What I learned about what is essentially a circus identity I find fascinating because of what it tells us about how nineteenth-century Americans treated race, even the white race, as a spectacle, as aperformed identity that might not be what it seemed. There was scientific, such as Voltaires letter On inoculation, and even mercantile as many products began to be sold with an allusion to Circassians, such as the Bloom of Circassia in London. The untamed hair evoked exoticism; it served as a marker that this woman, who otherwise appeared entirely white, was in fact something Other. But if they ask $4000 each, probably one would be better than two, for $8000 in gold is worth about $14,500 in U.S. currency. John Frederick Lewis's The Harem portrays Circassians as the dominant mistresses of the harem, who look down on other women, as implied in the review of the painting in The Art Journal, which described it as follows: It represents the interior of a harem and slaves at Cairo, wherein is seated in luxurious ease a young man, attired in the excess of Moslem fashion. This pustule produces the same effect in the arm it is laid in as yeast in a piece of dough; it ferments, and diffuses through the whole mass of blood the qualities with which it is impregnated. By policy, we must understand not only the three hundredplus years of law and governmental action that established categories of human beings fit for enslavement and other forms of oppression but also the shared conceptual and linguistic heritage that has formed the meaning of race in our world and that has worked its way into everything from everyday talk to official forms and the pronouncements of the Supreme Court. This is not Circassian history, it is American history, and the weird things that went on in the 19th century. Greenwood failed in his attempt, but that did not stop Barnum, who had no qualms about finding someone who could pass as Circassian to put on exhibition along with other remarkable individuals in his sideshow, such as Tom Thumb. These maidens are very honourably and virtuously instructed how to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed. According to Blumenbach, the white race originated in the Caucasus region, and all other human races derived from this original source as degenerations of the Caucasian, the highest type. See more ideas about women, crimean tatars, beautiful. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the young womans abstracted gaze with the absurdly wild mass of hair flaming around her head. Add to this heady brew the tincture of Orientalism that Edward Said has dissected as a feature of European colonial imagination, and we have in the Circassian Lady an archetype at the intersection of multiple Victorian obsessions, however covert. This lovely name offers a range of beautiful pet names, such as Jelica, Jele, Lena, Lenotschka, and Lenka. Though Barnum claimed his agent, dressed in full Turkish costume, had seen a large number of beautiful Circassian girls and women, for one reason or another he failed to return with one. Racial theories of the mid 19th century held that the people living in the Circassian mountains near the Black Sea were examples of the "purest stock" of the Caucasian race. She was tall, and well, though slightly, shaped; and held herself, like all Circassians, men or women, very erect."[18]. Also peculiar is how many of the Circassians have names beginning with a combination of Z and A or A and ZZublia Aggolia, Zalumma Agra, Aggie Zolutiaas if they were the alpha and omega of whiteness. Similar claims about Circassian women appear in Lord Byron's Don Juan (18181824), in which the tale of a slave auction is told: Some went off dearly; fifteen hundred dollars [37], The trend spread, with supposedly Circassian women featured in dime museums and travelling medicine shows, sometimes known as "Moss-haired girls". Titillation should not be confused with illumination. Emma Stone. Pronunciation clear help? "This delicate as well as fragrant composition has been long celebrated as the summit of cosmetics by all the Circassian and Georgian women in the seraglio of the Grand Sultan". It is fun to read and enjoy that people actually believed stuff like this, hence the reason they are no longer out there entertaining people, we got smart, not hate filled like you the first poster. Zalumma was the first of several Circassians in Barnums shows, and even her name was his invention. Their beauty is mentioned in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), in which Fielding remarked, "How contemptible would the brightest Circassian beauty, drest in all the jewels of the Indies, appear to my eyes!"[8]. Symbolic and only barely covert sexualization seems to have thrived in the liminal space of the sideshow freaks, as in this portrait of a snake charmer: The mystical symbolism of a freakish whiteness seems to have been even more accentuated in the case of some albinos, the whitest persons of all, who adopted the cachet of mysterious powers, such as mind reading, as a feature of their sideshow acts: This comes full circle in the portrait below of Aggie Zolutia, representing the highest possible pitch of a fetishized whiteness: an albino Circassian. Poetic romance-descriptions of Circassian girls appear in Don Juan by Lord Byron (1818-1824), in which the story of a slave auction is related: Some went off dearly; fifteen hundred dollars For one Circassian, a sweet girl, were given, Warranted virgin. The gallery below presents several views of Zalumma (with the name variously spelled); a portrait of another of Barnums Circassians, Zoe Meleke (a made-up name again); and a group portrait of the freaks in Barnums Circus; note that all are white, including the whitest of the white, albinos: And so Barnum invented the Circassian Lady, or sometimes the Circassian Beauty, as a sideshow performer of a particular kind. Barnum's Circassian beauties were young women with tall, teased hairstyles, rather like the Afro style of the 1970s. The fame of these women inspired more than just literary achievement. For an American audience both morbidly fascinatedand panicked by the prospect of race mixing, transgression of the taboo could go only so far before being sealed with disaster. They may be mans best friend, but man has also changed them beyond all recognition, these incredible pictures of dog breeds reveal. 'Twas for the Sultan, and at once withdrew. The Circassians are a North Caucasian ethnic group native to Circassia. It is all the more remarkable then that for nearly a century before their conquest and dispersal, the Circassians had been an object of European fascination. Thomas Benyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865). Circassians commemorate the banishment of the Circassians from Russia in Taksim, stanbul, Illustration of skulls of the five races, from. The very nature of the sideshow allowed the viewer to displace any genuinely discomforting questions into the realm of ambiguity, where they could then be safely bundled up and forgotten, just as we today confront our fears in the safety of a horror movie or a roller-coaster ride: as mere entertainment, a thrill to experience and then purge as at bottom unreal. Had decked her out in all the hues of heaven. University of Texas Press. Barnum's wigsWhy do you perpetuate these racial stereotypes when they have been historically proven to be false?Would you be offended if someone posted images of Vietnamese people with zippers running along their hairlines? : case sensitive: see the pronunciation key for a guide on how to write the sounds; sounds can only be searched in names that have been assigned pronunciations * is a wildcard that will match zero or more letters in the pronunciation example: *lee matches names which end with the sound lee _ is a wildcard that will match exactly one letter in the pronunciation Furthermore, white viewers would have had one very striking point of comparison for supposedly outlandish frizzy hair: this was the hair texture they would attribute to black people. Maker unknown, Aggie Zolutia, carte-de-visite (circa 1875), collection of Steven Bolin. We have to remember that the explosion of frizzed hair in the portraits of Circassian women was an entirely artificial effect, both cosmetically and culturally: it had to be created with beer shampoo and teasing comb; it had nothing to do with how actual Circassian women wore their hair. [29], In 1873, the decade after the expulsion of Circassians from the Caucasus where only a minority of them live today, it was argued that "the Caucasian Race receives its name from the Caucasus, the abode of the Circassians who are said to be the handsomest and best-formed nation, not only of this race, but of the whole human family. The legend of the Circassian woman involved a provocative component for white Americans: the idea that the Circassians were the most primordial form of the white race, and therefore also the purest and most beautiful exemplars of whiteness, especially their women; yet at the same time, these Circassian women were subject to the slave trade of the Ottoman Empire. As a type, the Circassian Lady became quite familiar in the United States, especially after the mid-1860s, when various performers in circus sideshows began playing this role. And we can account for this by connecting the dots: both African slaves and Circassian slaves were subject to sexual exploitation, even if the latter were supposedly rescued from that fate, and this is the point of contact that played so powerfully on white Americans imagination: wildness, even a contained and constrained wildness, suggested that the sexual exploitation was in some sense natural to the enslaved womens own instincts, character, and desires. So can we retire not just the fantastical label Caucasian as a name for whiteness but also the very notion of the human divisions that constitute whiteness itself, as well as the whole umbrella concept of race as color, in which white, black, brown, yellow, and red find their place? Included in my top most beautiful female athletes of the world. Though Barnum claimed his agent, dressed in full Turkish costume, had there seen a large number of beautiful Circassian girls and women, for one reason or another he failed to return with one. In a letter of May 1864, Barnum authorized his agent, John Greenwood Jr., to spend up to $5,000 in gold each (a vast sum in that day) for two Circassian beauties if Greenwood could successfully infiltrate the slave markets of Istanbul to buy them without being detected as a Westerner. As with PowerssGreek slave, the presumed Christian faith of the Circassian Beauty puts into play another paradox: the sexualized Other who is nevertheless both contained and made virtuous by her deep faith, despite her terrible fate. Frost, Linda, The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Imperialism, and American Popular Entertainment, in Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in US Popular Culture, 18501877(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Appear in advertisements on Turkish TV, in the theater. As another example, in 1868, the English sculptor John Bell produced a sculpture entitled The Octoroon. These Circassians were actually women from the countryside of the United States who had a more exotic appearance, which he exaggerated by styling them with afro haircuts. Barnums obsession originally led him to take advantage of the repercussions of the Circassian war to enter the slave market in Istanbul illegally. Zublia Aggolia was almost certainly a stage name, given that probably none of the women performing this part were actual Circassians, a people from the Caucasus region in what is now modern Russia. In 2014, the Circassian diaspora across the world sought to use the hosting of the Olympic Games in Sochi, where the Russians celebrated their victory over the Circassians in 1864, as an opportunity to protest the 150th anniversary ofwhat some have calledthe first genocide inmodern European history. Bogdan, Robert,Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). It is worth underlining this use of hair as a marker of forbidden sexuality, for it turns up again with the Circassian Ladies, but in a more subtle form. Maker unknown, inscribed on reverse Zoe Meleke, Circassian Lady, Born in Asia Minor, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of Greg French. The "golden age" of the Circassian beauty may be considered to be between the 1770s, when the Russian Empire seized the Crimean Khanate and cut off their slave trade, which increased the demand for Circassian women in Near Eastern harems; and the 1860s, when the Russians massacred thousands of Circassians and conquered Circassia. Of course, back in Powerss American homeland, what was most on the publics mind when the sculpture went on tour there was the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act. The imperial harem was famous for the extraordinary beauty of its maids, who were considered the most attractive in the Turkish-Ottoman Empire. Blumenbach theorised that the Circassians were the closest to God's original model of humanity, and thus "the purest and most beautiful whites were the Circassians". The combination of the popular issues of slavery, the Orient, racial ideology, and sexual titillation gave the reports of Circassian women sufficient notoriety at the time that the circus leader P. T. Barnum decided to capitalize on this interest. I found a name, inscribed inpencil more than 130 years agoon the back of the photograph, Zublia Aggolia, and a title, Circassian Lady. Even today, I still know nothing about Zublia herself apart from her name, and even that is not what it seems. Our choices about language are never just private. The max they could do is steal children from Caucasus and make fight . [20][21], Similar descriptions of the Circassian women appear in Florence Nightingale's travel journal where Nightingale called Circassians "the most graceful and the most sensual-looking creatures I ever saw". The Circassians With The Most Beautiful Women In The World There are folk songs in various languages throughout the Middle East and the Balkan peninsula that describe the superior appearance of Circassian girls. Whiteness, then, might be seen as no longer a guarantee of liberty and mastery, and so the prospect of the Circassian Lady offered the subtle thrills of danger and ambiguity. By the early nineteenth century, Circassians were associated with theories of racial hierarchy, which elevated the Caucasus region as the source of the purest examples of the "white race", which was named the Caucasian race after the area by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Racial theories of the mid 19th century held that the people living in the Circassian mountains near the Black Sea were examples of the "purest stock" of the Caucasian race. The charm was not limited to the Middle East, Cosimo de Medici (ruler of Florence from 1429 to 1464) had an illegitimate son with a slave bought in Venice who was said to be Circassian. Long before this Diaspora, and for some time after it, these Circassians occupied an unusual place in the collective imagination of Europeans, Americans and Turks. The Circassian blended elements of white Victorian True Womanhood with traits of the enslaved African American woman in one curiosity. 16 Barnum, in his autobiography, says little about what followed, except that Greenwood disguised himself as a slave-buyer and saw "a large number of Circassian girls and women" in . Emily Jean "Emma" Stone was born on November 6, 1988 in Scottsdale, Arizona to Krista Jean Stone (ne Yeager), a homemaker & Jeffrey Charles "Jeff" Stone, a contracting company founder and CEO. Hailing from the North Caucasus and the northeastern Black Sea coast, Circassians are an ethnic group historically famous for their alluring females. [19], Regarding one of her half-sisters who was also from a Circassian mother, Princess Ruete of Zanzibar mentions that "The daughter of a Circassian was a dazzling beauty with the complexion of a German blonde. 0 Ratings 0 Want to read; 0 Currently reading; 0 Have read; Not in Library. Many postcards of Circassians also circulated. This is confirmed by the portrayal of other types in the circus sideshows of the period, such as this Egyptian (another performed persona): So here we land in yet another seeming paradox: the putatively purest, most primordial, most beautiful form of the white race, the Circassian, is constructed to share, however subtly, its signature featurea wild mane of hairwith Africans. Mine Tugay (born July 28, 1978, Istanbul, Turkey) - Turkish actress. Aslihan Gurbuz (born February 16, 1983, Chanakkala, Turkey) - actress. Why the Circassian Lady as the title for this particular type of circus performer? The US Internal Revenue stamps on the back of each image were required on photographs by law, from August 1864 to August 1866, to raise funds for the Civil War. The idea of a woman being at the sexual mercy of her owner was not foreign to the imagination of the white public at the time in the United States, but Powerss statue of a naked white woman alluded only indirectly (and perhaps for that reason in the only way then publicly possible) to the fate of many enslaved black women: it was a well-known but largely unspoken fact that slave owners in the United States often entered into sexual relationships with their enslaved women, relationships that involved a range of coercion, almost all of which we would classify as rape today. Daguerreotype of a "Circassian beauty" by Matthew Brady, New York, circa 1861. African women were routinely portrayed as sexually lascivious, and therefore in some sense willing and complicit in their sexual exploitation. Francis Davis Millet depicted Circassian women during his 1877 coverage of the Russo-Turkish war, specifying local costume and hairstyle. "[24], During the 19th century, various Western intellectuals offered pseudoscientific explanations for the light complexion present among Circassians. Circassia is a mountainous region on the northeast shore of the Black Sea in the Caucasus (see the map below, with the close-up of Circassia in green). by Gregory Fried Published March 15, 2013*. Heres a newspaper clipping from the Edinburg Daily Courier, and is dated October 29, 1938. [9] Mark Twain reported in The Innocents Abroad (1869) that "Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople, but not publicly. What do Chechen and Circassian girls generally look like? "So even if you don't know that a word highlighted like this _____ denotes sarcasm, the context should have given it away. As such, Greece became a symbol of republican liberty against corrupt tyranny. It would be impossible to paint more charming visages, or better figures, than those of the Georgians (Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 269). Yes, I think you would.Time to face some unpleasant facts, Khanhyou simply do not possess the global cultural awareness needed to run a website of this type effectively.Your users have been telling you this, you have been ignoring them, and they have been abandoning your site as a result.This is a very good example of why that is.Do yourself a favor, and learn from it. [40] Barnum also produced a booklet about another of his Circassians, Zoe Meleke, who was portrayed as an ideally beautiful and refined woman who had escaped a life of sexual slavery.