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.
Exploring race and gender in Anna Seghers’s “The Reintroduction of Slavery in Guadeloupe”
ABSTRACT After having spent several years in exile in Mexico during World War II, in 1949 German Jewish author Anna Seghers published two novellas set in the Caribbean during the time of transatlantic slavery. In this essay, through an investigation of the novella “Wiedereinführung der Sklaverei in Guadeloupe” (“The Reintroduction of Slavery in Guadeloupe”), I question what Seghers’s portrayal of differently gendered and raced characters says about her argument about revolutionary politics. In general, socialists have long been criticized for their tendency to downplay racism as simply a by-effect that would be eliminated with capitalism. In this regard, Seghers seems to differ; rather than overlooking or downplaying race, “The Reintroduction of Slavery in Guadeloupe” has indeed been praised for demonstrating cross-racial solidarity embodied in its white, mulatto, and black male protagonists. As an author who had been active in socialist political circles since the 1920s and who settled in the Soviet-occupied zone upon returning to Germany from exile in 1947, Seghers’s interest in minority struggles and postcolonial issues is not surprising. However, I find this claim to cross-racial solidarity in Seghers’s text problematic; I will demonstrate my intervention with the story’s representation of its female characters. I argue that while the dark-skinned black women of the story are portrayed positively as having revolutionary potential, white and mulatto women are depicted as apolitical, bourgeois, and merely inhibitions to their male partners’ political activity. By allowing her white and mulatto female characters this passivity, Seghers’s attempt at a postcolonial narrative that encourages readers in socialist East Germany to view their colonial legacy more critically ultimately fails, in part because of the binaries and borders she maintains between women.
Ideological Quietism? Ideology and Party Politics in Britain
Ideology and political parties are frequently depicted as disparate entities, with scholars citing a range of exogenous and endogenous changes to demonstrate the decreasing relevance of ideology to party politics. This article moves away from such accounts by looking at the role of actors, and specifically party leaders, in contributing to perceptions of ideological decline. Through an examination of the rhetoric of Labour and Conservative Party leaders in Britain between 1946 and 1997, this article contends that politicians have engaged in, what is termed here, ‘ideological quietism’. In this sense, parties have not abandoned ideology but have made rhetorical shifts indicative of ideological decline.