Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue

Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue PDF Author: Julia Prest
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783031226939
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"[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.

Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue

Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue PDF Author: Julia Prest
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783031226939
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"[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.

Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue

Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue PDF Author: Julia Prest
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031226917
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
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.

Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre

Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre PDF Author: Julia Prest
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837644810
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
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.

Theater, War and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and its Empire

Theater, War and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and its Empire PDF Author: Logan Connors
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009431218
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The first study of French theater and war at a time of global revolutions, colonial violence, and radical social transformation.

The Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution PDF Author: Toussaint L'Ouverture
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788736575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Toussaint L'Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L'Ouverture's profound contribution to the struggle for equality.

New World Drama

New World Drama PDF Author: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822395738
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous scene of theatre in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to explore the creation of new publics. Moving from England to the Caribbean to the early United States, she traces the theatrical emergence of a collective body in the colonized New World—one that included indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and diasporic Europeans. In the raucous space of the theatre, the contradictions of colonialism loomed large. Foremost among these was the central paradox of modernity: the coexistence of a massive slave economy and a nascent politics of freedom. Audiences in London eagerly watched the royal slave, Oroonoko, tortured on stage, while audiences in Charleston and Kingston were forbidden from watching the same scene. Audiences in Kingston and New York City exuberantly participated in the slaying of Richard III on stage, enacting the rise of the "people," and Native American leaders were enjoined to watch actors in blackface "jump Jim Crow." Dillon argues that the theater served as a "performative commons," staging debates over representation in a political world based on popular sovereignty. Her book is a capacious account of performance, aesthetics, and modernity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Scripts of Blackness

Scripts of Blackness PDF Author: Noémie Ndiaye
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512822647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.

Creole Drama

Creole Drama PDF Author: Juliane Braun
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
The stages of antebellum New Orleans did more than entertain. In the city’s early years, French-speaking residents used the theatre to assert their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty in the face of growing Anglo-American dominance. Beyond local stages, the francophone struggle for cultural survival connected people and places in the early United States, across the American hemisphere, and in the Atlantic world. Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. Juliane Braun draws on the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of documents from both sides of the Atlantic, to explore the ways in which theatre and drama shaped debates about ethnic identity and transnational belonging in the city. Francophone identity united citizens of different social and racial backgrounds, and debates about political representation, slavery, and territorial expansion often played out on stage. Recognizing theatres as sites of cultural exchange that could cross oceans and borders, Creole Drama offers not only a detailed history of francophone theatre in New Orleans but also an account of the surprising ways in which multilingualism and early transnational networks helped create the American nation.

The World of the Haitian Revolution

The World of the Haitian Revolution PDF Author: David Patrick Geggus
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253220173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
These essays deepen our understanding of Haiti during the period from 1791 to 1815. They consider the colony's history and material culture as well as it 'free people of colour' and the events leading up to the revolution and its violent unfolding.

The Allure of the Ancient

The Allure of the Ancient PDF Author: Margaret Geoga
Publisher: Intersections
ISBN: 9789004129320
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
"The Allure of the Ancient investigates how the ancient Middle East was imagined and appropriated for artistic, scholarly, and political purposes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bringing together scholars of the ancient and early modern worlds, the volume approaches reception history from an interdisciplinary perspective, asking how early modern artists and scholars interpreted ancient Middle Eastern civilizations-such as Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia-and how their interpretations were shaped by early modern contexts and concerns. The volume's chapters cross disciplinary boundaries in their explorations of art, philosophy, science, and literature, as well as geographical boundaries, spanning from Europe to the Caribbean to Latin America"--