Guest Lecture, North American Literary and Cultural Studies / Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Prof. Wendy Sutherland, New College of Florida

"Staging Blackness and the Construction of Whiteness in 18th- and Early 19th-Century German Bourgeois Drama"

Thursday, 24 June 2010, 16:00

Campus B3 1, Großer Sitzungssaal

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This lecture analyzes the German bourgeois drama from a new perspective by “racing” the genre and locating both racial and class hierarchies within it. I argue that the German bourgeois drama, in presenting the racial and class other, constructs a bourgeois value system that is “German” at a time when there was no German nation to speak of. “Germanness”, a construction itself, was in one sense, an intellectual construction and in another, a collection of regional identities. I work to show how the German bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century fits in with the seminal ideas concerning German identity and self.