Read more
Carmen in Diaspora is a cultural history of
Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts. Beginning with Prosper Mérimée's novella and Georges Bizet's opera and continuing through twentieth- and twentieth-first century interpretations in literature, film, and musical theatre, the book explores how opera's most famous character has exceeded the 19th-century French context in which she was created and taken on a life of her own. Through this transformation, the Carmen figure has sparked important conversations not only about French culture and canonical opera but also about Black womanhood, community, and self-determination.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Carmen Is Everywhere
- 1. Carmen in Context: Reframing Prosper Mérimée and Georges Bizet
- 2. "Black Bohemia": Echoes of Carmen in Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay
- 3. Postracial Stardom: Carmen and the Making of Dorothy Dandridge and Beyoncé
- 4. "No more than the others": From the Celestial to the Communal in Karmen Geï and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha
- 5. "The Queen of Havana": National Liberation and Personal Freedom in Carmen la Cubana
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Jennifer M. Wilks is an associate professor of English, African and African Diaspora Studies, and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also directs the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.
Summary
Carmen in Diaspora is a cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts. It explores the phenomenon of the connection between the story of Carmen, which originally appeared in Prosper Mérimée's eponymous 1845 novella and came to prominence through Georges Bizet's 1875 opera, with prolific popular recreations in African diasporic settings. The source texts for Carmen not only suggest nineteenth-century French negotiations of Blackness via the Romani community, but also provide provocative frameworks through which to examine conceptions of Black womanhood and self-determination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through analyses of Mérimée and Bizet, the Harlem Renaissance novels The Blacker the Berry (1929), Banjo (1929), and Romance in Marseille (2020); the U.S. movie musicals Carmen Jones (1954) and Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001); the Senegalese and South African feature films Karmen Geï (2001) and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005), respectively; and the Cuban-set stage musical Carmen la Cubana (2016), Carmen in Diaspora examines how these works illuminate the cultural currents of the nineteenth-century European context in which the character was born. The book also interrogates social categories, particularly gender, race, and sexuality, in contemporary Europe, North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Carmen is Diaspora is an adaptation study that emphasizes connections formed through the transposition rather than imposition of European culture as it considers how artists have brought - and continue to bring - new energy, vision, and life to the story of opera's most famous character.
