SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007
Transmodernities/Translocalities: Panel Discussion
12:30 p.m. – 3 p.m. Polycentric sessions and screenings, San Francisco
Art Institute, Lecture hall and classrooms
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Carmen, Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, explores
the consequences that a foreign, dangerously sexy, and unattainable
woman faces in a male-dominated public sphere that attempts to restrain
and to ultimately confine her. As one of the most adapted operas in
world history, Carmen remains an eminent reference point for a variety
of contemporary dramatic renderings in the performance world. With some
eighty-two known film adaptations to-date, thirty-two non-theatrical
interpretations, and countless aural, visual, and thematic references
in commercials, movies, and print advertisements, nods to Carmen in
popular culture and media are ubiquitous. Through these various forms
of cultural reproduction and resignification of Carmen, the opera's
narrative has been transformed into the “Carmen myth,” the
fantasy of the foreign, compelling and unattainable woman floating freely
beyond domestic and social bounds, loving and leaving whomever and whenever
she wills, even in the face of death.
But what happens when the “Carmen myth”
is transplanted into African and African American social and geographical
contexts, when the central dramatic narrative is not sassy, Romani gypsy
Carmen meets indifferent, naïve and native-born Don José?
What new dramatic and interpretive potential of the Carmen myth do we
discover when all of the characters are Other/othered and not just Carmen
herself, when nearly everyone in the production is racially, culturally
and geographically similar? I contend that while the plot of the original
1875 opera (and also many of the twentieth-century European- and American-based
film adaptations) is predicated upon the interplay between the free-spirited,
foreign gypsy woman and the socially-constrained, indigenous male, the
Carmen film adaptations either casted by and/or written, directed and
produced in part by African and African Americans do not retain this
original and important racial, cultural and geographical dynamic that
so popularized and scandalized Carmen from the beginning.
Alternatively, in these African and African
American adaptations of Carmen racial and spatial politics commingle
with sexuality and gender politics to forward poignant critiques of
distinctive political and social situations. In these spatially, racially,
and culturally transplanted and transformed versions of the Carmen myth
– the fantasy of the free-spirited woman as an outlier of social
mores and moral codes – becomes a native-born woman contesting
societal constraints in a context that she seems thoroughly familiar
with. The racial, gendered, and sexual markings inscribed upon her body
transform her into the visual and narrative vehicle for exploring the
legacies of tripartite oppression: sexism, colonialism, and racism.
At times this critique of tripartite oppression, along with its exploration
of cultural imperialism is explicit within the film's staged performative
dimensions. At other times, as I will explore in my presentation, this
critical commentary surfaces in the off-stage, performative dimensions
of racial and spatial politics, boiling over behind the scenes of film
production. My presentation, based on a forthcoming publication, explores
the representations of race, sexuality, and spatiality in four African
and African-American film adaptations of Carmen: Carmen Jones (USA;
1954), Carmen: A Hip-Hopera (USA; 2001), Karmen Geï (2001; Senegal),
and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (South Africa; 2005). As these productions
are haunted theatrically by previous film adaptations of Carmen, I will
illustrate that sex and death operate metaphorically as potential spaces
for the containment of Carmen in all of her sexual and feminine prowess,
while vocal and visual signifiers of race and space are rampant in each
of the considered translocated, transmodern film productions.
Participant's Bio:
Shanesha R. F. Brooks Tatum, UC Berkeley alumna, is a doctoral candidate
at the University of Michigan where she specializes in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century American music and literature. With a specialization
in African American and Afro-Caribbean musical and literary forms, Tatum's
previously published research analyzed Langston Hughes's creation of
a literary translation of jazz and blues music techniques in his Harlem
Renaissance poetry and how his poetry instituted new ways for complicating
the concept of double consciousness in African American experiences.
Her current work explores secular and sacred boundary crossings in American
culture and cultural production, as well as and artistic and political
challenges to musical, literary and operatic canons.