ODSECS 13: Angelina Del Balzo скачать в хорошем качестве

ODSECS 13: Angelina Del Balzo

Eighteenth-Century Tragedy and the Formation of Whiteness The rise of the actress in English-language theater is inextricable with the development of “whiteness” over the course of the eighteenth century, with the first unnamed actress to perform appearing as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello (1604). Tragedy centered on the deaths of white women were central to British theater even as tragic Black women were omitted or erased. Famously, in Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of Oroonoko (1696), Aphra Behn’s enslaved African Imoinda became a white woman. While the connection between Oroonoko and Othello has been central to scholarly debates around race and the eighteenth-century stage, focusing on the male leads, contemporary spectators and critics frequently linked the latter to Aaron Hill’s wildly popular Tragedy of Zara (1735), which sits at the intersection of she- and Oriental tragedy. Centering on the suffering of a young Christian slave in love with the Sultan, Zara features the Desdemona/Imoinda character as the lead, caught between competing loyalties that ends with death by her husband’s hand. Hill’s reworking of these texts as she-tragedy points to the ways in which the suffering of white women are integral to their generic construction. But the difference between Zara and the Sultan Osman becomes more coded as racial only with the later revisions to the text in the 1760s by David Garrick, and the play is ambiguous as to whether or not the play invokes miscegenation as do Othello and Oroonoko. This talk will look at how these three tragedies explicitly racialize female pathos as white, and how the stage participated in the eighteenth-century formation of race.