1st Edition
Staging Blackness and Performing Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century German Drama
By Wendy Sutherland
Copyright 2016
280 Pages
by
Routledge
272 Pages
by
Routledge
272 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe,... Read more
Contents: Prologue; Introduction; Race in 18th-century Germany; Slavery, colonialism, and the 18th-century global stage; ’Looking at the overlooked’: stage properties and the table in Karl Lessing’s Die Mätresse (1780) excursus: the Court Moor and 18th-century court painting; The construction of whiteness in 18th-century bourgeois drama; Race, doubles, and foils: staging blackness in Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler’s Die Mohrinn (1801); Race, homosocial desire, and the black in Ernst Lorenz Rathlef’s Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg (1775); Reading in the dark? Racial hierarchy and miscegenation in Heinrich von Kleist’s 'Die Verlobung in St. Domingo' (1811) and Theodor Körner’s Toni (1812); Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Wendy Sutherland is Associate Professor of German at New College of Florida, USA.
‘A sophisticated and perceptive investigation of a significant yet somewhat neglected body of German literature that brings to light racial tensions and colonial issues implied in the seemingly closed world of "domestic" middle-class works.’
Karl S. Guthke, Harvard University, USA
