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Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

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  • Skarpelis, Anna Katharina Mosha

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

Racial purity and supremacy were core to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own “racial scientific” research showed that most Germans were “mixed-race.” Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely non-blond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inwards aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial self-understandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications for the sociologies of culture; race and ethnicity; theories of the state and of empire and science and technology studies.

Suggested Citation

  • Skarpelis, Anna Katharina Mosha, 2023. "Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography," SocArXiv 8vk9r, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:8vk9r
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/8vk9r
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    1. Neda Maghbouleh & Ariela Schachter & René D. Flores, 2022. "Middle Eastern and North African Americans may not be perceived, nor perceive themselves, to be White," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 119(7), pages 2117940119-, February.
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