Staging Blackness and Performing Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century German Drama
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A01=Wendy Sutherland
Author_Wendy Sutherland
Black Slave Labor
Category=ATD
Category=DSB
Category=DSBD
Category=JBSL
Category=NHTQ
Christ Child
colonial discourse analysis
Colonial Goods
Common Language
Court Moor
Danish Colonies
Dutch West India Company
eighteenth-century aesthetics
Emilia Galotti
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Father Daughter Relationship
Fort De Joux
Friedrich II
George III
German Bourgeois Drama
German Enlightenment theatre
German Royal Courts
Ideen Zur Philosophic Der Geschichte
King Friedrich II
Kleist's Novella
Le Fils Naturel
Lessing's Emilia Galotti
moral philosophy education
Moral Whiteness
race representation in German drama
racial identity formation
Seduced Innocence
transatlantic slave trade studies
White Bourgeois
White Space
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780367878986
- Weight: 412g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 12 Dec 2019
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Körner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Körner's play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences. Plays had an important role in educating the rising bourgeois class in morality, Sutherland argues, with fathers and daughters offered as exemplary moral figures in contrast to the depraved aristocracy. At the same time, black female protagonists in nontraditional dramas represent the boundaries of physical beauty and marriage eligibility while also complicating ideas of moral beauty embodied in the concept of the beautiful soul. Her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage grappled with the representation of blackness during the Age of Goethe, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.
Wendy Sutherland is Associate Professor of German at New College of Florida, USA.
