3. ›Bruder Mohr‹

Angelo Soliman: desecrated bodies and the spectre of Enlightenment racism

“…Napoleon's flagship was called Orient for precise reasons, taking a journey through time, 'through which the ancient image of the old Egypt would become inextricably linked with the history of modern Europe, and through which reflection on its current situation would at the same time ultimately become orientalized'. 40 The annexation of Egypt's cultural past was an integral part of this journey. In the early Enlightenment, in 1817, Georges Cuvier decided to depict this operation from a racial-theoretical perspective.…”

“…He was convinced that 'the culture of ancient Egypt could only have been created by the white race'. 41 Soliman's representation in this painting is complex. On the one hand he seems to stand in front of the pyramids of his own accord.…”

“…His skin colour was incidental, an attribute that could be explained by the strong rays of the sun in southern latitudes and, as a result, it was the character of the individual that was decisive.' 51 It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that these diverse images were replaced by increasingly narrow perceptions of African people that constructed them as primitive and naturally inferior to Europeans. These representations were closely linked to ideological attempts to justify slavery such as a new contradictive interpretation of Noah's Curse (The Curse of Ham), which called Africans descendants of Noah's son Ham and cursed with eternal servitude.…”

“…This perspective became increasingly common in a time in which someone's skin, hair, lips and nose were examined in terms of the often already so-called races and their perceived characteristics. 62 Contemporary thinkers of the Enlightenment tirelessly evaluated and classified human beings to establish the exact borders between the races. They also engaged in studies in the increasingly popular new pseudo-scientific disciplines of physiognomy and phrenology.…”

“…Two images of Soliman reflect these new trends in Europe, a cut-out of his silhouette and a death mask taken after his death (see Figure 3; a and b). These were not innocent memorabilia, but cultural relics of a time in which Enlightenment thinkers developed the discriminatory 'optic of racism', 63 engaging in increasingly taxonomic attempts to racially classify people. The silhouette reduces the complexity of facial features to form types.…”