ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I focused on tracing the route of colonial goods, that is, chocolate, coffee, sugar, and tobacco, from the African slave labor necessary in their production, to their cultivation on plantations in the Americas, and to their journey to the Prussian table. In this chapter, I will analyze how these 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, and then look at how eighteenth-century portraiture uses the Black as an essential prop in constructing the white self. In his book Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Norman Bryson paraphrases Charles Sterling's definition of rhopography as "the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that 'importance' constantly overlooks." 1 Using still life painting, often perceived to be a lower form of art because it depicts scenes from the domestic sphere such as food, the subtext of which presupposes labor in cultivation and production, Bryson shows the significance of these trivial objects in representing and defining the society and class in which they appear. This chapter will also look 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 will show how the material culture of slavery manifests itself metonymically on the table in eighteenth-century Prussian daily life. Far from "lacking importance," colonial goods are central in defining the white European family and society as a whole, especially in Karl Lessing's bourgeois drama, which, like still life painting, does not depict "those things in the world which are great—the legends of the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises in history" 2 as classical tragedy did, but rather presents the family and 88home, that is, the domestic sphere, as the locus of the action, and the bourgeois patriarch as hero.
