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Prof. Dr. Julia König: Imperial Fantasies and the Constitution of the White Subject Sexualized Gender Power Structures in Colonial Picture Postcards Around 1900

The golden age of the picture postcard around 1900 correlated with the heyday of the German Empire's colonial expansion (cf. Axster 2014). Increasingly, after the outbreak of the great colonial war against Herero and Nama in »Deutsch-Südwestafrika« (1904-1908), caricature postcards were printed and mailed, depicting racist caricatures of advances and sexual relations between colonized and colonizers. 
These pictures unfold their effect in their ambivalence: on the one hand, the eroticized stereotypes structure the colonial space, and on the other hand, sexual contact seems like the ultimate threat to colonial rule. Both are reflected again and again in racist stereotypes in different constellations (cf. Langbehn 2010) evoking the »colonial urphantasy« (Zantop 1997) or imaginaries of tropical hybridity (Young 1995): Caricatures of boyish white sailors in search of erotic adventures with exoticized Black women, of ›effeminate‹ white dandies who are supposed to prove their masculinity with the ›Black woman‹, and last but not least of the feared interest of white women in Black men – projections to which these caricatures ›respond‹ in a certain way. 
Presenting preliminary results of my current research project, I would like to take these representations as a starting point for a psychoanalytic social-psychological analysis of racialized gender concepts in caricatures around 1900. I am particularly interested in the affective dimension and the mass impact of these colonial stagings in the context of the patriarchal gender order of the German Empire. Arguing that the circulation of those caricature postcards could already function as a generator of a new form of mass education before the use of the radio and later that of the television, insofar as they represented a mass medium whose socio-psychological significance in the German Empire becomes virulent precisely in the moment in which the Empire strived to succeed as a global colonial power. Finally, I aim to discuss indications of the role of these stagings on caricature postcards in the constitution of the ›white subject‹ in the years around 1900.