Behn’s White Innocence: Language Politics in the Dutch-Surinamese Translations of Oroonoko (1688)

Abstract

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) has elicited myriad contradictory readings based on its central ideologies about race and slavery. The ambivalence within the novel has made it a popular text to adapt or translate to produce a certain politics. This essay examines two twentieth-century Dutch-Surinamese translations of the novel: H.D. Benjamins’s of 1919 and Albert Helman’s of 1983. I contextualize both translations within each author’s language politics and imperial projects, reading their work through the lens of Gloria Wekker’s notion of “white innocence.” I argue that Benjamins and Helman rely on Behn’s ethnographic authority and her white sentimentalized womanhood to produce an imperialist politics that perpetuates the long-standing myth of the Netherlands as a gentle and benevolent nation. By moving beyond the notorious politicization of Oroonoko during the nineteenth-century abolition movement, this essay sheds new light on how the novel’s ambivalent politics has been manipulated to political ends throughout history.