Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures ed. by Pamela Karantonis, Dylan Robinson (review)

[]

The pairing of opera and indigeneity in the title of Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson’s terrific edited collection is intriguing, but not intuitive. Opera is widely assumed to be European or Western, an identification that typically excludes Indigenous persons and groups. Likewise, Indigenous musics are stereotypically limited to ‘traditional’ forms, which excludes opera. Such cultural fundamentalism, though common, is hardly defensible in an age of pervasive creative globalization and mixture, including in contemporary Native artistic scenes. A signal contribution of Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures is its refusal of this fundamentalism through its documentation of Indigenous participation in opera and musical theatre, past and present. The volume also makes an important contribution to the existing musicological scholarship on the treatment of Native or Indigenous topics in opera, especially by non- Indigenous artists. In sum, it is an original, worthy addition to the scholarly literature on opera and musical theatre, Indigenous musics, and cultural and performance studies. With its lively and approachable discussion of a wide range of operas it is sure to appeal to general readers as well.

Indeed, the volume’s intended audience seems quite broad, and its lineup of contributors reflects this ecumenical appeal. Roughly half are musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and theatre scholars, with the remaining pieces (including two interviews) contributed by opera composers and directors, singers, music and language educators, a filmmaker and radio documentarian, an arts administrator, and a visual artist. Beyond this impressive professional diversity, at least seven of the twenty-three contributors identify as Native, Indigenous, Aboriginal, or First Nations. While non-Indigenous contributors (apparently including the editors) predominate numerically, the significant participation of Indigenous scholars and artists is noteworthy and important.

The geocultural and historical range of the volume’s essays is equally impressive. While no book could possibly represent the diversity of operatic creation involving Indigenous participants and/or topics, this volume has an ambitious global scope, with extended discussion of operas produced in Australia and in North and South America, and more limited treatment of African, South Asian, and European contexts. The historical scope is more restricted, with the majority of essays focused on the nineteenth century through to the present. Nevertheless, Nicholas Till’s essay, ‘Orpheus Conquistador’, looks at colonial themes in early Italian court opera, and the volume includes Dylan Robinson’s interview with Robert McQueen (with responses by Cathi Charles Wherry, Tracey Herbert, Lorna Williams, and Marion Newman), who directed the Vancouver Opera’s extraordinary 2007Coast Salish adaptation of Mozart’s Die Zauberflôte.

Opera Indigene was a wonderfully bold opening salvo for the new Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series (if a curious one, as the series has since focused on more recognizable opera topics). The volume originated in a 2008 conference at King’s College London, and a quick check of the programme shows that the majority of included essays were based on conference papers. This is not a conference proceedings per se, as the editors have clearly taken pains to develop it into a free-standing collection. Still, the volume does retain something of the feel of a proceedings, with numerous short essays or interviews (eighteen, not counting the introduction) that yield a highly varied, if at times disjointed, assemblage of topics and methods.

Of course, this variety is to be expected—and can rightly be seen as an asset—given the potentially vast subject matter. Any book that sets out to address ‘Indigenous opera’ will have to delimit both terms, each of which contains worlds. The editors gamely define the ‘Indigene’ of the title as referring to ‘operas by indigenous peoples of (and often about) the land’, as well as to fantastic operatic representations of indigenous peoples, usually by and for non-Native artists and audiences (p. 2 n. 3). As many of the contributors note, this first sense of ‘Indigene...