Reverberations of Empire? Opera in the Contexts of (De)Colonial and Postcolonial Thought

Abstract

The title of this inaugural issue was directly inspired by the range of submissions we received. Our contributors, whose pieces range from traditional scholarly articles to reflective essays by practitioners, revealed that opera’s colonial entanglements and (de)colonial reverberations cannot be confined to a single conceptual framework. The initial call for submissions foregrounded “de/coloniality“, but the breadth of perspectives led us to adopt the broader title “Reverberations of Empire? Opera in the Context of (De)Colonial and Postcolonial Thought”. This revised title acknowledges the diversity of approaches in the issue and emphasises the productive tensions between critique, practice, and historical legacy that define this field. Accordingly, the issue is conceived as a forum for reflection, collaboration, and critique. It provides a platform for voices that unsettle, reimagine, and recompose what opera and music theatre can mean in the wake of empire, moving between postcolonial reflection and decolonial re-imagining. The project builds on recent critical studies of Eurocentric music theatre and foundational works on Black opera, race, and cultural identity, while pushing those conversations into newer territory.

The contributions in this first issue can be understood as performing postcolonial or decolonial gestures in dialogue with one another – often resonating in productive friction rather than in unanimity. Together, they occupy in-between spaces: between what Diana Taylor would call “the archive and the repertoire”, between listening and voicing, between institutionalised structures and fluid formats, between myth and memory.[It is precisely in the contexts of opera and music theatre as spaces of knowledge, representation, and memory that colonial and decolonial narratives are performed, heard, negotiated, and overwritten.