Exploring race and gender in Anna Seghers’s “The Reintroduction of Slavery in Guadeloupe”

Abstract

ABSTRACTAfter having spent several years in exile in Mexico during World War II, in 1949 German Jewish author Anna Seghers published two novellas set in the Caribbean during the time of transatlantic slavery. In this essay, through an investigation of the novella “Wiedereinführung der Sklaverei in Guadeloupe” (“The Reintroduction of Slavery in Guadeloupe”), I question what Seghers’s portrayal of differently gendered and raced characters says about her argument about revolutionary politics. In general, socialists have long been criticized for their tendency to downplay racism as simply a by-effect that would be eliminated with capitalism. In this regard, Seghers seems to differ; rather than overlooking or downplaying race, “The Reintroduction of Slavery in Guadeloupe” has indeed been praised for demonstrating cross-racial solidarity embodied in its white, mulatto, and black male protagonists. As an author who had been active in socialist political circles since the 1920s and who settled in the Soviet-occupied zone upon returning to Germany from exile in 1947, Seghers’s interest in minority struggles and postcolonial issues is not surprising. However, I find this claim to cross-racial solidarity in Seghers’s text problematic; I will demonstrate my intervention with the story’s representation of its female characters. I argue that while the dark-skinned black women of the story are portrayed positively as having revolutionary potential, white and mulatto women are depicted as apolitical, bourgeois, and merely inhibitions to their male partners’ political activity. By allowing her white and mulatto female characters this passivity, Seghers’s attempt at a postcolonial narrative that encourages readers in socialist East Germany to view their colonial legacy more critically ultimately fails, in part because of the binaries and borders she maintains between women.