African and African European characters in Bredero’s early 17th-century plays

This article explores a chapter of the Dutch ‘black archives’: the presence of fictional African and African European characters – a man, a woman, and a child, on stage and in staged narratives – and the construction of the African(ist) Other and blackness in two plays (Moortje and Spaanschen Brabander) by canonic playwright G.A. Bredero. These plays were successfully staged and printed in Amsterdam during the second decade of the 17th century, at a time when the Dutch transoceanic trades were rapidly expanding and some African Europeans appeared in the city of Amsterdam. The powerful medium of theatre reflected on that and contributed to topical discussions about dealing with racial, ethnic, and gender differences. Bredero’s plays thematized the process of racialization in highly ambivalent ways and engaged with the discourse on the legitimation of enslavement and slave trade – a discourse that was not completely stabilized yet.