Juliana M. Pistorius Postcolonial Opera: William Kentridge and the Unbounded Work of Art Oxford University Press 304 pages, 6.35 x 9.17 inches ISBN 978-0197749210
Juliana M. Pistorius
On Postcolonial Opera: William Kentridge and the Unbounded Work of Art
Interview of
September 12, 2025
In a nutshell
What comes to mind when you think of opera? For most people, the word summons some variation on belting ladies, black tie, red velvet seats, opulent theatres, and diamond-encrusted snobbery from an increasingly aging public. In other words, we generally associate opera with a very specific vision of elite European culture.
But opera also exists in unexpected places. It can be found in car parks and bars, among young people and incarcerated persons. It also flourishes in postcolonial spheres such as South Africa, where the art form has become an integral part of Black cultural identities. The popularity of opera in former colonies belies the art form’s association with a European cultural elite.
Postcolonial Opera: William Kentridge and the Unbounded Work of Art asks what political and cultural work opera does in postcolonial spheres. Whose interests does the art form serve? Whose history and culture does it represent? Whose stories does it tell? And even more importantly, how does it tell these stories?
The book does two things: it examines the role of opera in the postcolony, and it engages with William Kentridge’s experimental theatre works. Kentridge is South Africa’s most famous living artist. He enjoys global renown, with blockbuster exhibitions at the most important museums and galleries in the world. Kentridge is an interdisciplinary artist with a profound interest in sound and performance. Over the past three decades, he has created operas for institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden in London, and La Monnaie in Brussels. He has also produced several experimental works, which play with the operatic medium in fascinating ways.
The unbounded work of art is Kentridge’s concept. He uses it to describe an approach to art-making that is capacious in a Dadaist sense. For Kentridge, anything can be part of the work of art. The boundaries around media are flexible: drawing can also be dance; sculpture can also be performance. Kentridge contrasts this approach with the Wagnerian idea of the total work of art, which is especially about coherence and control. In its place, Kentridge embraces an art of chance, coincidence, and unpredictability.
In Postcolonial Opera, Kentridge’s performance pieces anchor a discussion of opera’s capacity to process the political and ethical demands of the postcolonial present. Each chapter relates a Kentridge case study to one concept from postcolonial critical theory. The book starts by examining the history of opera in colonial spheres: is the art form really a colonial import? Or can we trace Indigenous performance traditions that are themselves operatic? If we think of opera as a form of storytelling through music, then there are many Indigenous performance traditions that do the same thing. Thus, I problematise the idea that opera somehow “belongs” to the West.
Having established that opera does have a place among pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Indigenous societies, I use the rest of the book to explore the tensions between opera’s role as a colonial art form, and its position as a form of Indigenous expression. I ask, specifically, whether opera can participate ethically in postcolonial acts of confession; what it means for opera to perform postcolonial mourning; how opera articulates and refigures ways of being “in time” in the postcolony; how opera makes place (and enables different forms of inhabitation) for the itinerant or displaced postcolonial subject; and how opera deals with ideals and inheritances of totality in the postcolony.
The wide angle
When I tell people that I study opera in South Africa, they almost always say, “I didn’t know there’s opera there!” Fact is, there’s a very vibrant operatic culture in South Africa. This is also true for other former colonies, both on the African continent and in other parts of the world. One of the questions that interest me, is why people are surprised that opera could thrive in a place like South Africa.
I am myself a classically-trained South African pianist. While pursuing my training, I often had to ask myself what it means for me to spend hours and hours practicing my instrument, while so many people in my country struggle to find sufficient food, accommodation and safety. How do we justify the money and time we invest in classical music in a place like this? Which values attach to classical music in a place like South Africa? These questions continue to activate my intellectual project.
Postcolonial Opera starts from the premise that all opera is somehow postcolonial. I understand a practice to be postcolonial if it reflects colonial structures back to us, or if it brings these structures to light and/or comments on them. Opera contains the conditions of coloniality within itself. The art form represents modernity, which, as Walter Mignolo argues, is always already intertwined with coloniality. Mignolo calls this the “modernity/coloniality” bind. So, if opera represents modernity, it also necessarily represents coloniality.
Opera reflects coloniality in other ways, too: operatic works, for instance, often assume an orientalist gaze. This is especially true for canonical works from the Euro-American repertoire. Frequently, opera functioned as a marker of colonial subjects’ civility, and of their connectedness with the European hinterland. Moreover, opera houses were built from raw materials extracted from colonies, or acquired using the wealth gained from colonial possessions. And finally, opera circulated around the world along the routes of colonial expansion.
The book is primarily aligned with two disciplines: opera studies and postcolonial theory. But it also incorporates performance studies, theories of form and genre, and scholarship on visual art. Postcolonial Opera especially forms part of a recent turn towards issues of race, coloniality, and representation in opera studies. Naomi André’s 2018 monograph, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement, remarks on the “shadow history” of Black participation in opera, both in the USA and South Africa. Even at times when opera appeared to be reserved for white artists and audiences, André shows that Black musicians took the art form and made it theirs. My book builds on André’s pioneering work by thinking specifically about the ways in which these “shadow cultures” interact with the structures of the postcolony.
Kentridge’s works are not necessarily representative of postcolonial opera in general. But they foreground many of the issues that characterise postcolonial opera writ large. For instance, Kentridge’s works are all collaboratively produced. They also incorporate non-operatic, Indigenous performance traditions, including music, dance, mime, and masquerade. Kentridge’s operatic works welcome a multitude of traditions, from the European avant-garde to anti-colonial and anti-apartheid art forms. As a result, they are heterogeneous and transcultural productions, which represent a hybrid model unmarked by conventional distinctions between the so-called “high” and “popular” or “folk” arts. Kentridge also incorporates multilingualism, and he uses his works to tell stories that expand on and even problematise the standard Western histories we encounter on stage. These are all characteristic features of operatic cultures that exist beyond the European norm.
A close-up
The most important thing I’d like a casual reader or browser to engage with is the book’s companion website. Writing about music, theatre, and dance often feels restrictive—one can only capture so much in words. In response to the restrictions posed by print, Oxford University Press has created a website to accompany the book. Here, the press hosts a number of short audio-visual samples of material discussed in the book. The relevant videos are indicated with a little icon in the text, so the reader knows when to look at or listen to an item online. It’s a brilliant way to incorporate multimedia into print.
Even without reading the book, the casual browser can turn to these video examples for an introduction to Kentridge’s audio-visual world. Kentridge’s theatre pieces are beautiful, humorous, moving, intriguing, and challenging. They open new perspectives on colonial history and performance, even for audiences unfamiliar with the historical or aesthetic intertexts referenced in the artist’s work. Kentridge’s art has a unique capacity to make people reflect on their own relationship to histories of colonialism and racial exploitation.
Apart from the companion website, there are of course other bits of the book with which I am particularly pleased. I love the quotes from Kentridge’s pieces. These bits of text, which are peppered throughout the book, reflect the artist’s sense of humour, and his capacity to integrate divergent frames of reference into a single, often absurd, framework.
Thinking of a specific section of the book, I continue to marvel at the near-simultaneity of the International Prime Meridian Conference (which decided on Greenwich as the zero point for global clock time) and the Berlin Conference (which partitioned Africa among the different colonial powers) in 1884. These conferences, which together had profound consequences for the African continent and its colonial rulers, form the starting point for Chapter 4, ‘Time’. I hope that casual readers looking through the book might pick up one or two strands from this chapter, to realise how coincidental our current temporal regime is. Clock time is not a given, nor does non-adherence to it necessarily signal failure.
Oxford University Press created a companion website for the book, featuring short audio-visual samples tied to the text. Icons in the book signal when to view or listen online.
Lastly
I close the book with a reflection on operatic postcoloniality and decoloniality. Over the past decade, the academy has increasingly begun to prioritise decolonial epistemologies and methodologies. The same is true for musicology, which is traditionally a profoundly Eurocentric discipline. Given opera’s complicity in various forms of coloniality, it is perhaps natural that opera studies has also increasingly begun to look for ways in which the art form may serve the decolonial agenda.
When I started this project, I intended to study a number of South African operas to see how they represented the aims and priorities of decolonisation. However, in the process of doing this work, I realised that opera as a genre is too deeply embedded in the structures and networks of modernity and late capitalism to participate truthfully or unproblematically in a decolonial project. Even so-called Indigenous operas continue to be heard through the sonic structures of European opera. If decolonisation represents, in Mignolo’s terms, a delinking from modernity, then opera as an institution would have to become something else before it can truly decolonise.
Consequently, I conclude that opera has tremendous capacity for postcolonial representation and critique, but that its role as an agent of decolonisation is more limited. That being said, I do think that certain forms of operatic experimentation have the potential to realise decolonial approaches and methodologies: I think especially of works created through non-hierarchical, collaborative processes; works that destabilise the distinction between audience and performers; works that do not aspire to repetition or circulation; and works that embrace notions of performance-as-knowledge-making, as memory, as history, and as community, rather than as discipline.
There are vast numbers of interesting operas and creators coming out of formerly colonised spheres. I would like Kentridge’s creations, and their treatment in this book, to serve as a first step towards thinking about the incredible variety of theatrical work from postcolonial societies, and about how these works interact with what we understand opera to be. Ultimately, the aim of Postcolonial Opera is to think anew about the borders we draw around genres. The book invites us to reflect on the assumptions we make about different forms of art, about where they belong and to whom, and about the ways in which we lay claim to cultural identities.
