Theater in the French Atlantic World

This article provides an overview of scholarship examining theatrical traditions and practices in the French Atlantic world. This domain was constituted through transoceanic trade, conquest, and migration, including through mass enslavement, between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This entry features scholarship that contributes to our understanding of the interactions among dramatic traditions on multiple continents and their influences on theater and performance practices around the Atlantic Basin. Here, the French Atlantic includes metropolitan France and its New World colonies, and African trading regions and places of origin of enslaved people, but also other areas that engaged with French and Creole dramatic texts, music, dance, and actors. Scholarship on French and francophone theater was long divided along national and colonial lines, with French-language works of theater history and criticism focusing nearly exclusively on theater in metropolitan France, especially Paris. A much smaller number of studies sheds light on theater in francophone Canada and colonial Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Scholarship on performance in precolonial Africa, meanwhile, was often anchored in African religious and cultural history or oriented toward contemporary postcolonial theater. Consequently, few general overviews address French Atlantic theater as a space of intercontinental exchange. In the past two decades, however, scholarship on Haitian and French Atlantic history and on theater in the Anglo-American Atlantic world has fueled significant interest in French Atlantic theater. This was reinforced by a broadening of the theatrical canon. New work explores theaters as cultural institutions, as centers of social and political debate, and as businesses that engaged in complex and contradictory ways with empire, race, and slavery; political alliances and postcolonial independence; representations of Black and native peoples; and women’s opportunities. It takes seriously the experiences of indigenous, enslaved, and mixed-race peoples as interpreters of French theater culture and as agents in shaping and creating hybrid and creolized performances. Scholarship increasingly recognizes the wide range of participation in theater culture in the circum-Atlantic and reciprocal influences on metropolitan stages. This field owes a debt to performance studies, which has moved beyond formal texts and professional playhouses to study music, storytelling, and dance in religious practice, political ceremony, and folk celebration. Reflecting the diversity of methods used in the field, this article includes scholarship by literary critics, historians, theater scholars, musicologists, and anthropologists. New databases provide tools to expand and deepen our knowledge of French Atlantic theater, inviting further work.