The embodiment and ‘refusal’ of the white possessive in opera: a comparative analysis of Louis Riel and Li Keur
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis critically examines representations of Métis leader Louis Riel (1844–1885) in Canadian opera through the theoretical framework of Aileen Moreton-Robinson's logics of white possession. The thesis uses discourse analysis by comparing and contrasting two operas, Louis Riel (1967) and Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North (2023). It highlights the politics of production of each opera and examines the ways in which these cultural productions shape public perception as well as the ways they represent, or resist, the complexity and agency of Indigenous cultures. After an introduction outlining relevant literature and methodology, the thesis’s first chapter examines how Louis Riel perpetuates the logics of white possession. It argues that the opera does so through the intersection of racialization, whiteness, and biopower that disavows Indigenous sovereignty and the power struggles between the politics of production and problematic hegemonic devices that use Riel as a unifying Canadian national identity at a historically important point in Canadian history. Chapter 2 compares Louis Riel with Li Keur to demonstrate how this new opera, when led by Indigenous creators and community members, challenges the logics of white possession, the classical music hierarchy, and masculinist Western-Eurocentric aesthetic by centering Indigenous women, languages, and culture in ways that assert Indigenous sovereignty. Overall, the thesis contends that the white possessive does not need to be an inherent quality in the classical music medium and offers a cautionary discourse for those engaging in musical works on, by, or with Indigenous People.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".