Ada and her Sisters: A Speculative (Character) History

Sharon Dodua Otoo and August von Kotzebue—a Black contemporary writer and a white playwright of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? An unlikely pairing, and yet both partake in a literary history, particularly if their respective choices of a character named Ada are read as a speculative character history. The histories of their Adas and of their literary sisters trace five centuries of the Atlantic world, shaped by colonialism, enslavement, and migration.