Sarah Adams of Ghent University to Speak

Sarah J. Adams is an FWO postdoctoral researcher at the Literary Department of Ghent University. She will speak on The Legitimacy of Resistance in Dutch Abolitionist Theater. This talk will explore the ways in which Dutch authors, thespians, and audiences envisioned slave-led resistance through a comparative examination of Nicolaas Simon van Winter’s infinitely popular tragedy Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf (1774) and the anonymously written De verlossing der slaaven door de Franschen (1794). If slave-led opposition in the Atlantic was viciously curbed by white officials, militias, or colonial policies, it seems that dramatists and spectators alike, despite their antislavery beliefs, disparaged nonwhite protesters and thwarted their role as crucial actors both on and off the (political) stage of 1800. This thwarting contrasted sharply with the violent ways in which the Dutch Patriots sought to overthrow the oligarchic yoke of the Stadtholderate during the Batavian Revolution in the very same decades.

Adams' book, Repertoires of Slavery: Dutch Theater Between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810, will come out with Amsterdam University Press in November 2022. Together with Jenna M. Gibbs and Wendy Sutherland, she is co-editor of Staging Slavery Around 1800: Performances of Colonial Slavery and Race from International Perspectives, contracted with Routledge.

This presentation is cosponsored by the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch and the Center for German and European Studies.

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