Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Dutch Politics, the Slavery-Based Economy, and Theatrical Culture in 1800
- 2 Suffering Victims: Slavery, Sympathy, and White Self-Glorification
- 3 Contented Fools: Ridiculing and Re-Commercializing Slavery
- 4 Black Rebels: Slavery, Human Rights, and the Legitimacy of Resistance
- 5 Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Appendix
- Index
4 - Black Rebels: Slavery, Human Rights, and the Legitimacy of Resistance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2023
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Dutch Politics, the Slavery-Based Economy, and Theatrical Culture in 1800
- 2 Suffering Victims: Slavery, Sympathy, and White Self-Glorification
- 3 Contented Fools: Ridiculing and Re-Commercializing Slavery
- 4 Black Rebels: Slavery, Human Rights, and the Legitimacy of Resistance
- 5 Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Appendix
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter considers blackface characters who challenged their subjection. Stage representations of slave-led resistance directly responded to the rebellions in the Atlantic orbit and metropolitan anxieties about retributive violence. Analyzing the blackface rebels and ideological assertions in Monzongo, De blanke en de zwarte, and De verlossing der slaaven demonstrates that the orchestrated revolts against slavery and human rights violations are portrayed as brutal and ineffective—if they are staged and considered at all. Following Michel Trouillot’s observations about the “unthinkability” of the Haitian Revolution, this chapter argues that dramatists, thespians, and audiences trivialized and erased non-white forms of redress by recasting these characters’ revolts to make sense to the white-dominant order and by utilizing Afro-diasporic people’s struggle to imagine their own fight for (political) liberty.
Keywords: slave-led resistance, human rights, Haitian Revolution, silencing, Batavian Revolution, white supremacy
Written in 1774, Nicolaas Simon van Winter’s Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf was the most popular antislavery production staged across the Netherlands until well into the nineteenth century. In a sentimental preface, van Winter attests that he created the tragedy in response to the nearly successful slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice in 1763. He had been particularly shocked by the brutal ways in which the rebellion’s leaders were hanged, burnt alive, or tortured on the rack once the revolt was rooted out, and by the apathetic news coverage of the events in the Dutch metropole. With Monzongo, van Winter hoped “to show [his compatriots] the brutalities of slavery; let them hear the voice of humanity and natural law, and elicit sympathy.” Despite its explicit and stirring preface, however, Monzongo is not set in Berbice and does not address the excesses of the transatlantic slavery system. Instead, it stages an insurrection plotted by the enslaved king of Veragua (today’s Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama), Monzongo, against his Spanish oppressor in early-sixteenth-century Mexico.
There were good reasons for van Winter to opt for a distant episode of colonialism in preference to staging a direct critique of the wrongs in the Dutch Atlantic. First, van Winter himself was engaged in the slavery-based trade as a merchant and shareholder of the Amsterdam company Jacob Muhl & van Winter, which marketed Campeche wood and indigo from Honduras and Curaçao.
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- Information
- Repertoires of SlaveryDutch Theater between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810, pp. 155 - 202Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023