Images of African Eunuchs

Orientalism, Teratology, and tje Colonial Imagination

Abstract

The European pictorial tradition’s ‘orientalism’ was one of the many sources of images of African eunuchs. An orientalist iconography of African eunuchs was present in the illustrated press and travel literature. Furthermore, medical teratology discussed eunuchs. As a visual record of human ‘types’, photography of African eunuchs was part of a teratologic inventory of a world about to disappear, according to the perspective of the colonial empires. Based on an iconographic corpus in diverse media support, this paper discusses the paradoxical ‘subalternity’ of African eunuchs and searches for the eunuchs’ inaudible voice in historiography. Finally, this paper maps the winding road from male genital mutilation to the symbolic emasculation of Africans in the colonial imaginary.