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Dagnostaw Demski and Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
political discourse, and also human bodies. According to his conclusions, in the
anti-Semitic caricature of the late nineteenth century, Jews were portrayed as "mor¬
ally degenerate liberals, capitalists, and intellectuals, and as ethnically or ‘racially’
ugly and inferior Ostjuden in one and the same image.” The visual distortion of the
Hungarian millennium celebrations as “Jewish” was thus the result, Szabé writes, of
the “stable semantic structure of modern anti-Semitism on the one hand, and spe¬
cific political constellations in Austria and Hungary on the other.” Another, rarely
studied potentiality of the process of visually representing the Other is discussed in
the last article of the chapter, Joanna Bartuszek’s ““Close Exoticism’: The Image of
the Hutsuls and Their Region in the Archives and Photographs of the Nineteenth
Century and the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” The author calls that poten¬
tiality de-Othering, and analyzes it by means of images of the Hutsul people and
their land, Hutsulshchyna, as they emerge from the visual collection of the Scientific
Archive of the State Ethnographical Museum in Warsaw. According to the author,
a process of de-Othering or de-exoticization of a group occurs as the originally “oth¬
ered” (e.g., mystified, romanticized) image of a group gradually transforms in the
public perception, and the group becomes familiar—and even distinctive—in the
end. Bartuszek demonstrates that in nineteenth-century Polish travel and academic
literature, as well as in the illustrated press, Hutsulshchyna and, generally, the east¬
ern Carpathian mountains were perceived as a kind of terra incognita. The district
and its inhabitants—having been under the Austro-Hungarian administration as
a part of Galicia’s territory for a long time—were thus surrounded by an indefin¬
able, mysterious aura, but were found attractive, exotic as such. Through a series of
various visual representations the Hutsuls had gained familiarity and also a sort of
prestige by the beginning of the twentieth century, which was only confirmed as
the district became part of Poland (in 1918), politically, too.
The fourth chapter entitled Representations of War and the Other studies the
most violent aspect of competition between nations in our region. It focuses on
the multiple relation between war and images. Alexander Kozintsev in his “Repre¬
senting the Other in British, French, and German Cartoons of the Crimean War”
studies the oeuvre of six cartoonists whose works have been published in various
European humor magazines—Punch, Le Charivari, and Kladderadatsch. The author
analyzes the visual propaganda campaign of the Crimean War (1835-1856) as rep¬
resented by those western cartoonists and suggests that the staging itself, the visual
choreography of the events, seems a work of art, a play in three, or actually four,
parts. At the “preparatory stage,” the Other (Russia) is dehumanized; in the first
part, the “strong one” (Russia) offends the “weak one” (Turkey); in the second part
the “noble ones” (Western countries) interfere to protect the “victim” against the
“offender”; while the third part—the finale—tells about the deserved punishment
inflicted on the “offender.” Kozintsev surveys the various representations of the story
and, citing a rich theoretical literature on humor, concludes that graphic caricature
fulfills a basically dual role. It can be used as a “weapon of satire and propaganda,”