“Eighteenth-Century Tragedy and the Formation of Whiteness”

Open Digital Seminar for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ODSECS) [online]
15 July 2021 at 4pm (UK)

One of the darkest legacies of the Enlightenment is the development of modern race categories while the transatlantic slave trade was at its height. As this focus on race formation has become central to research and teaching in the period, texts such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) have taken a more prominent place in scholarship and in the curriculum than ever before. In the eighteenth century itself, however, it was not Behn’s novella but Thomas Southerne’s 1696 stage adaptation that was more widely known; the stage Oroonoko and its adaptation by John Hawkesworth (1759) remained one of the most popular productions well into the nineteenth century. Sourtherne’s most famous change remained in the various revivals and adaptations of his Oroonoko throughout the following century and a half: Imoinda, the enslaved African princess and wife to Oroonoko, becomes a white woman, the daughter of a European who joined the Coramantien court. Given the play’s eventual importance to the history of abolition, Imoinda’s change in race is striking, as Southerne rejects the opportunity for the representation of an enslaved Black woman on stage. The theatrical Imoinda stands as is a well-documented historical impossibility: a white woman enslaved under chattel slavery as practiced in the Americas. But while Oroonoko’s depiction of the contemporary plantation is singular, its formal structure is actually characteristic of tragedy of the period. This talk argues that the generic conventions and dramatic expectations of the Oriental she-tragedy, a popular genre at the time, make this representation of the white Imoinda imaginatively viable, and that the visual dissonance of her character highlights the ongoing and contradictory development of modern race thought in the long eighteenth century.

Past

Project Session (invited speaker), Kathleen Wilson’s Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656-1833

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference
4-6 April 2024
Toronto, ON

“Roxolana in Restoration England and Contemporary Turkey: Performing Imperial History”

International Congress on the Enlightenment
3-7 July 2023
International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”
Rome, Italy

“Oriental She-Tragedy and the Formation of Whiteness”

XVII David Nichol Smith Seminar [Online]
13 Nov.-13 Dec. 2020
ANZSECS, Flinders University, and the University of Adelaide
Adelaide, Australia