An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Dana Van Kooy (Visiting Research Fellow 2022; Michigan Technological University)
Unsettling histories of dispossession in 'Harlequin Highlander, or Sawney Bean’s Cave' (1798)
This work in progress seminar will focus on a newly drafted chapter from my current book project, which is tentatively entitled Contesting PlantationoScenes. As the book’s title suggests, this project draws attention to scenes of the plantation world that were produced and disseminated throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These scenes from the archives of literature, theatrical performances, and the visual arts attest to and witness, oppose, condone, and call upon us to further struggle with and dispute the processes of differentiation and hierarchization that allowed for the exploitation of peoples, lands, labor, and even freedom itself. Throughout each of the book’s chapters I discuss alternative ways of conceptualizing and interpreting racialized assemblages and the histories of disavowal and dispossession associated with the era of planetary crises identified as the Plantationocene.
This chapter examines J.C. Cross’s Harlequin Highlander; or Sawney Bean’s Cave, a pantomime first performed at Jones’s Royal Circus in London on Monday, 11 June 1798. Set in Scotland and featuring the notorious and most likely fictitious sixteenth-century cannibal, Sawney Bean, Harlequin Highlander was a blockbuster hit with 130 successive nights of performance in London before moving to the provincial circuit and traveling to Edinburgh, Manchester, Dublin and points in between. In this period, pantomime proved adept in its ability to stage—animate, reproduce, and reconfigure—colonial relations and colonial landscapes. Harlequin Highlander unsettled colonial intimacies and staged Scotland’s histories of dispossession, which followed in the wake of Culloden and accompanied Scotland’s militarized and capitalist investments in Caribbean plantations. Working at the intersections of queer theory, black studies, environmental humanities, and performance theory, I focus attention on a unique, hand-annotated copy of the pantomime’s Song, Duets, and Choruses held in the collection at the National Library of Scotland and consider how the pantomime’s scenes exhumed and reburied Scotland’s colonial history with England, opened the door further to a tourist economy, and accommodated and adapted racialized assemblages, plantation logics, and imperial geologics.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2