Displacement and Nostalgia: Empire and Opera
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon

With tongue firmly in cheek, Ralph Locke once (accurately) described the paradigmatic plot of French nineteenth-century operas set in the exotic "East" as: "Young, tolerant, brave, possibly naive, white-European tenor-hero intrudes, at risk of disloyalty to his own people andcolonialist ethic, into mysterious, dark-skinned, colonised territory represented by alluring dancing girls and deeply affectionate, sensitive lyric soprano, incurring wrath of brutal, intransigent tribal chieftain (bass or bass-baritone) and blindly obedient chorus of male savages."Many have written about the Parisian Romantic taste for the exotic and the orientalist in their literature (Hugo's 1829 Les Orientales, e.g.), art (Delacroix, Ingres) and operatic music (Bizet, Massenet), but few have tied this directly to the fact that France was an active colonial power in North Africa and the Middle East at the time. The Battle of the Nile (1798) might have dashed French hopes of taking India, but it set the stage, so to speak, for a form of aesthetic colonization, a construction of a land of desire infinitely deferred. L'Africaine by Giacomo Meyerbeer/EugËne Scribe (Paris premiere, 28 April 1865) offers a complex grand operatic plot with multiple (confusing) love triangles, but what is interesting is that this French opera is about Portuguese exploration (Vasco da Gama) and the encounter with the African "other". As such, it is the forerunner of LakmÈ by LÈo Delibes/Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille (Paris premiere, 14 April 1883), another French opera about empire--but this time about the British in India. Both operas are centred on cultural conflicts between European and non-European, in which the African or Indian woman remains faithful to her religion and society and dies for her ill-fated love, while the European man's loyalty is to his nation--and himself. But LakmÈ's British Indian setting offered its original French audience more than "exotically colonial English people," as one critic has claimed; instead we would read both operas, but especially this latter, as evidence of French colonial displacement and even nostalgia.