During the First World War, cartoonists throughout the English-speaking world responded to Allied allegations of German atrocities by depicting the German soldier as a monstrous ogre and labelling him a ‘Hun’ (Gullace, 2010 Gullace, N. F. (2010) Barbaric anti-modernism: representations of the ‘Hun’ in Britain, North America, Australia, and beyond, in P. James (Ed.), Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press., pp. 61–62). The ‘Hun’ became a prominent symbol of the enemy’s capacity for rapacious violence and was widely depicted in both government and non-government propaganda. While the simian German soldier was unique to the First World War, the racial tropes projected on to him were not. Indeed, he was an amalgam of pre-existing imagery that had been created during the 19th century as British imperialists applied scientific notions of race to colonised people throughout the globe (Robertson, 2010 Robertson, E. (2010) The Hybrid Heroes and Monstrous Hybrids of Norman and Lionel Lindsay: Art, Propaganda and Race in the…
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