Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So and Roy Moodley, eds Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance

Opera in a Multicultural World is a collection of essays that takes ‘multicultural representations of European operatic genres’ (1) in its purview. Edited by three Canadian scholars, Ingraham, So and Moodley, it forms part of the Routledge Research in Music series that approaches research on music from a variety of angles, including neuroscience, identity, film, gender, technology and popular music. Within opera studies more specifically, this book finds itself in the company of a burgeoning collection of publications that focuses on opera on the margins of mainstream composition and production. Such publications include Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures (edited by Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson, 2011), Blackness in Opera (edited by Naomi Andre, Karen Bryan, and Eric Saylor, 2012), and ‘New Voices in Black South African Opera’, in African Studies (convened by Naomi Andre, Donato Somma, and Innocentia Mhlambi, 2016). In fact, this edition of African Theatre adds to a field of scholarship where the focus moves to opera production on the periphery, investigating how opera might be re-imagined in contexts away from its Western centre and how (if at all) it talks back to that centre. The contributions in Opera in a Multicultural World predominantly explore the manifestation of the ‘racial other’ in canonic opera production and composition, with two chapters touching on the use of jazz as opera's ‘musical other’, in its composition. The former largely concerns the way in which members of communities other than white (Christian) Europeans – in this book pertaining mainly to African American, Jewish and Chinese characters – are represented in historical and contemporary opera, as well as reportage on the lived experiences of singers of colour in canonical opera performance. The way in which cultures other than European find their voices in the genre also receives some attention. Geographically and culturally, the book covers Europe, North America and China, and most examples come from the operatic canon from the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, with Wagner, as usual, receiving a large portion of attention.

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