From Plantation to Paradise? Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789 by David M. Powers (review)

The silence at the core of From Plantation to Paradise? resounds all too clearly: among the many documents David Powers surveyed for this project, none inscribes the thoughts or emotions of an enslaved musician. What she examines instead are documents created by those empowered to write and publish, revealing a familiar Janus-faced portrait of these colonial primary sources. On the one hand, we see the rhetoric of enlightened, rational equality; on the other, the realities of segregation and oppression.

In this sense, the question mark in Powers’s title speaks to the underlying cultural tensions that animate her study. From Plantation to Paradise? offers an engaging history of music both as a means of empowerment and as a technology for domination in France’s Caribbean colonies. From this position at the geographic fringes of the French Enlightenment, the profound contradictions of the era can be seen all the more clearly. Yet Powers is concerned less with exposing contradictions than with examining how conflicting ideologies, power structures, and institutions affected the lives and music making of nonwhite musicians in these colonies.

Her focus falls primarily on performers and performances of French opera, a genre long understood in terms of its complex relationship to political power. This study is no exception; Powers sees in opera’s confluence of music and drama not just an entertaining spectacle but a poignant form of political control. Although opera-related documentation from the colonies is scarce (at least compared to what survives from Europe), Powers offers a rich context for her sources, putting them into dialogue with relevant materials from France, and understanding their significance in relation to the political and material realities of life in the colonies.

In the preface, Powers divides her study into two parts. The introduction and chapters 1–2 describe in broad terms the cultural, political, and material circumstances of both slavery and music making in the colonies. Chapters 3–7 explore in detail the activities of nonwhite musicians in this period. Seven appendixes (as diverse as miscegenation terminology tables and discographies of repertory discussed) bolster her argument, presenting much of her evidence clearly and succinctly.

The introduction establishes a precedent for finding in European sources orientalist descriptions of the African other. Powers notes, for example, the relative silence of philosophes like Voltaire on the question of slavery in the French colonies, a practice he openly criticized in Spanish and Portuguese territories (7–8). Closer to the topic at hand is her analysis of how depictions of slaves and slavery in French opera libretti “underscore the presumed inferiority of the sub-Saharan African Other” (19). By inscribing this bias into cultural practices, Powers argues, France established a cultural politics through opera aimed at controlling the slave population.

The forms of power and control present in the colonies are considered in the first two chapters. Chapter 1 considers the implications of the 1685 code noir and 1716 édit for the status of slavery in eighteenth-century colonies. These laws rigorously defined the restrictions placed on slaves, maximizing the power of the monarchy and its government to exert complete control. This included the creation of a racial stratification system that established precise names and categorizations for those of mixed race, those who were freed, and so forth. Examining the slave and free populations of French colonies in the eighteenth century, Powers argues that these controls were necessary if the monarchy hoped to reduce the possibility of slave revolts. By 1789, there were approximately ten slaves for every white citizen in some colonies. The implication is that political controls would not be enough, hence a need for cultural assimilation.

Chapter 2 introduces the three main power structures at play in the colonies: religious, military, and political. In each, Powers sees opportunities for assimilation through music. Religious missionaries trained slaves to sing, and sought to civilize the remnants of African...