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.
Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870
Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany's colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies - a kind of colonialism without colonies - in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of 'Germans' with 'natives' in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth- century literature, and shows how these colonial fantasies acted as a rehearsal for actual colonial ventures in Africa, South America, and the Pacific. From as early as the sixteenth century, Germans preoccupied themselves with an imaginary drive for colonial conquest and possession that eventually grew into a collective obsession. Zantop illustrates the gendered character of Germany's colonial imagination through critical readings of popular novels, plays, and travel literature that imagine sexual conquest and surrender in colonial territory - or love and blissful domestic relations between coloniser and colonised. She looks at scientific articles, philosophical essays, and political pamphlets that helped create a racist colonial discourse and demonstrates that from its earliest manifestations, the German colonial imagination contained ideas about a specifically German national identity, different from, if not superior to, most others. For its thoughtful investigation into the role of imaginary configurations and libidinal projections in the making of social and political communities, "Colonial Fantasies" will interest historians, literary theorists, and cultural critics as well as a range of students and scholars interested in nationalism, imperialism, and the political unconscious.
Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865
Throughout this important volume, the author underscores two vital themes: one, that visual presentation of slavery in England and America has been utterly dishonest to its subject, and the other a meditation on whether the ruptures of the slave experience - middle passage, bondage, and torture -- can be adequately represented and remembered.