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They are closely related to the labelling of others with the language of contamination and disease. Labelled with diseaseĪnimalisation and even bacterialisation are widespread elements of racist dehumanisation. They recognised that the white public had been thoroughly conditioned by the dehumanising violence of animal comparisons and simianised representations, as in the reel racism of King Kong. The artists fully understood the interplay of racist ideology, reactionary reporting and southern injustice. The rest of the picture was filled with a monstrous black simian figure baring its teeth and dragging off a helpless white girl. One of the 56 images showed the group of the accused young men beside a newspaper with the headline “Guilty Rape”. ‘Scottsboro Alabama’ carried a foreword by Michael Gold, editor of the communist journal New Masses. In 1935 a picture story by the Japanese artist Lin Shi Khan and the lithographer Toni Perez was published. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of having raped two young white women. The climax was the hugely successful classic of Hollywood’s horror factory, King Kong.Īt the time of King Kong’s production the public in the US was riveted by a rape trial. It popularised its repellent combination of sexist and racist representations. Literature, arts and everyday entertainment also seized on the issue.

Anthropology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, geology, medicine, philosophy, and, not least, theology were some of the fields. In the following centuries, simianisation would enter into different sciences and humanities. His intellectual contemporaries knew well that the stage for this transgressing love-and-rape-story was Africa because, according to the wisdom of the time, drills lived in Guinea.

In the story’s first version (1570), a Portuguese woman was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had his babies.Ī good century onwards the story had entered the realm of Europe’s great philosophical thought when John Locke in his 1689 essay Concerning Human Understanding, declared that “women have conceived by drills”. The history of a narrative by Antonio de Torquemada shows how in this process Africans became demonised and the demons racialised. He characterised the region as a hotbed of monsters, arising from the sexual union of humans and animals. Already Jean Bodin, doyen of the theory of sovereignty, had ascribed the sexual intercourse of animals and humans to Africa south of the Sahara.

She eagerly reciprocated and became helplessly hooked.įrom then on, the sexist manifestation of simianisation was intimately intertwined with its racist dimension. Several centuries later in 1633, John Donne in his Metempsychosis even let one of Adam’s daughters be seduced by an ape in a sexual affair.

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