This article addresses the representation of difference in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-May, 2005). It argues that through its use of different languages – musical and otherwise – the film deploys an aural strategy of representation that displaces the usual Carmen audience from the privileged place created by the structures of classical music. After looking into the way the original Carmen interpellated its (Western) audience via a ‘colonial ear’, it asks what happens when the opera is relocated in a different language, Xhosa, and so distant a setting as the South African township of Khayelitsha. What happens, in particular, to the supposed neutrality of its musical language, including the conventional exoticism encoded in Carmen’s own music, when it enters the fraught space created by the ‘postcolonial ear’?

Re-imagining through Sound: The Postcolonial Ear in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha

Guarracino S
2011-01-01

Abstract

This article addresses the representation of difference in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-May, 2005). It argues that through its use of different languages – musical and otherwise – the film deploys an aural strategy of representation that displaces the usual Carmen audience from the privileged place created by the structures of classical music. After looking into the way the original Carmen interpellated its (Western) audience via a ‘colonial ear’, it asks what happens when the opera is relocated in a different language, Xhosa, and so distant a setting as the South African township of Khayelitsha. What happens, in particular, to the supposed neutrality of its musical language, including the conventional exoticism encoded in Carmen’s own music, when it enters the fraught space created by the ‘postcolonial ear’?
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11697/128959
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