• Digital text corpus indexing with Nodegoat.
• New publication: Nesselrode zu Hugenpoet: Zamor und Zoraide. Ein Schauspiel in drey Aufzügen (1778), with an afterword and edited by Sigrid G. Köhler und Julia Rebholz (Wehrhahn Verlag, 2025).

Ziméo and Oroonoko are fictional Black characters that appear in 18th century European literature through stories, plays and poems. More than 60 translations and adaptations can be traced for this period, almost 30 of them in German-language literature alone. The story told through these two characters is one of resistance, namely the struggle of these Black actors against the contemporary slavery plantation system in the Caribbean. Apart from colonialism, enslavement and a right to resistance based on natural law, the texts also address the legitimacy of a capitalist world of consumption which is brought about by globalization. At the same time, questions of the anthropological, political, and legal equality of people, respectively their cultural, religious, and ‘racial’ differences are also raised and negotiated by the texts. The aim of this three-year project is to show how German-language literature participates in transnational debates about the globalization of the contemporary transatlantic world. What is more, it aims to show how literary texts thereby reflect their knowledge of a ‘German’ involvement in the global world and in its spaces of trade, communication, and culture. In an overarching perspective, the project then also examines the relationship between canonized and popular literature in the 18th century with regard to their treatment of contemporary history as global history. That this happens in the mode of and through practices of translation and adaptation shows how central these are to the mediation of world knowledge in a world that is increasingly perceived as global and diverse. This does not mean, however, that the texts are free of racism, exoticism, or Eurocentrism. Through their contradictions and paradoxes, the texts document the critical examination of the aforementioned topics and questions and they attempt, within the framework of cultural-historical discourses and narratives, to reflect and translate them through and into literature.