Violent Intimacies: White Counterrevolution and Fears of Miscegenation and Black Rebellion in Kleist's Verlobung in St. Domingo
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Heinrich von Kleist's Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (1811) represents a unique work among contemporary colonial narratives that grapple with the world‐shattering events of the Haitian Revolution. This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the connections between German cultural production and the colonial world, as I reflect on how late‐eighteenth‐century colonial racial capital brought together enslaved Africans and Europeans of various national backgrounds in physical and literary spaces. Through a Black Studies approach, I argue that Kleist's Verlobung offers a valuable reading of the uprising, as it reveals the foundations of racial violence in St. Domingue and the counterrevolutionary position of whiteness as a pan‐European project committed to suppressing anticolonial mass rebellion. While the titular “betrothal” between the protagonists Gustav and Toni fails, I argue that Gustav unwittingly succeeds in upholding the tacit contract to defend whiteness against the threat of Black Revolution in the colonial world.
Source: The German Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/gequ.70024
Author: Will Weihe
Institution: William & Mary
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W7115016600