Doing Drag in Blackface

Abstract

This article acknowledges racism and sexism as ethical problems in Grimmelshausen’s novel Courasche. Its charismatic protagonist is not only old and a woman (and therefore arguably a witch), but adds racialised exclusion to her portfolio when she narrates her autobiography in blackface. Here the author interrogates Grimmelshausen’s narratorial masks using Medina’s conception of the infelicitous subject, who has a paradoxical double function: infelicitous subjects simultaneously demonstrate how things should not be done and sow seeds of doubt about the practices and beliefs of the normative economy. Recognising the problem racism and sexism represent in Courasche raises the question whether Grimmelshausen’s engagement with knowledge is conventional or innovative; whether Courasche merely reproduces, or also destabilises, epistemic injustice. Courasche as a protagonist is an exemplar of transgression. But is her transgressive infelicity epistemically constitutive – does it contribute to the creation of new discursive contexts?