Postcolonial Opera

Pistorius outlines a theory that asks us to think about how opera has meaning in today’s world that hosts the afterlives of brutal oppressive legacies whether they be from colonialism, apartheid, slavery, settler colonialism, or other forms of domination. Part of the magic is through a focus on one artist, William Kentridge, and these ideas can be helpful for thinking about how all operas work today when they are interpreted on stage. * Naomi André, David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement *

Juliana M. Pistorius is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Global Research Fellow at University College London and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research engages with questions of race, coloniality, and political resistance in Western art music, with a special focus on opera in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Since graduating with a DPhil from the University of Oxford she has held a Leverhulme Early Career ResearchFellowship at the University of Huddersfield and has been admitted as a research fellow to Africa Open Institute for Music, Research, and Innovation at the Stellenbosch University. She is a founding member of the Black OperaResearch Network (BORN) and the reviews editor for Cambridge Opera Journal.