ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes how the colonial goods are used as stage properties in Karl Gotthelf Lessing's Die Mätresse (The Mistress), a bourgeois drama set in Prussia during the reign of King Friedrich II of Prussia. It then looks at how eighteenth-century portraiture uses the Black as an essential prop in constructing the white self. The chapter also looks at the overlooked, the repression of slavery, that is, the invisibility of slave labor embedded in the cultivation and production of colonial goods consumed in Europe as presented in eighteenth-century German bourgeois drama and its depiction of the Prussian table. It shows how the material culture of slavery manifests itself metonymically on the table in eighteenth-century Prussian daily life. These "stage properties" highlight the staging of blackness and performance of whiteness itself, both carefully constructed to depict and replicate the trope of the master-slave dichotomy, where a "domestication of difference" is achieved, but the exotic is simultaneously retained.