Sarah Smith (married name Bartley) as Imoinda in "Oroonoko"

Sarah Smith (married name Bartley) as Imoinda in "Oroonoko"

Smith, Sarah

Race in the theater

Hawkesworth, John, 1715?-1773

Full-length portrait of Smith in the role of Imoinda. Unlike other adaptations of Oroonoko at the time (including the Hawkesworth version in which Smith is performing), Smith plays in blackface. With arms outstretched and draped with a white scarf, she wears a simple white turban and white gown.

Alais

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rare Book and Manuscript Library

J. Roach

1806

Behn, Aphra, 1640-1689. Oroonoko

Southerne, Thomas. Oroonoko, a tragedy

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JPG

English

Still Image

embta2014-00171

MISS SMITH as IMOINDA Imo. ____ Indians or English: Whoever has me, I am still a slave. Published as the Act directs by J. Roach. Russell Court. Drury Lane June 18, 1806

Secondary Criticism:

"Blackness in the eighteenth century was of course used to characterize persons from the Indies, the Americas, Africa, or the South Pacific; it was also applied to the Irish as a mark of their Celtish origins, and more generally ot the laboring classes, especially coalminers and chimney sweeps. Yet it was not clear how fundamental dark coloring might be." --Felicity A. Nussbaum, "Black women: why Imoinda turns white," The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 151-188. 151.

Engraving