Mirroring Zambo in an Atlantic context: the open wound of slavery in Gottfried Keller's Don Correa (1881)
Abstract This article analyzes Gottfried Keller's story Don Correa from the classic German novella-cycle Das Sinngedicht (The Epigram, 1881) in an Atlantic context. Using Walter Benjamin's concept of “mirroring” as a theoretical framework, the article “mirrors” Don Correa's Angolan slave Zambo in three different cultural and political settings: “Where Africa Mirrors Latin America” focuses on the prominent role of the Jesuits in Don Correa and connects the fate of African slaves with that of Amerindians, “Where Female Mirrors Male” focuses on the topic of transvestitism and connects the legendary Queen Nzinga to Keller's predilection for gender crossing, and “Where Black Mirrors White” focuses on the debate on slavery in Keller's native Switzerland during the time when the novel was written. These three “mirrors” provide new insights into the cultural and historical context to which Don Correa refers and the debate on transatlantic slavery during Keller's lifetime. This approach challenges the general assumption that Das Sinngedicht is one of the few works by Keller without reflection on concrete historical and/or political problems. By interpreting the story alongside research and debates on cultural and historical issues in the Atlantic world, it reveals a series of connections that have remained unnoticed in the existing scholarship. It shows how Atlantic studies allows new perspectives on classic literary works, even if those works originated in a cultural context that does not seem to have a direct relationship to slavery and colonialism.
SLAVERY: ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT (2013)
For 2013, the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, notes and articles in scholarly periodicals, substantial reviews and review essays, conference papers, and chapters in edited volumes and Festschriften focused primarily on slavery or slave trading. Scholarly materials in electronic media, as well as some audio and visual, are also mentioned. Readers unfamiliar with other technical aspects of the presentation may refer to the notes introducing previous supplements in this journal. The bibliography does not include materials on slavery found in writings focused on other subjects, e.g. Spanish administrative practice, the history of sugar, urban or agricultural history, race relations, or the Roman family. Specialists in every field will therefore not find recognized contributions to knowledge of the subject presented in the context of the broader scholarship in their areas – perhaps, and precisely for that reason often among the more significant works in their fields. It is on such specialists, and the references to such related studies that they provide in their own works, that the bibliography ultimately depends. We aim here to cover the literature at a level that gives readers full access to all scholarly literature on slavery within a single additional research step. Full bibliographic references to edited collections of essays and conference proceedings appear under editors’ names or, lacking an editor, under titles, with cross references to their contents under the names of contributing authors in sections of the bibliography specific to their separate topics and different from the placing of the volume as a whole. The corresponding individual entries provide short-title references to the full collective entry. Republished works listed in previous supplements in their original forms are listed under a short reference to the original title, with details of subsequent appearances following. Slavery & Abolition, 2014 Vol. 35, No. 4, 681–781, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.972027
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
As this is a time of great anxiety and distress among you, on account of the infringement not only of your Charter rights; but of the natural rights and privileges of freeborn men, permit a poor, though freeborn African, who, in his youth, was trapanned into Slavery, and who has born the galling yoke of bondage for more than twenty years; though at last, by the blessing of God, has shaken it off, to tell you, and that from experience, that as Slavery is the greatest, and consequently most to be dreaded, of all temporal calamities: So its opposite, Liberty, is the greatest temporal good with which you can be blest!