Repertoires of Slavery: Dutch Theater Between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810 

Speaker: Sarah J. Adams, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ghent and Antwerp University
Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, Dutch Studies, Center for African Studies, Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, BENELUX Studies Program, Black Studies Collaboratory
Sarah J. Adams presents her forthcoming book Repertoires of Slavery: Dutch Theater Between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810 (Amsterdam University Press, Spring 2023). Through the lens of a hitherto unstudied repertoire of Dutch abolitionist theater productions, the study pries open the conflicting ideological functions of antislavery discourse within and outside the walls of the theater and examines the ways in which abolitionist protesters wielded the strife-ridden question of slavery to negotiate the meanings of human rights, subjecthood, and subjection. The book explores how dramatic visions of antislavery provided a site for (re)mediating a white metropolitan-and at times a specifically Dutch-identity. It offers insight into the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century theatrical modes, tropes, and scenarios of racialized subjection and considers them as materials of the “Dutch cultural archive,” or the Dutch “reservoir” of sentiments, knowledge, fantasies, and beliefs about race and slavery that have shaped the dominant sense of the Dutch self up to the present day.