Marked Territory: Assemblages of The Black Female Subject in 19th Century Visual Art and Verdi's Aida

Abstract

The relevance of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Aida within the Western operatic canon, contemporary opera, and other forms of theatre performance affect contemporary discourse around equity and inclusive representation in the performing arts. This thesis considers the intertextual representations of the black female subject in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida (1871) from the narrative and musical texts, to the visual text in performance. This thesis expands musicological considerations of Aida to include intersectional frameworks of feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Additionally, using art history and cultural criticism it purposefully situates operatic performance as a form of visual culture. In this sense, the stage is the frame through which the components of the black female as Other in Aida are seen as assemblages of conventional representations of the black female subject derived from nineteenth-century European art. The methodology applies what Toni Morrison theorized as the “Africanist presence” and Abdul R. JanMohamed’s framework of the Manichean allegory to analyze and critique the ways in which perceptions of the racialized woman materialize from a trajectory of marginalized images of black femaleness in Western visual art. The discussion is an exploration of how these translate to the stage through costume, performativity, and performance as assemblages reified through the artistic practice and operatic performance of Aida. This thesis also considers the intersectional positionality of the performer in the role of “Aida” and how, the actor, as creator and viewer of cultural capital, becomes a catalyst to subvert or reinforce the “Africanist presence.”