Staging blackness and performing whiteness in eighteenth-century German drama

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural production, Wendy Sutherland argues that German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, Heinrich von Kleist, and Theodor Körner played a significant role in constructing whiteness.

Situated within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, her book shows 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.