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
2 - Suffering Victims: Slavery, Sympathy, and White Self-Glorification
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 examines enslaved characters as objects of pity for their white counterparts on and off the stage. Three plays I will classify as “bourgeois dramas”—Selico, De negers, and Kraspoekol—exemplify a set of generic strategies employed to inspire Dutch audiences with an antislavery spirit. Dramatists confronted audiences with the wrongs of slavery through moving “slave testimonies” and manifestations of violence that revealed the harsh realities of the slavery systems. One of the most important dramatic conventions was the presence of a white bourgeois hero who alleviated these victims’ plight and whose passionate antislavery speeches drew directly from debates outside the theater. This philanthropic figure was as central to the abolitionist appeal as he was to the reification of white male dominance.
Keywords: bourgeois theater, white hero, sympathy, colonial family, national identity, miscegenation
In his pivotal study on British abolitionist rhetoric, Brycchan Carey sets out the importance of sentimentality in the development of abolitionist thought and political antislavery interventions along genre lines. Central to this type of discourse, also wielded in the Dutch metropole, was “a belief in the power of sympathy to raise awareness of suffering, to change an audience’s view of that suffering, and to direct their opposition to it.” What abolitionist authors had in common was indeed a paramount confidence in the fact that passions and pathos were generally more persuasive than intellectual arguments. Sentimental fiction, as Lynn Hunt has famously argued in Inventing Human Rights, invariably took a stand on the side of victims of sexual oppression, social exclusion, or unjust (colonial) policies, and sought to play upon bourgeois values of compassion and human rights. One literary site where authors pre-eminently drew on audiences’ faculty of fellow- feeling was the theater—a genre that remains remarkably absent from Carey’s and Hunt’s studies. This chapter examines how Dutch thespians, playwrights, and translators invited readers and spectators to sympathize with enslaved Africans and Asians and challenged them to espouse the antislavery cause through a set of genre-typical strategies. It will turn to Adriaan van der Willigen’s Selico (1794), P.G. Witsen Geysbeek’s De negers (1796), and Dirk van Hogendorp’s Kraspoekol, of de slaaverny (1800) to explore the constellation of the enslaved as objects of pity for their white counterparts, both on and off the stage.
- Type
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- Information
- Repertoires of SlaveryDutch Theater between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810, pp. 57 - 106Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023