Dramas of Race and Ethnicity in Nineteenth Century America

One of the first successful fields of modern American popular culture was the theater of the nineteenth century, which often addressed social and moral issues through melodramatic and sentimental plot structures and sought to attract viewers with extravagant stage sets and spectacular feats of action. Among the most controversial issues dramatized in plays from the Jacksonian Era to the Civil War were the destiny of the Indian population and the rising tensions between North and South over the issue of slavery. Our objective in this course will be to analyze how plays from this era communicated different notions of race and ethnicity to their readers and audiences and thereby participated in the public debates about the social, political, and cultural status of Native Americans and African Americans in the United States. Over the course of the semester, we will read and discuss four plays that deal in various ways with ethnic and racial conceptions of Native American and African Americans: John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), George Aiken’s dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, a Leap for Freedom (1858), and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon; Or, Life in Louisiana (1859). We will also look at a small selection of short blackface minstrel plays which inaugurated long-standing racial and ethnic stock figures and added a comical discourse to the depiction of Native American and African American on the American stage. All reading material will be made available on the course moodle. Seminar für Anglistik Beachten Sie, dass Sie diesen Kurs nach den Prüfungsordnungen ab 2011 nicht besuchen dürfen, wenn Sie die für dieses Modulelement laut Fachspezifischen Bestimmungen und Modulhandbuch notwendigen Voraussetzungen noch nicht erfüllen. Universität Siegen WiSe 2014/15 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stein Daniel