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Introduction
city. Derlers study raises the guestion of whether photography can at all be used as
evidence of social reality.
Anna M. Rosners "The Image of the Jewish Street Seller in Nineteenth Century
London" studies the representation of Jews in the caricatures of the British press.
According to her findings, some stereotypes were universal, others unigue and pres¬
ent only in Britain. In the beginning, the street seller was the main figure. The most
universal were those representations that were based on the foreignness of the Jews,
their alien tradition, culture, and religion. The Jewish street seller was depicted
usually as a stranger, but also as one who does not stand out in the crowd. Later
cartoons presented Jewish figures that were difficult to recognize, which, as Rosner
argues, reflects the process of their assimilation into British society and culture.
Dobrinka Parusheva’s “Bulgarians Gazing at the Balkans: Neighboring People
in Bulgarian Political Caricature at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century” closes
the chapter. Parusheva focuses on strictly political caricature in Bulgaria, finding her
way between opposite perspectives. On one hand, Lawrence Streicher claimed that
in the twentieth century, “the news story increasingly ... divorced the narration of
events from their meaning” because of the struggle for objective reporting and the
importance of the social situation in which caricature appears and the understand¬
ing of politics, on which the audience relies. She recalls the approach of the most
famous Bulgarian caricaturists according to which the artist has to be well versed
in the life of the society. Following this way in the presentation of her data she
concludes that political caricature involved mostly current domestic issues, and not
problems and disagreements with neighbors. Characteristic to this genre was the
use of personified political figures rather than abstract ones, representing nations.
Parusheva could also observe a shift in attitudes as changes have become visible in
the political context.
The sixth and final chapter entitled New Versus Old: Local Responses to
a Changing World surveys further smaller registers of everyday life in which visu¬
ality played an eminent role and in which a certain kind of Othering occurred.
Karla Huebner, in her “Otherness in First Republic Czechoslovak Representations
of Women,” studies the nontraditional images of women in the first half of the
twentieth century. She has found that the figure of the New Woman has meant
something different according to location and time in Czechoslovakia. This seems
to have reflected different versions of modernity and nationality in different places
and during different periods. Huebner compared various magazines and newspa¬
pers published in Czechoslovakia and found that the image of the New Woman
was everywhere. She has shown the differences by underlining specific kinds of
similarities she has found depending on specific political views (liberal or leftist)
or nationality (Czech or Slovak). She has also noticed that the German and Roma
women were ignored in the press representations of the period.
Eva Krekovi&ovä and Zuzana Panczov, in their “Visual Representations of ‘Self?
and ‘Others’: Images of the Traitor and the Enemy in Slovak Political Cartoons,
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