Die Verlobung in St. Domingo
To conclude, a superficial reading of Die Verlobung presents us with a very traditional colonialist narrative structure and voice, preconditioning us to sympathize with the colonizer over the colonized. A closer reading sees Kleist determine the notion of European colonialism in its historical context as more of a colonialist attitude, based on the general understanding of a series of hierarchies structuring notions of race, morality and humanity amongst others. Kleist seems to offer a critique of the logic of some of these constituent parts of the colonialist attitude, as with Gustav’s stratified aesthetic -moral racism, yet in other instances, as with the notion of colonialism imposing ideas of (European-defined) morality and humanity, there isn’t such a critique. Indeed, one might see a ‘normal iza tion’ of these destructive attitudes in the black characters reflecting the same tendencies. However, this is where Kleist’s most subversive critique comes in to play, as it is in the very equivalence of black and white, colonized and colonizer, that the fundamental notion of hierarchy and difference that underpinned colonial ideology is undermined.
Bibliography
Kleist, Heinrich von, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, Das Bettelweib von Locarno, Der Findling (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2002) Kord, Susanne ‘The Pre -Colonial Imagination: Race and Revolution in the Literature of the Napoleonic Period’, in Un-Civilizing Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias , ed. By Mary Fullbrook (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007) Perraudin, Michael ‘Babekan’s ‘ Brille ’ , and the Rejuvenation of Congo Hoango: A reinterpretation of Kleist’s story of the Haitian Revolution’, Oxford German Studies 20 (1991) Zantop, Susanne ‘Changing Color: Kleist’s ‘ Die Verlobung in St. Domingo ’ and the Discourses of Miscegenation’, in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist , ed. By Bernd Fischer (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2003)
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