Description

Scenarios of Subjection: Performed Colonial Knowledge in the Dutch Harlequinade of 1800

Dr. Sarah J. Adams

Dutch imperial ideologies and discourses are overwhelmingly studied through linguistic sources and methods. However, scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Diana Taylor, and Gloria Wekker argue that colonial knowledge is often embodied and therefore better traceable outside the walls of text-driven archives. This talk will discuss the performed knowledge of colonialism and race that is produced and promoted in two popular eighteenth-century harlequinades: Willem van der Hoeven’s farce Arlequin, tovenaar en barbier (1730) and Jean Rochefort’s pantomime Arlequin uit slaverny verlost door toverkunst (1803). The performative scenarios provided for their black-masked and comic protagonist, I will argue, repeated and transformed over time and continue to shape embodied colonial traditions such as Black Pete today.

Sarah J. Adams is a postdoctoral FWO-fellow at the Department of Literature. Her work centers around popular blackface cultures in the (early) modern Low Countries.