Carmen in Diaspora

Abstract Carmen in Diaspora explores why the Carmen story, which originally appeared in Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous 1845 novella and came to prominence through Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, has proven such fertile material for popular recreations in African diasporic settings. Carmen’s source texts not only suggest nineteenth-century French negotiations of blackness via the Romani community to which the title figure belongs 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 US 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 and allow creators, performers, and audiences to interrogate social categories, particularly gender, race, and sexuality, in contemporary Europe, North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. It 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.