Making whiteness visible: Slavery and oriental she-tragedy in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1696)

Abstract

This article offers a genre‐based argument for the white Imoinda in Thomas Southerne's stage adaptation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Southerne's adaptation was one of the earliest depictions of plantation slavery on the English stage, and it drew on tropes from the Oriental she‐tragedy's depiction of enslaved European women in the Ottoman Empire. Evoking Desdemona in the then‐popular Othello, Imoinda offers a rare moment when the actress's whiteness is named as such diegetically. The stage Oroonoko shines a spotlight on the way that gendered performance worked through naturalizing white women as the default sympathetic subject for Enlightenment audiences. The dramatic conventions of the Oriental she‐tragedy make this representation of the white Imoinda imaginatively viable, while the dissonance of her character reveals the contradictory nature of race thought in the long eighteenth century.