Colonialism And Slavery In Performance

Author : Jeffrey M. Leichman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781800348042
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Colonialism and Slavery in Performance written by Jeffrey M. Leichman and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonialism and Slavery in Performance brings together original archival research with recent critical perspectives to argue for the importance of theatrical culture to the understanding of the French Caribbean sugar colonies in the eighteenth century. Fifteen English-language essays from both established and emerging scholars apply insights and methodologies from performance studies and theatre history in order to propose a new understanding of Old Regime culture and identity as a trans-Atlantic continuum that includes the Antillean possessions whose slave labour provided enormous wealth to the metropole. Carefully documented studies of performances in Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous French colony, illustrate how the crucible of a brutally racialized colonial space gave rise to a new French identity by adapting many of the cherished theatrical traditions that colonists imported directly from the mainland, resulting in a Creole performance culture that reflected the strong influence of African practices brought to the islands by plantation slaves. Other essays focus on how European theatregoers reconciled the contradiction inherent in the eighteenth century's progressive embrace of human rights, with an increasing dependence on the economic spoils of slavery, thus illustrating how the stage served as a means to negotiate new tensions within "French" identity, in the metropole as well as in the colonies. In the final section of the volume, essays explore the enduring legacy of the Old Regime in contemporary Antillean stage culture, illustrating how performance traditions continue to structure the understanding of what it means to be French in France's former Atlantic slave colonies.

Author : Jeffrey Leichman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781800857810
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Colonialism and Slavery in Performance written by Jeffrey Leichman and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonialism and Slavery in Performance brings together original archival research with recent critical perspectives to argue for the importance of theatrical culture to the understanding of the French Caribbean sugar colonies in the eighteenth century. Fifteen English-language essays from both established and emerging scholars apply insights and methodologies from performance studies and theatre history in order to propose a new understanding of Old Regime culture and identity as a trans-Atlantic continuum that includes the Antillean possessions whose slave labour provided enormous wealth to the metropole. Carefully documented studies of performances in Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous French colony, illustrate how the crucible of a brutally racialized colonial space gave rise to a new French identity by adapting many of the cherished theatrical traditions that colonists imported directly from the mainland, resulting in a Creole performance culture that reflected the strong influence of African practices brought to the islands by plantation slaves. Other essays focus on how European theatregoers reconciled the contradiction inherent in the eighteenth century's progressive embrace of human rights, with an increasing dependence on the economic spoils of slavery, thus illustrating how the stage served as a means to negotiate new tensions within "French" identity, in the metropole as well as in the colonies. In the final section of the volume, essays explore the place of performance in representations of the Old Regime Antilles, from the Haitian literary diaspora to contemporary performing artists from Martinique and Guadeloupe, as the stage remains central to understanding history and identity in France's former Atlantic slave colonies.Featuring contributions from Sean Anderson, Karine Bénac-Giroux, Bernard Camier, Nadia Chonville, Laurent Dubois, Logan J. Connors, Béatrice Ferrier, Kaiama L. Glover, Jeffrey M. Leichman, Laurence Marie, Pascale Pellerin, Julia Prest, Catherine Ramond, Emily Sahakian, Pierre Saint-Amand, and Fredrik Thomasson. Jeffrey M. Leichman is Jacques Arnaud Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University, where his research and teaching focus on French theatrical literature and culture. He is also project director for the NEH-supported VESPACE project, an international digital humanities collaboration building an interactive VR model of an eighteenth-century Paris Fair theatre. Karine Bénac-Giroux is maîtresse de conférences at Université des Antilles. A specialist in questions of personal identity in 18th century comedy, she has opened a field of research on racial/gender stereotypes in literature and contemporary dance in the West Indies. She is a member of the steering team of the project Matrimoine-Afro-Américano-Caribéen, https://matrimoine.art, and has created several research-creation pieces.

Author : Sarah J. Adams
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000849783
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging Slavery written by Sarah J. Adams and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This international analysis of theatrical case studies illustrates the ways that theater was an arena both of protest and, simultaneously, racist and imperialist exploitations of the colonized and enslaved body. By bringing together performances and discussions of theater culture from various colonial powers and orbits—ranging from Denmark and France to Great Britain and Brazil—this book explores the ways that slavery and hierarchical notions of "race" and "civilization" manifested around the world. At the same time, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the theater was a space that also facilitated reformist protest and served as evidence of the agency of Black people in revolt. Staging Slavery considers the implications of both white-penned productions of race and slavery performed by white actors in blackface makeup and Black counter-theater performances and productions that resisted racist structures, on and off the stage. With unique geographical perspectives, this volume is a useful resource for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the history of theater, nationalism and imperialism, race and slavery, and literature.

Author : Wendy Warren
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1631492152
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America written by Wendy Warren and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editor’s Choice "This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports. And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.

Author : Julia Prest
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9783031226922
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue written by Julia Prest and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This] is an exciting and impressive project that presents the first study of public theatre and slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Prof. Prest brings to bear a remarkable corpus of sources, from notarial records and eyewitness accounts to newspaper adverts, published treatises, and the texts of plays, to advance a series of significant, groundbreaking findings." -Christy Pichichero, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA "'Un-silencing' the enslaved Haitians who built the theaters, changed the scenery, and played the accompaniments, Julia Prest discovers new worlds backstage in the theaters of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue-an exemplary study in the method and imagination required of voicing muted histories." -Joseph Roach, Yale University, Connecticut, USA The French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was home to one of the richest public theatre traditions of the colonial-era Caribbean. This book examines the relationship between public theatre and the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue-something that is generally given short shrift owing to a perceived lack of documentation. Here, a range of materials and methodologies are used to explore pressing questions including the 'mitigated spectatorship' of the enslaved, portrayals of enslaved people in French and Creole repertoire, the contributions of enslaved people to theatre-making, and shifting attitudes during the revolutionary era. The book demonstrates that slavery was no mere backdrop to this portion of theatre history but an integral part of its story. It also helps recover the hidden experiences of some of the enslaved individuals who became entangled in that story. Julia Prest is Professor of French and Caribbean Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. She has published widely on early-modern French and Caribbean theatre, opera and dance, and is the creator of the trilingual (English-French-Kreyòl) Theatre in Saint-Domingue, 1764-1791 performance database: 'theatreinsaintdomingue.org'. She has collaborated with theatre-makers to create new works that bring colonial-era theatre to today's audiences, and her edited collection, Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre: Issues in Research, Writing and Methodology is forthcoming in 2023.

Author : Emily Sahakian
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813940095
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging Creolization written by Emily Sahakian and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-07-17 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization—the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based process, dramatized by French Caribbean women’s plays and enacted through their international production and reception histories. The author contends that the syncretism of the plays is not a static, fixed creole aesthetics but rather a dynamic process of creolization in motion, informed by history and based in the African-derived principle that performance is a space of creativity and transformation that connects past, present, and future.

Author : Natasha Lightfoot
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822375052
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Troubling Freedom written by Natasha Lightfoot and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1834 Antigua became the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to full emancipation. Immediate freedom, however, did not live up to its promise, as it did not guarantee any level of stability or autonomy, and the implementation of new forms of coercion and control made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from slavery. In Troubling Freedom Natasha Lightfoot tells the story of how Antigua's newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation. She presents freedpeople's efforts to form an efficient workforce, acquire property, secure housing, worship, and build independent communities in response to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior and oppression. Despite its continued efforts, Antigua's black population failed to convince whites that its members were worthy of full economic and political inclusion. By highlighting the diverse ways freedpeople defined and created freedom through quotidian acts of survival and occasional uprisings, Lightfoot complicates conceptions of freedom and the general narrative that landlessness was the primary constraint for newly emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.

Author : Julia Prest
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1837644810
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre written by Julia Prest and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting across academic boundaries, this volume brings together scholars from different disciplines who have explored together the richness and complexity of colonial-era Caribbean theatre. The volume offers a series of original essays that showcase individual expertise in light of broader group discussions. Asking how we can research effectively and write responsibly about colonial-era Caribbean theatre today, our primary concern is methodology. Key questions are examined via new research into individual case studies on topics ranging from Cuban blackface, commedia dell’arte in Suriname and Jamaican oratorio to travelling performers and the influence of the military and of enslaved people on theatre in Saint-Domingue. Specifically, we ask what particular methodological challenges we as scholars of colonial-era Caribbean theatre face and what methodological solutions we can find to meet those challenges. Areas addressed include our linguistic limitations in the face of Caribbean multilingualism; issues raised by national, geographical or imperial approaches to the field; the vexed relationship between metropole and colony; and, crucially, gaps in the archive. We also ask what implications our findings have for theatre performance today – a question that has led to the creation of a new work set in a colonial theatre and outlined in the volume’s concluding chapter.

Author : Julia Prest
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031226917
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue written by Julia Prest and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-13 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was home to one of the richest public theatre traditions of the colonial-era Caribbean. This book examines the relationship between public theatre and the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue—something that is generally given short shrift owing to a perceived lack of documentation. Here, a range of materials and methodologies are used to explore pressing questions including the ‘mitigated spectatorship’ of the enslaved, portrayals of enslaved people in French and Creole repertoire, the contributions of enslaved people to theatre-making, and shifting attitudes during the revolutionary era. The book demonstrates that slavery was no mere backdrop to this portion of theatre history but an integral part of its story. It also helps recover the hidden experiences of some of the enslaved individuals who became entangled in that story.

Author : Randy M. Browne
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812294270
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean written by Randy M. Browne and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive. Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death. Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.