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.

Wendy Sutherland is Associate Professor of German at New College of Florida, USA.

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 Mÿtresse (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.