Staging blackness and performing whiteness in eighteenth-century German drama

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Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural production, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of blackness in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of the white bourgeois German self. Sutherland argues that German bourgeois dramas, such as those by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, Theodor Körner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Körner's play was based) played a significant role in constructing whiteness by using the black female protagonist to set the boundaries of physical beauty while complicating ideas of moral beauty. Situated within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage engaged with the representation of blackness, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.