Heellife link:https://heellife.unc.edu/event/11583196 Dr. Candace Bailey, North Carolina Central University “An Opera Trying to Say It All: Postcolonialism, Freedom, Social Justice, and Alterity in Edmond Dédé’s Morgiane (1887)” In 1887, Edmond Dédé (New Orleans 1827 – Paris 1901) completed Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan in Bordeaux, where he had lived since 1859. The earliest full-length opera (four acts, full orchestra) in the western tradition by a Black composer, this work never saw production until earlier this year, when Patrick Quigley and Givonna Joseph were able to mount four concert performances, of which I was privileged to be a small part. In 2026, a performance edition, recording of the 2025 performances, will be published, as will my handbook on Morgiane as part of the Cambridge Music Handbook series. This talk will highlight major points I find Dédé making in his only opera, ones that take an ordinary comic exotic opera and imbue with it extraordinary meaning. The lengthy title of this talk hints at this wealth of intent. There can be no question that throughout his life, Dédé had always been the Other, and when a man who has always been the Other wrote an opera about Otherness, it is not surprise that he should choose to expose the fallacy of how western musical establishments (and others) viewed (and thus treated) him. In Morgiane, the composer introduces the Arabs as Self and the Persians as Other. The process of alterity can go beyond simple Othering to personify a response to or a resistance against dominant narratives, which is how I interpret Dédé’s message in Morgiane. When the final act reveals that the main character belongs to the despised race of Persians, the entire framework of alterity is turned on its head. Dédé deconstructs the hierarchy of morality based on race that the opera depicts previously. It might even be a way of tying his own darker skin to the Otherness associated with people of African descent. He makes further social comments in this opera. The titular character, Morgiane (from the Ali Baba stories) constitutes Dédé’s statement against racial profiling and serves as a representation of real Black women instead of the caricatures the French might have seen in theaters such as the Folies Bordelaises (where he worked in the 1870s and 1880s). Key questions arise from basic issues of the issue of race in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, the places of Dédé’s birth and maturation, and the place where he spent most of his adulthood. Throughout much of opera’s history (and certainly in the 1880s), Black would have necessarily been defined as Other, and White represented Self, specifically French hegemony. Morgiane presents alternatives in myriad ways, and each offers a way into thinking about Dédé and how he saw himself in the world in which he worked. Moreover, Morgiane evinces ties to Dédé’s life in New Orleans. Using the Antillean theorist Edouard Glissant’s framework of la créolité to explore relational identities in New World societies, as opposed to root traditions in Europe or Africa, I find that Dédé’s notion of identity had been fashioned in relation to his lived experiences in postcolonial New Orleans, in postwar Mexico, and in France, as well as his travels to French Algiers, Portugal, and Marseilles, and not in any one isolated location. Because of this, he could authoritatively ask who is Self and who is Other in his immediate world of 1880s Bordeaux. Dédé confronts the naïve bifurcation of white and black, of African and European, and resists hegemonic power by writing not only an opera in the style of a white French composer but also infusing it with characteristics of his own multiracial— hybrid. He crafted Morgiane as a means to transform mentalities and reshape society. The UNC Music Research Forum hosts invited lectures by distinguished music scholars from around the world and informal research presentations by members of our department and colleagues across campus. It serves as an intellectual hub for the department and is open to all. The Forum is held on the final Friday of each month during the semester from 3:30-5:00 pm in Person Recital Hall.