Oldal 84 [84]
Playing With Otherness: Within and Beyond Stereotypes in Visual Representations
ethnic Others should be brought under the category of satire, although a degree of
comic relief was sometimes visible in the mode of expression. In this sense, playing
was used to achieve various aims:
e to indicate surprise (ill. 15);
* to convey argumentative meaning (ills. 18 and 20);
e to provide a signal that someone is aware that it might give offense (ill. 15);
* to mitigate an utterance such as a complaint or direct request (ill. 17);
¢ for actions and expressions conveying something that is not expected (ill. 18).
The ethnic motifs in caricatures appeared in various manners. The subject of
increased tourism entered both the serious and that satirical press (ills. 19, 20, 21).
In most cases, a tourist was treated with disdain, despite the popularity of images
from exotic places, ethnographic exhibitions, exotic shows, theaters, and circuses in
central Europe? and from accounts of travels. The local point of view represented
in caricatures was a priority, which indicates a certain type of cognitive horizon of
that period.
Overpopulation of the countryside and gradually progressing urbanization led
to increased social mobility, not only domestically, but also among expatriates (ill.
25), while the class society was still firmly stuck in its foundations. The new phe¬
nomena on the territory of Poland of the time, such as industrialization and urban¬
ization, created the new Others, which can be exemplified by the subject of vagrancy
in the press, for example, /a fioraia (the flower woman; ill. 28).
A separate topic of modernizing people is what was perceived as backward or
primitive. Primitiveness,” from the visual representation’s point of view, was related
to bodily deformation, stooped posture, hairiness, and sexuality. The figures from
illustrations 22 and 28 are typical, as presenting two disparate worlds, the region of
Indochina and the streets of Warsaw; the former was serious while the latter seems
playful in character. The similar figure of a filthy, unpredictable woman unable to
make ends meet serves to personify the threat of the plague (pestis) in the representa¬
tions of the distant Others. In the second example, primitiveness relates to familiar
figures from the streets of Warsaw, evoking fear, disgust, aversion, lack of respect,
and embarrassment.
In a model in which the most harmonious situation is one in which the woman
remains in the care of the men or her family, the figures of women who stay outside
of such protection on the one hand represented a threat to the social structure and
28 As example is of note: Ashanti Show in Vienna, also other shows the tour of the Buffalo Bill the¬
ater with Indians and a stable of horses around central Europe in 1906, which stopped in the city of
Marseille and in Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, the region of Stanislawowo and Lviv,
Rzeszöw, Tarnéw, Cracow to Cieszyn, Bohemia, Germany, and France. There were visiting Warsaw,
mentioned in the satirical press (e.g., Singhalese, Japanese).
?° Hannu Salmi mentions the literary motif of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2010: 132) in the short story
by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886, as mirroring the polarization that characterized the
period.
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