Carmen in Diaspora : Adaptation, Race, and Opera's Most Famous Character

Carmen in Diaspora is a cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts. Beginning with Prosper Mérimée''s novella and Georges Bizet''s opera and continuing through twentieth- and twentieth-first century interpretations in literature, film, and musical theatre, the book explores how opera''s most famous character has exceeded the 19th-century French context in which she was created and taken on a life of her own. Through this transformation, the Carmen figure has sparked important conversations not only about French culture and canonical opera but also about Black womanhood, community, and self-determination.

Carmen in Diaspora is a cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts. It explores the phenomenon of the connection between the story of Carmen, which originally appeared in Prosper Mérimée''s eponymous 1845 novella and came to prominence through Georges Bizet''s 1875 opera, with prolific popular recreations in African diasporic settings. The source texts for Carmen not only suggest nineteenth-century French negotiations of Blackness via the Romani community, but also provide provocative frameworks through which to examine conceptions of Black womanhood and self-determination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through analyses of Mérimée and Bizet, the Harlem Renaissance novels The Blacker the Berry (1929), Banjo (1929), and Romance in Marseille (2020); the U.S. movie musicals Carmen Jones (1954) and Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001); the Senegalese and South African feature films Karmen Geï (2001) and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005), respectively; and the Cuban-set stage musical Carmen la Cubana (2016), Carmen in Diaspora examines how these works illuminate the cultural currents of the nineteenth-century European context in which the character was born. The book also interrogates social categories, particularly gender, race, and sexuality, in contemporary Europe, North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Carmen is Diaspora is an adaptation study that emphasizes connections formed through the transposition rather than imposition of European culture as it considers how artists have brought - and continue to bring - new energy, vision, and life to the story of opera''s most famous character.