno materijalizirane u lisabonskom javnom prostoru. želja za perpetuiranjem narativao velikanima, za legitimizacijom izuzimajućeg pogleda na por-tugalsku kolonijalnu agendu temeljenu na fikciji rasnog skladate veličanje Vieire kao „branitelja ljudskih prava“ − u 17. stoljeću,kada taj koncept nije ni postojao − temelje se na instrumentalnom

7 Raniji proglasi o zabrani porobljavanja Amerindijanaca usvojeni su 1609. i 1680., no izuzeća poput „pravednog rata“ usvojena su ubrzo nakon toga. Ove zakonske inicijative nikada nisu učinko-vito zaustavile porobljavanje urođeničkog stanovništva.

korištenju anakronističke terminologije koja Vieiru pokušava predstaviti pojmovima koji su i nedosljedni i nepoznati konceptu-alnim svjetovima u kojima je živio. Kako kaže Ananya Chakravati, takvi pokušaji retoričkog majstorstva „govore o Crkvi bez carstva“5. Odvajanjem Crkve od carstva te isusovačkog reda od portugal-skog kolonijalnog poduhvata, uloga crkvenih institucija poput Družbe Isusove u provođenju, omogućavanju i širenju ropstva i kolonizacije nije samo prešućena nego i u potpunosti zataška-na. No, do 1759. godine, kada je portugalsko carstvo zabranilo i protjeralo isusovački red, niti jedna druga skupina – svjetovna ili crkvena – nije posjedovala toliko robova u obje Amerike.

Promišljanje nas navodi na zaključak da su sponzori spome-nika – općina Lisabon, Družba Isusova i Santa Casa da Misericór-dia, moćno katoličko svjetovno bratstvo − povijesnoj preciznosti pridavali tek sporednu ulogu. Zbog toga je Manuel Clemente, kardinal i lisabonski nadbiskup, nastojeći potvrditi povijesnu točnost spomenika izjavio da je prikazani lik „vjeran onome što je prikazano u gravurama“.6 Time se pozvao na zabrinjavajuću i anakronističku nevjerodostojnost, s obzirom na to da su spome-nute gravure nastale desetljećima nakon Vieirine smrti. Drugim riječima, kardinal je insinuirao viziju Vieire iz 18. i 19. stoljeća koja je bila te još uvijek jest ono što Portugalci u 21. stoljeću trebaju i zaslužuju. S obzirom na to da su ranonovovjekovne gravure na-stale u kontekstu restrukturiranja i širenja carstva, vrijedi provje-riti kakvi to imperijalistički projekti, u kardinalovom umu, i dalje oblikuju sekularni, demokratski i, barem u teoriji, postkolonijalni Portugal 21. stoljeća. U povijesnom trenutku koji je obilježen pojavom tradicionalno marginaliziranih i utišanih glasova (čiji su protagonisti prečesto osuđeni na margine portugalske javne i političke sfere) Vieirin spomenik pruža jasan iskaz o savezništvu sa zastarjelim, iako i dalje snažnim konsenzusom o tome tko je dostojan povijesnog predstavljanja i koje se slike uklapaju u poli-tičko tijelo ili ga predstavljaju.

Narativ reproduciran ovim spomenikom, koji Vieiru oslikava kao velikog „heroja urođeničkih naroda“, osipa se pri analizi situiranoj u kontekstu njegova vremena, odnosno u 17. stoljeću. Priče koje naglašavaju abolicionizam Amerindijanaca osmišljene su da uvjere publiku kako je Vieira bio jedinstven, izuzetan i nepri-kosnoven. Međutim, porobljavanje Amerindijanaca ukinuto je u španjolskom carstvu već 1501. godine. S druge strane, konačne zakonske inicijative kojima se zabranjuje porobljavanje urođe-ničkog stanovništva u portugalskom carstvu pojavljuju se tek u 18. stoljeću.7 No bez obzira na to, Vieira je, prema priči čuvaraluzotropikalnog konsenzusa, maltene začetnik abolicionizma.

3 M. Ramon, C. A. Faraco, „História sociopolítica dalíngua portuguesa“, Comuni-cação e sociedade, 34(2018), URL: http:// journals.opene-dition.org/ cs/679

6 „Padre António Vieira:Estátua de um dos ‘maioressímbolos da cidade’inaugurada em Lisboa“,Agência Ecclesia, 23. lipanj 2017. Dostupno na https://www.youtube.com/wat-ch?v=kQF59sWKvjs

4 Nick Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: a Counterhistory of Visuality, Duke University Press, Durham, 2011.

5 Ananya Chakravarti, „Architects of Empire“, Aeon, 2020. URL: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-jesuits-cul-tivated-the-idea-of-europe-an-empire [pristupljeno 20.8.2020.]


Ovo je tumačenje krajnje lukavo jer Vieirino protivljenje ropstvu urođeničkog stanovništva predstavlja kao jedinstveno ili čak ispred svojeg vremena, u doba kada su rasprave o aristotelov-skom prirodnom ropstvu već stoljećima predstavljale uhodan skolastički žanr. Drugim riječima, Vieira, kojeg spomenuti čuvari prikazuju kao tvorca novog svjetonazora, zapravo je bio samo predstavnik naslijeđene tradicije. Abolicionistički prikaz Vieire postaje još podliji kada se u obzir uzme rad povjesničara Antónia Joséa Saraive iz 1965. godine, koji ne samo da je ovu tezu doveo u pitanje, već je i razotkrio retoričku i političku predanost Isuso-vaca afričkom ropstvu.

Postolje spomenika, međutim, sadrži još više anakronizama. Na primjer, u tvrdnji da je Vieira bio „isusovac, propovjednik, svećenik, političar, diplomat, zaštitnik autohtonih [naroda] i ljudskih prava, [i] borac protiv inkvizicije.“ Zanimljivo je kako čuvari luzotropikalnog konsenzusa, inače uvijek spremni optužiti druge za anakronizam kada govorimo o rasnoj pravdi i ropstvu, u ovom izboru riječi ne vide znakove anakronizma. Budući da seVieira nikada nije definirao kao „političar“ ili „zaštitnik ljudskihprava“, vrijedi ispitati tko ga je, zašto, i s kojim namjerama takoimenovao. Oba se pojma na postolju koriste u svojim značenji-ma 20. i 21. stoljeća. Stoga, ne samo da su ih imputirala njegovapokoljenja, nego su to napravili na način Vieiri posve nepoznat.Jednom kada je spomenik inauguriran, čuvari više nisu zamije-ćivali anakronizam pojmova kojima je Isusovac opisan. Takve suoptužbe, naime, uslijedile tek nakon što su se disonantni glasoviusprotivili luzotropikalnoj hegemoniji simboliziranoj ovim spome-nikom. Zanimljivo je da se pitanje anakronizma postavilo tek kadsu novi glasovi osporili naturaliziranu dominaciju ovih političkih,kulturnih i vjerskih aktera u portugalskom društvu.

Povijest se bavi promjenama i nepredvidljivošću. Vieira, kao ni bilo koji drugi protagonist ili trenutak nisu imuni na tu povijesnu dinamiku. Ipak, ovaj spomenik, koji samo hini biti povijesnim objektom, u biti to nije. Da se postavljanje ove bronce u lisabon-ski javni prostor dogodilo u 17. ili 18. stoljeću, a ne 2017. godine, on bi se mogao smatrati povijesnim izvorom kojeg povjesničari, arheolozi i antropolozi mogu kontekstualizirati. No, budući da ovaj spomenik potječe iz 2017., a ne iz 18. stoljeća, on je nedvoj-beno ‚naš‘. Ne samo da je nastao u naše vrijeme, nego je i financi-ran iz suvremenih, javnih izvora. Uzimajući u obzir ovaj kontekst, jasno je da nas spomenik ne može naučiti ničemu, ni o povijesti Portugala, ni o portugalskim modelima kolonizacije i rasnim od-nosima, pa čak ni o samome Vieiri. Umjesto toga, ono što može jest osvjetliti postojanost luzotropikalnog mita i njegove ostavštine

Anonimna aktivistička intervencija. Srpanj 2018. Autor/ica fotografije nepoznat/a.


u drugom desetljeću 21. stoljeća. Stoga je jedini „uspjeh“ ovog spomenika oživotvorenje sentimentalne slike portugalske koloni-zacije Brazila, njezina postupanja prema urođeničkim narodima te uloge katoličke Crkve u tom procesu. Sve ovo ne poučava promatrače ni o čemu iz prošlosti, ali ih zato poučava o svemu ve-zanom za sadašnjost— poučava, naime, o ulozi koju diskreditirani povijesni događaji i dalje igraju u sadašnjosti.

Vieirin spomenik je, prema tome, dvostruko anakronističan. Iako pripada našem vremenu, također predstavlja razumijevanje Vieire iz hagiografske i nacionalističke narativne perspektive nastale pod utjecajem uljepšane verzije kolonijalnog nasilja. Zato je predstavljanje Vieire kao začetnika ljudskih prava zalog budućeg anakronizma, odnosno, način nošenja s Vieirom kao povijesnom osobom oblikovan je znanjem o događajima i očekivanjima o njihovoj vrijednosti koje samo budućnost može donijeti. Ipak, ne samo da bi ideje poput „ljudskih prava“, koje su se pojavile tek krajem 18. stoljeća, bile posve nerazumljive Vieiri, nego su, prenošenjem tih ideja na spomenik, njihovi zagovornici namet-nuli svoju jedinstveno anakronističku, samozavaravajuću viziju povijesti svima nama, i to u javnom prostoru. Ovaj potonji način uključivanja, pak, predstavlja retrospektivni anakronizam, s obzi-rom na to da nameće doktrinarni narativ prošlosti na sadašnjost. Priča artikulirana kroz ovaj spomenik dijeli istu viziju koja je bila promicana i u 19. stoljeću, na vrhuncu portugalskog kolonijalnog širenja u Africi, kao i u vrijeme Salazarove diktature. Nažalost, ovo su narativi čija postojanost gotovo pa i nije dekonstruirana tijekom 45 godina demokracije.

Godine 2018. ista lokalna vlast u Lisabonu i njezin načelnik dali su dupli ulog u imperijalne tlapnje kako bi promovirali ‚muzej otkrića‘. Taj je prostor, međutim, u potpunosti suvišan. Takav muzej već postoji na otvorenom, a zove se Lisabon. Duhovi kolonijalnog nasilja i carske ekspanzije vrebaju na svakom gradskom uglu. Od turističke četvrti Belém, do raznih spomenika, kipova i obilja kafića, palača i botaničkih vrtova, Lisabon je rascvjetani kolonijalni palimpsest. Unatoč izlišnosti takvog poduhvata, konzervativni sektori prigrlili su ideju o muzeju usidrenom u luzotropikalnom mitu te su ga, vjerni svojoj ulozi čuvara, iskoristili kao sredstvo (s)mirenja radi bojazni o slabljenju njihove luzotropikalne hege-monije. Takve tjeskobe proizlaze iz demografskih promjena u suvremenom portugalskom društvu, njegove rastuće društvene i kulturne raznolikosti, kozmopolitske naravi mladih generacija i rastuće javne vidljivosti nekada marginaliziranih aktera, poput ljudi afričkog podrijetla, Roma i radničke klase.

Spomenici anakronizmu moraju pasti

Hegemonističke optužbe za anakronizam nisu samo podle, već i neosnovane. Koristeći se ideološkom i političkom instrumentali-zacijom, takve kritike namjerno zamućuju napore preispitivanja prošlosti, svojstvene historiografiji. Međutim, ti su napori samo lažni pokušaj očuvanja plošnog, homogenog narativa koji se temelji na isključivanju bivših koloniziranih naroda. Nije važno samo analizirati sve spomenike starije od 1974.–1975.; važno je i raspravljati o svakom spomeniku izrađenom u duhu preostale struje suvremene, luzotropikalne misli. Jednako tako, kao što danas uzimanje prava na analizu, raspravu i kritiziranje pojma „muzej otkrića“ nije stvar anakronizma, tako se smije raspravljati i o mogućnosti davanja službenih isprika ili plaćanja odštete. Polemizirati o ulozi povijesnog naslijeđa i razmatrati načine kako popraviti prekinute veze s prošlošću danas ne predstavlja kronološku pogrešku. Tijekom svojih života mnogi su bivši robovi podnosili molbe za odštetu koje su im bile odbijane. Stoga aktu-alne zahtjeve ne treba promatrati kao fenomen sadašnjice, nego bi valjalo sagledati ih iz povijesne perspektive i proučavati ih u njihovim putanjama dugog trajanja (longue durée). Suvremene rasprave o odštetama, dakle, nisu anakronističke8. Polemizirati o tome kako je prošlost oblikovala i još uvijek utječe na sadašnjost ne predstavlja puritansko odbijanje povijesnog znanja, već že-stoko odbijanje instrumentalizacije sjećanja kako bi se zatvorilo, ušutkalo i isključilo.

Mi anakronizmom smatramo predlaganje kontinuiteta luzo-tropikalnog etosa kao, ne samo poželjnog, već i jedinog mogućeg puta – upravo ono što neprestano zagovaraju čuvari povijesnog konsenzusa. Vieirin spomenik najrecentniji je i najmoćniji ozna-čitelj tog anakronizma na djelu – i upravo je stoga i dalje sustav-na meta aktivističkih intervencija. Zapravo, od samog trenutka inauguracije, ovaj spomenik nikada nije naišao na podršku. U više je navrata spomenik bio prekriven crvenim karanfilima, simbolom portugalske revolucije i demokracije iz 1974. − i bijelim cvijećem, simbolom ukidanja ropstva u Brazilu. U najnovijoj intervenciji, upriličenoj 10. lipnja, na službeni Dan Portugala, Camõesa i por-tugalskih zajednica, Vieirin je spomenik išaran crvenim srcima i jednostavnim, zapovjednim natpisom: „dekoloniziraj“.

Nužno je prekinuti nasilje koje provode luzotropikalni anakronizmi te ekstrahirati prešutno perpetuiranje kolonijalne opstojnosti, kao i brojne oblike izuzeća koja oni još uvijek proi-zvode u sadašnjosti. Te su opstojnosti omogućene povijesnom i strukturnom prirodom rasnog nasilja i njegovom nekritičkom

8 Ana Lúcia Araújo, Repa-rations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Comparative History, Bloomsbury, Lon-don and New York, 2017.


naturalizacijom u javnom prostoru i intelektualnim raspravama. Prekid aktualnog anakronističkog konsenzusa omogućit će nove kritičke glasove koji prepoznaju heterogene temporalnosti, kako one postojeće, tako i nadolazeće. U konačnici, stvaranje novih narativnih prostora također može potaknuti ponovno otkrivanje dostupnih prošlih i sadašnjih materijalnosti – te reimaginacijom prošlosti može stvoriti nove, ranije ne(za)mislive budućnosti, u kojima je jedina dostojna sudbina za sve spomenike koji su nastali lijevanjem iz luzotropikalnog imaginarija, poput Oca Antonija Vieire, povratak u ljevaonicu.

Anonimna aktivistička intervencija. 10. lipanj 2020. Autor/ica fotografije nepoznat/a.

181

THe uN-BearaBleliGHTNess oF aNaCH-roNisM:

Practices of Monument-

making and the

Guardians of Historical Consensus

inês Beleza Barreirosrui Gomes Coelho

Patrícia Martins MarcosPedro schacht Pereira

182 183 The Unbearable Lightness of AnachronismI. Beleza Barreiros, R. Gomes Coelho, P. Martins Marcos, P. Schacht Pereira

The Luso-tropical consensus

Over the past few years, and especially since 2017, various occurrences intimated the waning of a dominant narrative con-sensus crystalized around the meaning and legacies of Portugal’s colonial empire. This consensus, moulded in the late 1800s, was partially anchored in the exaltation of the era of maritime voyages and colonial expansion of the 15th and 16th centuries, traditionally known as ‘discoveries.’ Concomitantly, the imperial project fantasized by Portuguese elites was accompanied by the fabrication and dissemination of a discourse proposing an interpretation of this past as ‘exceptional’ within the European context, given its alleged moorings in a humanist, ecumenic vision. Such discourses, inspired by the Brazilian anthropologist and sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) and his thesis known as Luso-tropicalism, suffered circumstantial adaptations over time. Freyre articulated in essentialist terms a defense of Portugal’s exceptionally benign colonial enterprise—thereby crafting a mythos that acquired particular strength in Portugal, at the start of the 1950s, as the Portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974) faced a mounting tide of international criticism aimed at the heart of its ‘civilizing mission.’ In desperate need of arguments capable of legitimating the colonial order imposed onto the territories known today as Portuguese-speaking African countries, Salazar’s elites turned to Freyre.2

This colonial order predominated in Africa while a dicta-torial regime reigned over the metropolis. In the context of the Cold War, the survival instincts of Salazar’s colonial and fascist regime hinged largely on the weaving of a Luso-tropical fable. This fantasy, in turn, was used to naturalize its own power and spin a mythological yarn about the exceptionalism of its pur-portedly benign civilizing mission. None of these fictions remain only in the past. To this day, the legacies of colonialism rever-berate uncritically throughout the Portuguese public sphere. As such, neither the shattering of fascism emblematized by the 1974 Carnation Revolution, nor the pivotal role played by Afri-can independence movements were able to chip away at the Luso-tropical, ideological consensus forged under Salazar’s rule. Yet, despite the nominal, political decolonization that has taken place since 1974, in the consciousness of many, Portugal remains an empire. Decolonization is an unfinished project and contin-ues to create critical problems for citizenship and democratic representation.

In 2015, activism that was initially centered around the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement in South Africa triggered a larg-er movement calling for the toppling of racist statues used to represent colonial figures or events. This vindicating gesture—with roots in the African independence movements—has not only gained momentum in the last three years, but has also found transnational echoes in racial and social justice move-ments like Black Lives Matter. As calls to decolonize knowl-edge, institutions, and curricula have coalesced with demands to develop effective antiracist practices, the challenge of forging new imaginaries and shaping new narrative futures has come to hinge heavily on ‘the past as problem’. This article highlights how these dynamics have converged in contempo-rary Portugal, particularly since 2017.

In Portugal, as decolonial and antiracist movements de-manded a reassessment of national heroes and the reopening of historical narratives to new protagonists and perspectives, such demands were frequently met with charges of ‘anachro-nism.’ This debate was emblematized in a statue inaugurated in 2017, in Lisbon, dedicated to a 17th century Jesuit missionary in Brazil, Father António Vieira. However, as we will argue, in Portugal this debate was informed by a double-anachronism. On the one hand, by dismissing the possibility of a reassess-ment of the historical past, agents of historiographical or-thodoxy were advocating for a colonial vision of history that actively perpetuated the rhetoric of Portugal’s fascist regime (1926-1974).1 On the other hand, in their desire to laud heroes and instrumentalize national figures, the same agents of ortho-doxy, themselves, relied on a plethora of anachronistic terms. As such, we argue that rather than being borne out of a con-cern with historical and analytical rigor, the charge of anachro-nism constitutes a smokescreen levied to silence and suppress the emerging voices of historically marginalized communities.

1 In 1926 a military putsch overthrew the republican regime in order to institute the Military Dictatorship, which in 1928 was renamed the National Dictatorship. In 1932, António Salazar, who until then had only occupied cabinet positions in both dictatorships, became the central, commanding, and centralizing figure of a regime named the Estado Novo, or New State. A new constitution was proclaimed in 1933 establishing the basis of the regime that ended on 25 April 1974, with the Carnation Revolution. Salazar governed as dictator from 1932 until he became gravely ill in 1968, being re-placed by Marcelo Caetano.

2 Cláudia Castelo, “O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo”: luso-tropicalismo e ideologia colonial portugue-sa (1933.-1961.), Afrontamen-to, Porto, 1998.


Despite systematic criticisms sustained by this hegemonic narrative since the 1950s in the form of critiques of benevolent colonization and imperial expansion, only fragments of this de-bate have seeped into public opinion. This remains true despite the emergence of new social actors—notably, racialized subjects whose interventions in Portuguese society always existed, albeit without the recognition afforded by the gatekeeping circles capable of legitimizing novel cultural actors and historiographical narratives. Still, these disruptive brokers of socio-cultural change proved decisive in breaking with the dominant Luso-tropical consensus. Yet another contribution made towards the unsettling of ossified narratives and hegemonic representational tropes stemmed out of the increased mobility gained by Portuguese scholars, the growing internationalization of academia, and the heightening international interest engendered by Portuguese colonial archives.

The guardians of historical hegemony

Most recently, events like the inauguration of António Vieira’s statue or the proposal for a Museum of the Discoveries have brought about interventions critical of the hegemonic, historical consensus. Such interpolations have provoked strong reactions from those who often play the role of guardians of the old histor-ical mythos: academics and various retired intellectuals, not to mention the traditional panoply of conservative commentators — predominantly male, white, upper class, urban, and concentrated in Lisbon. A key criticism aimed at those who dare to question their so-called consensual version of the past is the charge of anachronism. In the critiques relayed, afro-descendants and other newly emerged actors are accused of imposing their vision of the present—described, in their caricature, as ideological and ‘politically correct’ — to how past events ought to be read and interpreted. According to these guardians of national, historical consensus, all of us currently inhabit a temporal dimension in which past, present, and future exist in totally discrete, unrelat-ed temporalities. However, after only a superficial glance, the alleged anti-anachronism avowed by these guardians reveals itself to be nothing more than a false intuition. After engaging in a more scrupulous analysis, any observer can detect an endless maze of rationalizing logics and incoherent dead ends.

Presently, when these guardians puff up their pride to praise ‘grand feats,’ extraordinary ‘discoveries,’ and tremendous ‘rev-olutions’ carried out by their so-called national heroes, they do

Overthrown colonial statue at the Fortress of Cacheu, Guinea-Bissau. Photo by Rui Gomes Coelho.


so in precisely the same temporality—the same present, that is—that they share with us. In spite of this, their instrumental visits to the historical past are performed with the sole purpose of extracting ‘grand feats’ used to emblazon and valorize only certain moments, dates, and/or protagonists at the expense of others. These silencing choices are not only editorial in nature, but also constitute powerful curatorial acts. Nevertheless, what these guardians do not explain is that these omissions consti-tute choices too. In their minds, only oppositional perspectives appear tainted with the great sin of ‘ideology.’ Our guardians, in contrast, are believed to be the authors of a universal and eternal history: forever valid, immune to reinterpretation, and impervious to debate. Thus, the fraud enforced by their so-called historical consensus emanates precisely from this fallacy and their respec-tive attempts to naturalize one single interpretation of ‘History’ as the only possible reading yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

In doing so, these guardians not only seek to naturalize their own power, but also to neutralize any challenge to their prized Luso-tropical consensus by accusing any inquiring minds of pro-moting an anachronistic historical account moved by ideology alone. However, similar concerns never seem to emerge when the time for celebrations arises. Strangely, neither the ‘grand feats’ of the ‘great men’ involved in the violent process of colonization, nor the accolades lauding the ‘civilizing’ role of the great Portuguese nation, ever appear to these guardians as ideological choices. Such contradictions become all the more revealing when the purported value-neutral account of History promoted by these guardians, so perfectly overlaps with the historiography sanc-tioned by Salazar’s fascist, colonial regime. However, the argu-ments paraded by these guardians do not require any coherence. In the eyes of these Luso-tropical wardens, anachronism occurs only when their ruling vision is suddenly questioned and the my-thology of a benevolent colonial enterprise is brought to its knees by contributions from representatives of historically excluded, marginalized, and oppressed communities. Given these dynam-ics, an important question arises: if acts of resistance led by historically oppressed and marginalized peoples were contempo-raneous to the deeds these guardians celebrate under the banner of ‘heroism,’ why then is it anachronistic to reveal, acknowledge, and analyse acts of resistance to colonialism but not acts of so-called ‘imperial heroism’? In other words, why is only resistance to colonialism destined to be ideological, while imperial expansion is rendered as an absolutely ‘objective’ state of nature?

Inauguration of the statue to Father António Vieira, Lisbon. June 2017. From left to right its sponsors: António Vaz Pinto (Society of Jesus), Fernando Medina (Lisbon’s mayor), Pedro San-tana Lopes (Santa Casa da Misericórdia). Municipality of Lisbon.


Anachronism in action: the statue to Father António Vieira

Anachronism implies a chronological or factual error, an event or position attributed to a time that seemingly is out of step. Today, many projects of monumentalization promoted both in Portugal and around the globe are anachronistic in nature; while posturing as objects from the past, proclaiming to speak about history, these monuments either also endured throughout time and still exist today, or were produced in the present. As such, they are projects of illusion and ambition. By trying to, in 2020, perpetuate a narrative forged to serve the political desiderata of Portugal’s fascist-colonial regime, self-appointed guardians of the unison past propose to conserve an ossified vision history that is at odds with the ethos of a plural and democratic society. Thus, recent monuments, such as the statue to Father António Vieira (1608-1697), inaugurated in June 2017 in Lisbon, mate-rialized nothing more than a fanciful version of history. Vieira, a Jesuit missionary and important Baroque preacher, used his sermons to oppose the dominant practice of indigenous en-slavement. However, what the guardians often omit is that Vieira was a proponent of Black, African slavery. By stressing only the former rather than the latter, their hegemonic historical narra-tives produced a hagiographic tale in which Vieira emerged as a so-called defender of Amerindians and an “emperor of the Portuguese language.”3 It was precisely within this mythological conceptual space that the statue’s sculptor and official sponsors found themselves at the time of its inauguration, in the summer of 2017.

The statue epitomizes an effort of disguise and dissimulation. The distressed verdigris patina impressed upon this novel bronze feigns the veneer of old age. Posing as an ancient artifact, or a family jewel passed down through generations, the statue, upon closer inspection, reveals to be no more than a facsimile ordered, paid for, and inaugurated today. As such, it constitutes no more than an esoteric archaism conjured by a Luso-tropicalist world-view, still dominant among Portuguese elites, and disseminated within the public sphere. Hence, this statue proves that histori-cal time is not linear, but rather a process saturated by different temporalities. Moreover, it also shows that the construction of colonial ‘visuality’—the sensible and aesthetic manifestation and naturalization of the status quo4 —and its continuous reproduc-tion in time, is a resilient discursive practice that disciplines the modes of its own apprehension and naturalization by virtue of its investment in history.

After weighing these considerations, one vital question arises:who needed this statue in 2017, and why? Any response must necessarily begin with an inquiry into its symbolic roots and ori-gins. Above all else, this statue was borne out of an equivocation; an attempt to intentionally prolong a fabulation concocted about empire, systematically materialized in Lisbon’s public space. The eagerness to perpetuate the narrative of great men, to legitimate an exceptionalist view of Portugal’s colonial telos premised on the fiction of racial harmony, and of praising Vieira as a “defender of human rights”—during the 17th century, at which time this concept did not even exist—are premised on the instrumental deployment of anachronistic terminology attempting to char-acterize Vieira in terms both inconsistent and unfamiliar to the conceptual worlds he inhabited. Such attempts at rhetorical sleight of hand, in the words of Ananya Chakravati “speak of the Church without empire”. 5 By severing Church from empire, and the Jesuit order from the Portuguese colonial enterprise, the role played by ecclesiastical institutions, like the Company of Jesus, in pursuing, enabling, and expanding enslavement and coloni-zation is not only elided, but entirely whitewashed. Yet, by 1759, when the Portuguese Crown outlawed and expelled the Jesuit order, no other group—secular or ecclesiastical—owned as many slaves in the Americas.

Upon reflection, we are led to conclude that the statue’s sponsors—the Lisbon municipality, the Company of Jesus, and the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, a powerful Catholic, lay brother-hood—deemed historical accuracy to be only a secondary con-cern. This is why Manuel Clemente, the Cardinal and Patriarch of Lisbon, sought to attest to the statue’s historical veracity by declaring that it was “faithful to what the engravings reproduce.”6

In doing so, he appealed to a disconcerting and anachronistic implausibility, given how the engravings he referred to were pro-duced decades after Vieira’s death. In other words, the Cardinal insinuated that a vision of Vieira constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries was and is what the Portuguese of the 21st century still need and deserve. Given how those early modern engravings were produced in a context of imperial reconfiguration and expansion, it is worth inquiring what sort of imperial projects, in the mind of the Cardinal, still shape a secular, democratic, and at least nominally, a post-colonial 21st century Portugal. At a historical moment marked by the emergence of traditionally marginalized and silenced voices (protagonists all too often consigned to the margins of the Portuguese public and political sphere) Vieira’s statue provides an unequivocal declaration of allegiance to an

6 Our translation. “Padre António Vieira: Estátua de um dos «maiores símbolos da cidade» inaugurada em Lisboa”, Agência Ecclesia, June 23, 2017. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQF59sWKvjs

3 M. Ramon, C. A. Faraco, “História sociopolítica da língua portuguesa”, Comuni-cação e sociedade, 34(2018), URL: http:// journals.open-edition.org/ cs/679

4 Nick Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: a Counterhistory of Visuality, Duke University Press, Durham, 2011.

5 Ananya Chakravarti, “Ar-chitects of Empire”, Aeon, 2020. URL: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-jesuits-cul-tivated-the-idea-of-europe-an-empire [accessed 20th August 2020]


anachronistic, albeit powerful, consensus about who is worthy of historical representation and what images fit within and repre-sent the body politic.

The narrative framing Vieira as the great “hero of indigenous peoples,” reproduced in the statue, crumbles when analyzed within the context of its own time, the 1600s. Accounts stress-ing Amerindian abolitionism are designed to lull audiences into believing that Vieira was unique, exceptional, and unparalleled. However, the enslavement of Amerindians had already been abolished in the Spanish empire in 1501. Conversely, the ultimate legal initiatives outlawing indigenous enslavement in the Portu-guese empire came only in the 18th century.7 Notwithstanding, according to the tale relayed by the guardians of the Luso-tropical consensus, Vieira all but invented abolitionism. This rendition is highly disingenuous because it presents Vieira’s opposition to indigenous slavery as unique or even ahead of its time, when debates on Aristotelian natural slavery were a well-established scholastic genre for centuries. In other words, Vieira, whom the guardians portray as the creator of a novel worldview, was, in fact, merely a representative of an ancestral tradition. This abolitionist depiction of Vieira becomes all the more disingenu-ous when taking into account the historian António José Saraiva’s work from 1965, which not only challenged this thesis, but also laid bare the Jesuit’s rhetorical and political commitment to African slavery.

But the pedestal of the statue exhibits even more anach-ronisms. For instance, when it says that Vieira was a “Jesuit, preacher, priest, politician, diplomat, defender of Indigenous [Peoples] and of human rights, [and] a fighter against the in-quisition.” It is quite interesting to note how the guardians of Luso-tropical consensus, always so ready to accuse others of anachronism when talk of racial justice and slavery arises, found no anachronisms at all in this choice of words. Since Vieira never defined himself as either a ‘politician’ or as a ‘defender of hu-man rights,’ it is worth questioning who did, why, and with what intentions. Both terms, as they are exhibited on the pedestal, are deployed in their 20th and 21st century meaning. Hence, not only were they imposed by posterity, but also in a manner entirely foreign to Vieira. However, once the statue was inaugurated, these guardians saw no anachronism at all in the words chosen to describe the Jesuit. Rather, such charges came only after, as the dissonant voices rose to challenge the Luso-tropical hegem-ony emblematized in this monument. Strangely, the question of anachronism only emerged when novel voices challenged the

naturalized dominance of these political, cultural, and religious actors in Portuguese society.

History deals with change and contingency. Neither Vieira, nor any other protagonist or moment are immune to this dynam-ic. Yet, this statue, which only poses as a historical object, is, at heart, no such thing. If the grafting of this bronze onto Lisbon’s public space had occurred in the 17th, or 18th century and not in 2017, it could, admittedly, be treated like a historical source fit to be contextualized by historians, archaeologists, and anthropol-ogists. However, because this statue dates back to 2017 and not the 1700s, it is unambiguously ‘ours.’ Not only was it produced in our own time, but it was also paid for by contemporary public agents. Considering this context, it becomes clear that the statue can teach us nothing about either the history of Portugal, Portu-guese models of colonization and racial relations, or even about Vieira himself. Rather, what this statue can do is to illuminate the endurance of the Luso-tropical myth and its legacies in the sec-ond decade of the 21st century. Thus, the statue’s only ‘success’ is the recreation of a sentimental image of the Portuguese coloni-zation of Brazil, its treatment of indigenous peoples, as well as of the role of the Catholic Church in that process. All this teaches any observer nothing rigorous about the past, but everything about our present— namely, about the role that a discredited version of historical events still plays today.

Vieira’s statue is, therefore, doubly anachronistic. While it belongs to our very own time, it also represents an understand-ing of Vieira tethered to a hagiographic and nationalist narrative space swayed by the sugarcoating of colonial violence. Thus, to present Vieira as a precursor to human rights constitutes a ‘prospective anachronism’. That is, the mode of engaging with Vieira, as a historical figure, is shaped by a knowledge of events and expectations about their value that only the future would grant. Yet, not only would concepts like ‘human rights,’ that only arose in the late 18th century, be entirely incomprehensible to Vieira, but by impressing them onto the statue, its promoters also imposed their uniquely anachronistic, wishful-thinking vision of history onto all of us, and in the public space. This latter mode of engaging, in turn, constitutes a retrospective anachronism, seen as it enforces a doctrinaire narrative of the past onto the present. The account articulated in the statue shares the same vision pro-moted both in the 19th century, during the height of Portuguese colonial expansion in Africa, and during Salazar’s dictatorship. Unfortunately, these are narratives whose durabilities were hardly deconstructed by 45 years of democracy.

7 Previous decress outlaw-ing Amerindian slavery were approved in 1609 and 1680, but exemptions such as “just war” were passed shortly thereafter. These legislative initiatives never effectively stopped native enslavement.


In 2018, the same Lisbon municipal government and its Mayor doubled down on the fantasies of empire to promote a ‘museum of discoveries.’ However, this space is entirely redun-dant. Such a museum already exists in broad, open air; and it is called Lisbon. All throughout the city, the ghosts of colonial violence and imperial expansion can be found lurking. From the touristified neighborhood of Belém, to various monuments, statues, and a deluge of coffeeshops, palaces, and botanical gar-dens, Lisbon is a flourishing colonial palimpsest. Notwithstand-ing its superfluous nature, the idea of a museum moored to the Luso-tropical mythos was taken up by conservative sectors who, true to their role of guardians, used it to assuage concerns about their waning Luso-tropical hegemony. Such anxieties spring from demographic changes in contemporary Portuguese society, its growing social and cultural diversity, the cosmopolitan nature of its youth, and the burgeoning public visibility of formerly margin-alized agents, such as people of African descent, Romani people, and the working class.

Monuments to anachronism must fall

Hegemonic accusations of anachronism are not only disingenuous,but also ill-founded. Such critiques intentionally muddle the labor of historiographical reassessment inherent to history writing with ideological, and political instrumentalization. However, these ef-forts constitute nothing more than a feigned attempt to preserve a placid, homogeneous narrative premised on the exclusion of formerly colonized peoples. It is not only pertinent to study all statues produced before 1974-75, it is also important to debate every monument manufactured under the auspices of a lingering strand of contemporary, Luso-tropical thought. Similarly, just as there is no anachronism when the prerogatives of analysing, de-bating, and critiquing the notion of a ‘museum of discoveries’ are exercised today, it is also not erroneous to discuss the possibility of issuing official apologies or paying reparations. To debate the role played by the historical legacies today, and to consider how to remedy such shattered bonds constitutes no chronological error. During their lifetimes, many formerly enslaved people presented and saw their petitions for reparations denied. As such, rather than a phenomenon of the present, current requests should be duly historicized and studied in their longue durée trajectories. For that reason also, contemporary debates around reparations are not anachronistic.8 To discuss how the past struc-tured and still informs the present represents no puritan refusal

8 Ana Lúcia Araújo, Rep-arations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Comparative History, Bloomsbury, Lon-don and New York, 2017.


of historical knowledge, but a vehement refusal of the instrumen-talization of memory to occlude, silence, and exclude.

Anachronism is, we submit, to propose that the continuity of the Luso-tropical ethos is not only desirable, but the only pathway possible—as the guardians of historical consensus con-tinually advocate. Vieira’s statue is the most recent and powerful signifier of that anachronism in action—and that is precisely why it remains the systematic target of activist interventions. Indeed, since its inauguration, this monument was never consen-sual. On more than one occasion, the statue appeared covered with red carnations, a symbol of Portugal’s 1974 revolution and democracy—and white flowers, a symbol of abolitionism in Brazil. In the most recent intervention, on June 10th, the official Day of Portugal, Camões, and the Portuguese Communities, Vieira’s statue was marked with red graffiti hearts, and the simple, imperative inscription: ‘decolonize.’

It is urgent to interrupt the violence performed by Luso-tropical anachronisms, and to extricate the tacit perpetuation of colonial durabilities, along with the numerous exclusions they still produce in the present. These durabilities are enabled by the historical and structural nature of racial violence and its uncritical naturalization both in public space and intellectual debates. Breaking with the current anachronistic consensus will allow for novel critiques capable of recognizing heterogeneous temporalities, those both ongoing and forthcoming. Ultimately, the forging of new narrative spaces can also foster the reinvention of extant past and present materialities—and, by reimagining the past anew, can create new, hitherto unimagined futures, futures in which the only worthy fate for all statues grafted from the Luso-tropical imaginary, such as that of Father Antonio Vieira, is a return to the foundry.

196 197 Biografije

Catherine Baker viša je predavačica povijesti 20. stoljeća na Sveučilištu u Hullu. Politiku nacionalizma, medija i popularne kulture u postjugoslavenskoj regiji počela je proučavati za vrijeme doktorskog istraživanja o popularnoj glazbi i narativima identiteta u Hrvatskoj od 1991. godine (doktorirala je na UCL-u, Školi slavističkih i istočnoeuropskih studija, 2008.). Proučava i svakodnevnu politiku očuvanja i izgradnje mira. Njezina knjiga Race and the Yugoslav Region, Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester University Press, 2018.), razmatra ove i druge teme u kontekstu globalne politike rase.

Inês Beleza Barreiros povjesničarka je umjetnosti i kulture koja trenutno radi kao savjetnica za donošenje politika u portugalskom parlamentu i urednica u La Rampi. Doktorirala je medije, kulturu i komunikacije na Sveučilištu u New Yorku.

Jasmina Cibic izlagala je na brojnim izložbama, što uključuje i njezine samostalne izložbe na Venecijanskom bijenalu, u BALTIC-u u Gatesheadu, u Kunstmuseenu u Krefeldu, MG+MSUM-u u Ljubljani, CCA-u u Glasgowu i Ludwig Museumu u Budimpešti. Izlagala je i na grupnim izložbama u MoMA-i u New Yorku, Galeriji Whitechapel u Londonu i Muzeju umjetnosti Guangdong u Kini. Njezine najnovije monografije uključuju i Spielraum (BALTIC + Distanz) i NADA (Kunstmuseen Krefeld + Kerber). Trenutno radi na nadolazećim samostalnim izložbama i filmskom projektu The Gift u suradnji s ustanovama macLyon i Film London.

Biografije

198 199 BiografijeBiografije

Umetnički kolektiv Doplgenger se bavi odnosom između umetnosti i politike kroz preispitivanje režima pokretnih slika i načina njihove recepcije. Radovi su im prikazani na festivalima i u institucijama poput Bijenale savremene umetnosti Talin, Nacionalna galerija Makedonije, Likovni salon Celje, Moskovski muzej savremene umetnosti (MMOMA), Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine, Umetnički muzej Bon, Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb, Centar Pompidu, Međunarodni filmski festival Roterdam, Međunarodni filmski festival u Sijetlu, Biro Stedelijk muzeja u Amsterdamu. Dobitnici su Politikine nagrade za najbolju izložbu u Srbiji 2015. godine. Uredili su publikaciju Amateri za film, a od 2018. godine deluju kao kustosi i selektori festivala Alternative film/video u Beogradu.

Rui Gomes Coelho je arheolog i docent na Odsjeku za arheologiju, Sveučilište Durham, UK.

Ferenc Gróf predaje na École Nationale Supérieur d’Art (ENSA) u Bourgesu od 2015. godine. Jedan je od osnivača pariške zadruge Société Réaliste (2004.–2015.), a njegovi su radovi predstavljeni na brojnim samostalnim i grupnim izložbama i bijenalima, poput onoga u Šangaju 2012.; Lyonu 2009.; i Istanbulu 2009. godine. Société Réaliste pauzira s radom od 2015., ali Ferenc Gróf i dalje djeluje kao samostalni umjetnik. Neke od njegovih novijih samostalnih izložbi uključuju Without index (Muzej Kiscelli, Budimpešta, 2016.), X with a dot below (OFF bijenale, Budimpešta, 2017.), Or firing of a red star alert (Galerija acb, Budimpešta, 2018.), Anxiocene (Moulins de Paillard, FR, 2019.).

Minna Henriksson jedna je od urednica časopisa Art Workers – Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice (Helsinki/Tallinn/Stockholm 2015.). Henriksson je izlagala na međunarodnim izložbama, uključujući: Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, 3. Bergen Assembly; Stasis – Taking the Stand, 7. Bijenale u Thessalonikiju; Time Is Now, 2. Izložba suvremene umjetnosti u Wuzhenu; Tunnel Vision, 8. Momentum – nordijsko bijenale suvremene umjetnosti; Lenjinov muzej, Tampere; History Unfolds u Švedskom povijesnom muzeju, i na internetskoj platformi Documente u Kasselu.

Behzad Khosravi Noori je doktor znanosti, umjetnik, pisac, pedagog, čovjek koji život doživljava kao igru i nekromant. Njegova praksa temeljena na istraživanju uključuje film, instalacije, kao i arhivistiku. Njegovi radovi istražuju povijesti globalnog juga, rada i sredstava za proizvodnju, kao i povijest političkih odnosa koji su postojali kao protu-naracija dihotomiji Istoka i Zapada tijekom Hladnog rata. Radovi Khosravi Noora izlagani su, između ostaloga, u Muzeju Kalmar, Muzeju umjetnosti Malmö, Bijenalu u Temišvaru, na 12.0 Contemporary u Islambadu, u Tensta Konsthallu, na Venecijanskom bijenalu, u HDLU-u u Zagrebu, WHW-u u Zagrebu, Botkyrka Konsthallu, CFF-u (Centru za fotografiju u Stockholmu), Marabouparkenu, Centru za suvremenu umjetnost u Rigi.

Patrícia Martins Marcos je povjesničarka i doktorandica na Odsjeku za povijest i prirodoslovne studije, Sveučilište u Kaliforniji, San Diego, SAD.

200 201 BiografijeBiografije

Pedro Schacht Pereira je docent na portugalskim i iberijskim studijima, Državno sveučilište Ohio, SAD.

Ana Sladojević je nezavisna teoretičarka iz Beograda. Radila je kao kustosica u Muzeju afričke umetnosti – zbirci Vede i dr. Zdravka Pečara, i u Muzeju Jugoslavije. Učestvovala je u projektima: Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Muzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova/Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (2019.)/ Gwangju (Južna Koreja, 2020.); Tito u Africi: slike solidarnosti, Muzej Jugoslavije (2017)/ Muzej Pitt Rivers, Oxford (2018.)/ Wende Museum, Los Angeles (2019.); NYIMPA KOR NDZIDZI, Čovek ne može opstati sam, (Re)konceptualizacija Muzeja afričke umetnosti – zbirke Vede i dr Zdravka Pečara (2017); Nesvrstani modernizmi, Muzej savremene umetnosti u Beogradu/ERSTE Stiftung (2016.).

202 203 Biographies

Catherine Baker is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century History at the University of Hull. She has been researching the politics of nationalism, media and popular culture in the post-Yugoslav region since her doctoral research on popular music and narratives of identity in Croatia since 1991 (PhD University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2008). She also studies the everyday politics of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Her book Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester University Press, 2018), revisits these and other topics to situate them within the global politics of race.

Inês Beleza Barreiros is an Art and Cultural Historian, currently working as a policy making advisor at the Portuguese Parliament and editor at La Rampa. She has a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication, New York University.

Jasmina Cibic has exhibited extensively, including solo shows at Venice Biennale, BALTIC Gateshead, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, MG+MSUM Ljubljana, CCA Glasgow and Ludwig Museum Budapest, along with group shows at MoMA NY, Whitechapel Gallery London and Guangdong Museum of Art China. Her latest monograph publications include Spielraum (BALTIC + Distanz) and NADA (Kunstmuseen Krefeld + Kerber). She is currently working on her upcoming solo exhibitions and film project The Gift with macLyon and Film London.

Biographies

204 205 BiographiesBiographies

Doplgenger art collective focuses on the relationship between art and politics by questioning the regime of moving images and ways of their reception. Their works have been featured at festivals and institutions such as the Tallinn Contemporary Art Biennial, National Gallery of Macedonia, Celje Art Salon, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Bonn Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Centre Pompidou, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Seattle International Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, etc. They won the Politika Award for the best exhibition in Serbia in 2015. They edited the publication Amateurs for Film (2017) and have been the curators and selectors of the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade since 2018.

Rui Gomes Coelho is an archaeologiest and Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK.

Ferenc Gróf has been teaching at the École Nationale Supérieur d’Art (ENSA) in Bourges (FR) since 2012. He is a founding member of the Parisian co-operative Société Réaliste (2004–2015) who’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and biennials such as Shanghai, 2012; Lyon, 2009; and Istanbul, 2009. Since 2015, Société Réaliste has been on a hiatus, but Ferenc Gróf has continued his work as an individual artist. His most recent solo exhibitions include Without Index (Kiscelli Museum, Budapest, 2016), X With a Dot Below (OFF Biennale, Budapest, 2017), Or Firing of a Red Star Alert (acb Gallery, Budapest, 2018), Anxiocene (Moulins de Paillard, FR, 2019).

Minna Henriksson is the co-editor of Art Workers – Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice (Helsinki/Tallinn/Stockholm 2015). Henriksson has exhibited her work broadly in international exhibitions, among others in the Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, 3rd Bergen Assembly; Stasis - Taking the Stand, 7th Thessaloniki Biennial; Time Is Now, 2nd Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition; Tunnel Vision, 8th Momentum - Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art; The Lenin Museum in Tampere; History Unfolds in Swedish History Museum, and at the online platform of Documenta studies in Kassel.

Behzad Khosravi Noori is a PhD, artist, writer, educator, playgrounder and necromancer. His research-based practice includes films, installations, as well as archival studies. His works investigate histories from the Global South, labour and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter narration to the East-West dichotomy during the Cold War. Khosravi Noori’s works have been shown at Kalmar Museum, Malmö art Museum, Timișoara Biennale, 12.0 Contemporary Islamabad, Tensta Konsthall, Venice Biennale, HDLU Zagreb, WHW Zagreb, Botkyrka Konsthall, CFF (Centre of Photography, Stockholm), Marabouparken, Centre of Contemporary art, Riga, among other venues.

Patrícia Martins Marcos is a historian and a PhD Candidate at the Department of History and Science Studies Program, University of California, San Diego, USA.

206 207 BiographiesBiographies

Pedro Schacht Pereira is an Assiciate Professor of Portuguese and Iberian Studies, The Ohio State University, USA.

Ana Sladojević is an independent theorist from Belgrade. She worked as a curator at the Museum of African Art – the Veda and Zdravko Pečar Collection and the Museum of Yugoslavia. She contributed to the following projects: Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana (2019)/ Gwangju (South Korea, 2020); Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity, Museum of Yugoslavia (2017)/ Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (2018)/ Wende Museum, Los Angeles (2019); NYIMPA KOR NDZIDZI, One Man No Chop, (Re)conceptualisation of the Museum of African Art – the Veda and Zdravko Pečar Collection (2017); Non-Aligned Modernisms, Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade/ERSTE Stiftung (2016).

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BROJ ISSUE 3 - ArtsEverywhere

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