Predicaments of Coloniality, or, Opera Studies Goes Ethno

Pistorius, Juliana. 2019. ‘Predicaments of Coloniality, or, Opera Studies Goes Ethno’. Music & Letters 100(3), 529-539. 

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OVER THE PAST DECADE OR SO, opera scholarship has enjoyed a remarkable expansion of both geographical and disciplinary territory. The result, articulated in such volumes as Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson’s Opera Indigene (2011),¹ Naomi André, Karen Bryan, and Eric Saylor’s Blackness in Opera (2012),² and the three texts under consideration here, has been a valuable proliferation of perspectives and methodologies. Engaging repertories, voices, and spaces until recently unaccounted for in opera scholarship, these studies have examined opera not merely as artefact, but as a site for contemporary social and political meaning-making.

The turn towards supposedly peripheral operatic cultures, however, appears to have reinforced a disciplinary distinction between opera scholarship’s mainstream and its others. In what resembles the divide between ethnomusicology and musicology, studies of operatic activity located outside the deracialized canons of the West seem to have been relegated (and, occasionally, self-sequestered) to a disciplinary dust bowl. For a field as fundamentally interdisciplinary as opera studies, the paradox is glaring. Moreover, as the three books discussed here show, the division is neither necessary nor productive.