文章基本信息

标题：Beautiful Black Soul? The Racial Matrix of White Aesthetics (Reading Kotzebue against Kleist)
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作者：Sigrid G. Köhler
期刊名称：Image & Narrative
印刷版ISSN：1780-678X
出版年度：2013
卷号：14
期号：3
页码：34-45
语种：English
出版社：Image & Narrative
摘要：Racism is not a modern phenomenon. The amalgamation of anthropology and aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, however, led to a very specific inscription of the racial matrix into modern European epistemology. Not least responsible for this was the power of the imagination – that is to say the faculty by which the particular images that produce and transport racist stereotypes are generated. Ensuing from the abolition movement and the debate on slavery, the texts of Kleist and Kotzebue take very different positions in their literary treatment of this context. On the one hand, Kleist’s novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in St. Domingo) reflects the production of racist images so radically that the aesthetic transgression of the racial matrix becomes impossible, as a consequence denying the possibility of a common imaginary and of common imaginations. On the other hand, with explicit reference to the arguments of the abolition debate, Kotzebue’s theatre play Die Negersclaven (The Negro slaves) assumes the postulate of equality of all people for all its characters, both black and white, even applying this postulate to aesthetic ideals with the effect that (in contrast to Kleist’s Toni) the slave Ada in Kotzebue’s play is described as a ‘beautiful soul’ – but only within the aesthetic frame of the bourgeois drama based on emotion, as such rendering a transgression which, nonetheless, remains fictional.
关键词：race; aesthetics and anthropology around 1800; ‘Bildung’; power of imagination; beautiful soul; Heinrich von Kleist; August von Kotzebue