French Opera at the Fin de Siecle

Huebner, Steven

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195189544.001.0001

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…One reviewer considered Fervaal as "a Celtic hero glorifying the French race." 131 Fouillé saw the Celts' refuge in the mountains as a source of the French attachment to their soil and their families and an explanation for their conservatism. 132 How these theories about national origins played out, however, suggests that more was at stake here than race.…”

Section: Racial Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Theorizing Race in Nineteenth-Century France: Music as Emblem of Identity

Pasler¹

2007

The Musical Quarterly

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Long before the postmodern and postcolonial preoccupation with hybridization, the impact of migrations and urban expansion, as well as the notion of Western culture as a product of the colonized and the colonizers, related concerns permeated notions of race and national identity in nineteenth-century France. Within French debates about race lay a deep-seated anxiety about the racialized Self as much as the racialized Other. While the French have wanted to believe in the Revolutionary notion of the Republic as "one and indivisible," 1 they have had to come to grips with a history characterized not by homogeneous coherence, but by invasions, conflict, and accommodation. Celts, Gauls, Romans, Franks, Southerners, and Northerners, the people and the nobility, colonized peoples and émigrés, each of these has formed part of the fabric of identity developed over the centuries, and yet each is the subject of intense ongoing controversy. Some French in the nineteenth century, particularly republicans, saw these cultural collisions as nourishing, inducing progress; others, especially those nostalgic for the Ancien Régime, insisted on certain continuities as responsible for "the genius of the race." Historians struggled with the transnational nature of peoples like the Celts who, living in northern Europe and southern Germany as well as France, raised questions about the relationship between race, culture, and nation. 2 Also difficult, colonial theorists had to acknowledge that colonialism, at least theoretically, necessarily involves reciprocal influences. 3 Underlying these concerns, nineteenthcentury French intellectuals sought to understand how their nation emerged from successive confrontations of Self and Other, difference and similarity, and how its hybrid people unsettled these binary oppositions over time through both resistance and assimilation. In the context of emerging nationalism, then, race was not only an imperialist construct and a product of colonial consciousness. The French were deeply concerned with who they were vis-à-vis their European neighbors, especially Germany. With the near-impossibility

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Section: Racial Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%