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

buir.contributor.authorDel Balzo, Angelina Marie
buir.contributor.orcidDel Balzo, Angelina Marie|0000-0003-4375-5828
dc.citation.epage23
dc.citation.issueNumber3
dc.citation.spage7
dc.citation.volumeNumber48
dc.contributor.authorDel Balzo, Angelina Marie
dc.date.accessioned2025-02-26T11:26:11Z
dc.date.available2025-02-26T11:26:11Z
dc.date.issued2024-09-01
dc.departmentProgram in Cultures, Civilization and Ideas
dc.description.abstractThis 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.
dc.identifier.doi10.1215/00982601-11309281
dc.identifier.eissn1086-3192
dc.identifier.issn0098-2601
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/11693/116867
dc.language.isoEnglish
dc.publisherDuke University Press
dc.relation.isversionofhttps://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00982601-11309281
dc.rightsCC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International Deed)
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.source.titleEighteenth-Century Life
dc.subjectTragedy
dc.subjectOttoman
dc.subjectImperialism
dc.subjectActresses
dc.subjectSlavery
dc.subjectOroonoko
dc.titleMaking whiteness visible: Slavery and oriental she-tragedy in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1696)
dc.typeArticle

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