“In Our Raven-Like Body … Blooms a Heart as White as a Lily”

Abstract This essay explores imaginings of blackness in early modern German court festivals through sonic, kinetic, and visual media. Based on my analysis of festival descriptions, illustrations in festival books, and notated music, I ask how sonic and performative components such as music and dance as well as visual elements, especially clothing and black-up techniques, were employed to construct sub-Saharan Africans as racialized Others. These multi-media imaginings of sub-Saharan Africans were designed to affirm racial hierarchies by discursive strategies of generalization and denigration, and by blurring boundaries between human beings and animals – strategies of race-making that demonstrate that Germany around 1600 was by no means a political and cultural backwater but participated in racial discourses representative of Europe’s leading colonial powers – Spain, France, and England.