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.