Performing Il/legibility Staging Miscegenation in Oroonoko and Inkle and Yarico on the late Eighteenth-Century Stage

Abstract

This chapter explores the late eighteenth-century performance histories of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695) and George Colman the Younger’s Inkle and Yarico (1787), which dramatized ambiguous characterizations directly influenced by colonial incursions in the Americas and British culpability in the slave trade. I focus on the heroines, Imoinda in Oroonoko and Yarico of Inkle and Yarico, in scenes and theatrical illustrations that gestured to a history of interracial relations in colonial regions. The cultural and aesthetic configurations of Imoinda and Yarico in the context of the transatlantic foreground the inconsistent and conflicting range of meanings embedded in that expression in its accretion of confused racialized identities in and across transatlantic cultural sites. In this exchange, moreover, economic benefits of the slave trade and plantation enslavement were adumbrated by fears of racial contamination from colonial encounter, fears made manifest in miscegenated bodies, which were also, conflictingly a source of fascination and desire.