Understanding Representation in the Historical Canon (Video)

- Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome

to Understanding Representation in the Historical Canon.

This is first of a three-part series entitled Invisible Influencers:

Examining Absence in Popular Narratives.

My name is Shakoor Ward.

I am Director Learning Development and Equity at Tulane Libraries

and it is a great pleasure to welcome you to this event.

Now, the catalyst for the series is the extraordinary life of

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint Georges whose absence from musical and military

history canons inspired this series that examines presence and absence

in popular historical narratives, as well as how

they are sustained or disrupted.

Our purpose here today is to create the space

for a conversation that takes a broad look at race and representation

that is not present in the popular historical imagination.

Now we have a distinguished panel

and an experienced moderator who will guide us through the session.

Before I turn things over to our moderator, Lisa Hooper,

I'd like to introduce you to our panelists.

I'll start from my right, Dr. Denise Frazier.

Dr. Frazier is the Assistant Director of the New Orleans Center

for the Gulf South at Tulane University,

a place-based research center that grants fellowships and organizes

public programing, immersive experiences and collective contemplation

about the Bayou region, stretching from Texas to Florida,

and its connections with other regions around the world.

Her research interests currently include the Gulf South and the anthropocene,

sound studies and the political, social, digital, natural

and built environments of the Gulf South and circum-Caribbean.

She is also the manager, co-founder and violinist, vocalist,

percussionist of Les Cenelles.

Did I say that correctly? - Yeah, Les Cenelles.

You would be able to say it correctly, Ms. Joseph. Les Cenelles.

- It’s a French word.

...which is a string and technological interfacing ensemble that performs

African diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African

and indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities.

Next, we have Demi Ward.

Demi is a sound artist and researcher committed to the embodiment

and insurgent practices of the Black Creole diaspora over time.

Demi's work centralizes wellbeing through physical and artistic

lenses, prioritizing care and an element of Black futurity.

Next, we have Givonna Joseph.

As founder and artistic

director of the award-winning OperaCreole,

Ms. Joseph’s research on 19th century New Orleans free classical

and operatic composers of color and Creole history and heritage

has been featured in The New Yorker's Southern Living Magazine.

She was previously honored as a standard bearer of Louisiana culture on the

Grand Tour, a documentary for French TV and locally on Music Inside Out.

Her most recent cover articles are in Breakthrough Media Magazine

and NOLA Boomers Magazine.

Since 2011, the international soloist,

arts integration specialist, and university lecturer,

along with her daughter, Aria Mason, OperaCreole co-founder,

has received awards for mounting lost or rarely heard

operas by composers of color.

Ms. Joseph received the Torch Bearers Award from the New Orleans

regional chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 2022.

She also teaches a new class for Loyola's College of Music and Media, called

Opera, Classical Music, and Race.

And last but certainly not least,

we have our conductor for today, Lisa Hooper.

As head of media services, Lisa supports a staff and student library worker...

student library worker team

dedicated to ensuring visitors have access

to our extensive media collections as well as creative technology.

Lisa also works with the music and dance and theater departments

to build collections and provide instructional and research support.

She is also responsible for collecting film across all disciplines.

I don’t think we could have had a better qualified panel

and moderated to address the questions we will raise today.

We'll have a Q&A session at the end and then try to take questions

submitted in the Zoom chat if time permits.

And I won't take any more time.

I'll turn things over to Lisa.

Lisa, I invite you to take it from here.

- Okay. Thank you, everybody.

Just a shout out first to everybody in Zoom land.

I'm actually really pleased and relieved to see a lot of familiar names and faces.

So thank you all for joining us.

It's really nice to have you there in Zoom land.

Yes, you are just in time. Come on in.

Come on in.

Thank y’all.

So, actually, Shakoor

as Rosanne gets settled in, there she is.

As Rosanne get settled in, do you want to do her quick bio?

And we'll get her set up.

Thank you.

- You're not able to see yet in Zoom land, but soon you will see

our final panelists who just arrived, Dr. Laura Rosanne Adderley. Welcome.

Dr. Adderley is an associate professor

in the Department of History at Tulane University School of Arts.

Dr. Adderley specializes in the history of African diaspora,

the Atlantic slave trade, Black enslavement

in the Americas, Caribbean History, and African American History.

Her current book project is tentatively entitled

‘Archives of Atlantic Abolition Slave Trade Records African Lives in the

Everyday Politics of Freedom.’ Welcome, Dr. Adderley.

- And so with that, we'll get started. In case you couldn't tell,

these mics are for a recording which will be available online later.

So we are going to work really hard to project

so everybody in the room and on Zoom can hear us.

We're doing the best we can.

And so actually I do sort of want to start perhaps people in Zoom

can join us using the reactions and y'all are here in the room.

So I'm really curious who in the room and online have heard of

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint Georges

It's been a long day y'all. Chevalier de Saint Georges.

Who have heard of him either before you learned about this event

or if you know the movie before you learned about the movie.

Show of hands.

Nobody in the room?

I actually saw maybe I think I saw up to six thumbs up,

which means you guys are all music librarians [chuckles].

That's my wild guess.

Thank you. So, because the majority here do not know

or did not know who Joseph Bologne is, let me set the stage, right.

So who was Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint Georges?

For all of you who actually speaks French, I apologize.

Who was he?

He was a master fencer by the time he was a teenager.

He is said to have given fencing lessons

to the revolutionary general Alexandre Thomas Dumas,

who you might recognize his last name.

He is the father of the Dumas who wrote The Three Musketeers.

Not coincidentally, there is a lot of speculation, conjecture, healthy guesswork

that speculates that potentially Chevalier de Saint Georges

was the role model for the Three Musketeers.

That book might not have existed, as we know it without him.

He was a master marksman whose skill impressed the American

John Adams so much that he actually wrote home about him.

He was the music teacher of Marie Antoinette.

He was known as the most talented violinist in all of France.

He led the most prestigious ensembles in all of France.

He was a composer who explored and developed the style

that we know today as symphonie concertante.

And he did it before Mozart, just saying.

He -- Oh, I just forgot what it's called, not the Masons.

You helped me out on this earlier and I didn't write it down -- Freemason.

Sorry. He joined one of the major Freemason organizations

and he not only invited many other brilliant artists like him,

but also other people that we know today.

Gossec is a composer that many of us in music world know today.

He was brought in by Joseph Bologne, might not have been without him.

Importantly, he also led Europe's first all Black regiment.

He prevented an Austrian invasion of the French city of Lille

during the French Revolution without any bloodshed.

He was also the son of a sugar and coffee plantation owner in Guadeloupe,

and he was the son of a 16-year-old enslaved woman, enslaved by his father.

And so, by all accounts, everybody who knew him...

That's a good point, John.

Well, somebody in the chats just noted we don't actually have his name on the slides

You're right.

We will take that into note for next time.

Thank you.

Right [chuckles].

But by all accounts, by everybody who knew him,

he was the definition of excellence in everything that he did.

He was very well known and beloved during his lifetime.

And so why don't we know him today?

Why did he become invisible despite being so influential during his lifetime?

So those are the questions that we're trying to answer today.

And Rosanne, if you're ready, I'm going to call upon you.

Perhaps.

So we start at the beginning of his life in Guadeloupe,

which is Guadeloupe, 1745. He is being raised up as the son

of a sugar and coffee plantation owner in the big house.

And at the time of his birth, the code noir was in place

and it remained there for just a few years before his death.

So actually he was alive when it was repealed the first time.

This code would have undoubtedly shaped the world that he navigated

both as a child and throughout most of his adult life.

So I'm wondering if you're able and also anybody else

at this table who has thoughts on the code noir,

if you can sort of help us understand what bearing the code noir,

also known because I can't pronounce French, the Black code,

what bearing it would have had on the child

of an enslaved woman to an already married plantation owner?

Well, I have you know, you did send me

that question in advance, and I'll say I'll say three important things.

I want to quote Courtney Becknell, who I think is in medical school at LSU now.

But she used to be a docent at Evergreen, which is tied up

in the same family that owns what is now the Whitney Plantation and Slavery Museum.

And she said that one of the core lines

as the brilliant tour guide she was and she would remind

people was there was no such thing as a code noir police.

And in that sense, we can overthink the impact of the

code noir and what it actually said on people's actual practice.

The other person that I would like to quote

that is enormously relevant here is Melanie LaMotte,

who was at Tulane and is now at the University of Texas,

who has a wonderful book coming, I think, in the fall

about the way that -- and she's literally mapped it.

The book discusses it, but she also literally maps the way that

French colonial forces of various kinds -- and I use force with a small “F”,

not literally meaning military -- that they're writing to one another across

an expanding French empire from the 17th through --

she doesn't go to the 20th century

-- and essentially saying, you know, “Dear person in Madagascar,

what are you doing about this?” You know, this circumstance?

She's particularly interested in how they deal

with people of mixed race and children and these kinds of things.

So there's this more so than what the code noir said,

to Courtney Becknell's point, is that what were the

what were the norms of the society in which she would have been born?

And then beneath that, to the point about no code noir police,

the norms generally versus what were the norms in his individual circumstance?

And that's the bit we're missing.

And so in that sense, one of the things that you can't overstate

that he would have been born regardless of where he lived,

where he set his head at night, or where he spent his hours,

into a society that was overwhelmingly African.

Alright.

You know, the thing that characterizes enslavement in so many parts of

Latin America and the Caribbean is just the sheer scale of it

in a way that we can't imagine it in Ascension Parish in Louisiana here.

But the presence of that very Black world as opposed to a French colonial world.

So when people inquire,

as they no doubt will, about the film, about his quote unquote, connection

to those people, it's a bit like asking someone who leaves

New Orleans at age 16, do they remember New Orleans and what it was like?

And how did -- it is a perverse question.

That's thing number one.

I think thing number two that is

and it's hard to read is that there's an enormous amount of power

exercised by the small number of people who enslaved others.

And while it was perfectly normative for even free and wealthy people at age

16 to be impregnated by persons

with whom they chose to have sex or not, in this era,

regardless of their status, it's extremely difficult to

envision to unfold what it meant to be that person.

The thing that is actually certainly true that it was a fraught status,

you know, and one of which he would have been aware.

One of the -- a film that goes off the rails eventually

the film of Anne Rice’s Feast of All Saints.

The actor who acts the role of the mulatto son

does some really brilliant acting without words about the --

it’s a teenage actor -- about the fact that they try to render them,

that film goes completely off the rails and that actually does spend time in slave

society that this film, for the most part, does not, you know,

that it is at those ages that you become aware

that something is amiss and complicated about the way

that white supremacy and European supremacy, about culture is.

And that's the world.

On the one hand, overwhelmingly Black, overwhelming African,

you know, just the whole cacophony of African culture and language around

and no way to escape that racial hierarchy and his place in it.

And I worry, I'm eager to wait

to see how people read that or whether they want to sort of completely

put him down in the world in which he landed as if this past.

And I was just listening --

there's a new book out called ‘Fog’ about adoptees.

I was listening to the interview with the author this morning

and even those that were adopted as infants that

what the book is largely about is about the people just erase that.

And the weight of that world was not something that would

and just the sheer demographics and cultural space

was very different, radically different from the one.

This is just not the circumstances of his birth.

It had real consequences.

- Thank you, Rosanne. So you know, when I reread the code noir

potentially last week, I've lost track of time.

I think I reread it last week.

You know, my takeaway from just my very 21st century rereading,

I think that was a really important thing, that we are seeing this through 21st

century eyes and frameworks.

So when I reread that, my thought was

there was never supposed to be a Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint Georges.

There was only supposed to be a Joseph.

But what I'm hearing from you and the comment that you made earlier

when we were just informally talking is it's really more about the context

of his family circumstance within the larger framework.

Even though my initial thought was like, “Oh, he shouldn't have existed

because his father was married to a white woman with a white daughter.

So he should have, according to the law, like gone into the same condition

as his mother, which would have been slavery,”

I think that's actually a really important note and so I'm just highlighting that.

I think that our 21st century framework is a little bit different from

the individual context of every individual and that's powerful, I think.

- And I think that's what LaMotte's book is about.

Essentially people asking even in the eighteenth,

and nineteenth centuries, “Wait, this is not supposed to be happening”

and then something will happen around property or something else.

And they literally write, you know, “Dear person in Martinique

or Louisiana or in Madagascar, Have you encountered X?

And how should I respond?” - So can I reframe my question?

My second question that I had already posed to you just a little bit.

So, if his individual circumstance

in his lifetime was clearly different from what the law at the time said,

it was eventually repealed near the end of his life,

but then shortly after he died, it was reinstated.

And so I'm wondering if the reinstatement and severe crackdown

and re-empowerment of the practice of slavery could have sort of

contributed to his eventual erasure and invisibility over time?

Or is that my librarian conjecture?

- I think I would -- I think that it's too -- i think that it’s too much

to essentially credit French restoration slavery in the eastern Caribbean

with, and I use in scare quotes for the video, but not for Zoom,

the erasure, because what

and who we know from what historical record

in the weight of their lifetime, in weight of anyone's lifetime

and our long term memory is one of the things that

the historical profession kind of and popular culture kind of struggles with.

There's so many figures that were terribly important

in their lifetime that are known to be so and the one that

I sort of reference for the US context that's an easy one is Sally Hemings.

Now we take for granted how well known Sally Hemings was

in Jefferson's time and we knew exactly who all those Hemings descendants were --

completely well-known in their time.

And they weren't.

And in certain circles of the both academic life

of certainly Virginia genealogical life and certain kind of Jeffersonian circles.

And as you pointed out, people who know a certain set

of 18th century French sort of music traditions.

And so what erasure, what erasure means in what context.

And so I wouldn't credit the re-enshrinement of sort of,

you know, the what they call my students always freak out about that.

They were like, wait slavery complete revolutionary ended and then came back

and they're like, they're just like agape for like two and a half weeks.

And they circle back on it because you know, particularly those of them

that don't know much about French colonialism, it was a terrible thing.

And I think something that I don't know that the literature on it in France,

that really the kind of social history of what that actually meant.

What does that mean, but yet I don't think that's the reason.

I think it has to do with the way we, what we do and don't remember about

the colonial and slavery era generally and how we sort of pick and choose.

And I'd be super interested within kind of the people that know,

-- kind of the people that -- within the people that know lesser known

musical figures like you've got people on Zoom that know

you know, that Joseph Bologne is not news to them.

And so in that sense, I think what we're reaching for is I think what's happened

in the case of Hemings. You know, I used to teach a course on race,

sex and American slavery that it was very much about your question like since

all these mixed race people aren't supposed to ... what are we doing.

But when I would walk around I would turn the

my Hemings books opposite side out

so that I wouldn't have to start with anyone about like that conversation

because it was somehow politically fraught or like, you know, and in this sense.

So I'm not sure what the reasons for

or, I mean, the thing that I don't know is, well, there's no one identical to him.

But in terms of like how within what music worlds is he known.

Like, as I said, the same way I think what I thought about the Hemings situation,

like the most people knew all the things, all the things that are in

Annette Gordon-Reed’s. There were circles of people,

and it's not taking anything away from the sort of the way she's transformed

the, the mainstream historical discourse and it is a gorgeously written book.

Within what circles was he known and why versus kind of what is out in what

and in some ways, Annette Gordon-Reed’s climbing on the barricades for Hemings.

Who climbs on the barricades for Joseph Bologne and to what audience?

Because with this is very much a US political audience

and so it's a very different audience.

- Yeah, I think that's a fabulous question and we are absolutely going to dig

into his social network, especially once he moves to Paris.

We're going to talk about that in a minute.

But before we leave Guadeloupe, Denise, I want to turn to you briefly,

because I think you've done some really interesting thinking research

and especially creative work on the colonial legacies

of sugar and the generational harm of these industries.

And so what has always fascinated my imagination since learning about him

is that Joseph Bologne’s most formative years as a child were spent

on just such a plantation, probably straddling both of those worlds, yeah?

So, I mean, where am I going with this question?

I have it written down.

So like in my mind, he's among the first of these generations

to experience and benefit from the impacts of slavery very firsthand.

I'm wondering if you can, if you're able to at this point,

help us unpack a little bit the factors that might have contributed.

And again, this is a little bit speculative for all of the very good

reasons that Rosanne just gave us, but sort of speculate a little bit on

sort of this probably silencing and real time erasure

that would have happened during his lifetime

while he was actually experiencing these things.

- Thank you. Yeah.

I just want to thank Lisa and Alan and Dr. Ward for inviting me on to this

beautiful panel of people who I admire deeply.

Um, can you all hear me? Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you. [chuckles] And just to respond a little bit to what

Rosanne said, I'm very interested in why he is coming up right now.

I was thinking about Liberty Place and, you know, Lee Circle

is now Freedom Circle, how certain things have changed here in New Orleans.

We still have signs that street signs that are of Confederate soldiers. Right?

So the history seems to me like a loop pedal sometimes. And I'm more interested

in understanding the reasons why certain people are coming up,

because we all know that people of African descent are entirely complex

and we've always had these histories and relationships.

But why certain people are coming to the surface at certain times

is completely interesting.

And when Dr. Adderley was talking, I completely thought of this, you know,

in a sonic way, just thinking of history as this loop pedal that certain

sounds are coming up and coming down consistently.

So I just wanted to respond a little bit to what Dr. Adderley said

and kind of question. I wanted to question why, you know, why as well, why, Joseph?

Why now? Because there's a lot going on right now against, you know,

people of African descent. We just saw what happened in Tennessee.

You know, there's just so many examples that we can think about right now

and to think about locally here in New Orleans as well.

And also just to just respond quickly. Dr. Ward mentioned Les Cenelles.

I just want to foreground that Les Cenelles is the

electroacoustic group that Demi and I are a part of.

We took that name from the Afro-Creole poets.

The first anthology of African Descended poetry

in the entire United States was this group called Les Cenelles.

And so that was in the 19th century. That's where that is coming from.

So we are kind of a loop pedal response to what they were doing

what this group of Afro-Creole poets were doing

and how that connects with nationalism at that time and in this place.

And also wanted to there's so many things already want to respond to

before I get to answer this question, but I'll go quickly because I have notes

and going off the dome is not my strong suit.

The Count of Monte Cristo.

I remember reading that and having no idea about Alexandre Dumas's racial history,

but when I read that entire book, I was li “This person is of mixed race.”

I immediately knew it just because of the way that the story was told.

There's just some, there was an angst there that I really connected with,

and I wasn't surprised when I found out about his situation.

And his connection with Joseph is completely interesting.

And I sort of had this different vision of Joseph after I knew

about the connection with this literature and Dumas.

But to answer your question, I've been thinking a lot about this.

A lot of the work at New Orleans Center for the Gulf South right now is connected

with this idea of the Anthropocene, which is this scientific epoch

that we are in right now, where humans have the most influence on the planet.

And recently there's a wonderful exhibition

of art at Antenna Gallery and 3116 Gallery called Art and Insurgency.

And the co-curator, Shana M. Griffin, who works a lot on Black displacement here

in the city, and Imani Jacqueline Brown, who is studying Saint James Parish

and the environment there, has worked with this term ‘plantationocene’.

So I'm also thinking about that as I was thinking about your question

and thinking about this city and how everything relates

to this idea of the plantationocene.

Our architecture, the way we talk, the way we interact with each other.

You know, the stratosphere of positions and jobs

and who is on the top and who's on the bottom here is really obvious

in this place and so that's connected with the idea.

I'm thinking about the colonial legacy of sugar and the Anthropocene.

You know, sugar is not indigenous to this region.

It's from actually South Asia and it was brought in the 1400s

when a lot of this expansion of colonialism was actually beginning

and cutting sugar was incredibly labor intensive.

Someone mentioned Evergreen Whitney Plantation.

You know, I just got chills when I went to Whitney the first time

and I saw those big vats of liquid around the plantation.

I got sick to my stomach thinking about what it must have meant

to have carried those vats of boiling hot water that was used for cane

for reducing the hot cane water into syrup

and what that process was for people of African descent.

These boiling houses became more prevalent in the 17th, 18th and 19th century. Joseph Dr. Adderley stated,

that he was exposed to that trauma. He was exposed to this this idea of the

plantationocene, but he moved to Paris when he was really young, so

that's something that you know, we have to contend with.

He was cognizant of the dangers of enslavement and the entanglements of what

it meant to grow this crop and to reduce this crop into what we know as white sugar

His whole existing existence is a product of colonial entanglement.

So I've heard his music, but I have to see him in that way

as I see myself in that way.

And so his position as the claimed son of this noble planter

afforded him allowances that we can only assume

kept him from the gruesome realities of actually doing the backbreaking labor.

But that's an assumption that I'm making.

But we can’t assume that he wasn't, of course, exposed to the trauma of this crop

I wasn't able to find any information on records of his life before he was 13.

So this is a lot of speculation, but he was educated

and cultured in that 1800s way. Right.

And raised in a way that was afforded to an elite child in the

17th century, 18th century.

Thinking of the silencing and erasure of his lived experience

is that his story is not easily told with the tropes of which we are accustomed.

And so I think that's why he's fascinating now.

He was a beneficiary of the colonial project, but

that there had to be tons of privileges that he was not afforded that I'm also

interested in knowing what those are because he was of African descent

and he wasn't the child of a legitimate relationship.

You know, his enslaved 16 year old mother was not married to this person,

but I believe she did go with him to Paris if I'm not mistaken. So there's an

interesting entanglement there that kind of connects with Jefferson also.

He also fought for people in the French Revolution and fought for the liberation

of Haiti. So that's another nuance to his story that separates him from Mozart,

if I'm not mistaken [laughter].

The book that I read calls him the Black Mozart,

which was completely unfair and we need to stop that.

We need to stop it.

You know, when history has been intentionally erased or forgotten,

we should ask ourselves, “What do we have to gain through understanding

this history?” Demi and I are both classically trained musicians,

and I was very shocked that this didn't come up at all during my training.

I'm thinking about his excellence also as a survival tactic.

Yeah, I'm just curious about how we now,

with more information coming about him, seek to

really understand this person in a complete holistic way

or flatten his experience as an exceptional person of color

when his life, of course, contains its own complexity

and richness and distinction.

And also, who else are we erasing when we lift him up?

There are classical musics all over the world,

not just in Western Europe, and we all know that.

So why aren't we lifting up

other classical musicians from the continent of Africa or India?

Who are those exceptional people who we still need to hear from?

But erasure and invisibility have a purpose and are part

of the colonial project and are part of this plantationocene to disregard

how some people of African descent have navigated colonial history.

So I think understanding how he navigated his specific colonial history is

so vital and important and interesting.

Now we can sort of tease out who else?

Who are we missing when we make these comparisons?

- I don't want to interrupt, but I think the important

-- you said something so brilliant there about the Black Mozart thing

because I didn't articulate what's problematic about that.

There's all kinds of people of color all over that colonial world in which he’s in.

And this framing suggests that, okay, there's two -

there's this Mozart and there’s him.

And the point you said about the elite education to which, you know, there's

people of color from these colonial entanglements all over that world

and what sort of Mozart becomes the standard.

Then there's a Black, then all these other people, there's a there's a new erasure.

It's an exquisite point.

- Yeah.

Yeah. Do you want to go ahead and jump in Givonna?

- I'd like to jump in on a couple of things.

My brain is just kind of running.

First of all,

for people who are not as familiar with code noir, this made me think about that.

It's a set of laws in how you exist.

It’s a condition of your birth,

if you're an enslaved person, you inherit the condition of your mother.

But it was where you could go, how you could dress.

And we defied all of those rules in some way or another

when they said if you look white and you have long hair,

when you go in public, you have to cover your hair

because we want to be sure that you have one drop of Black blood.

Right?

So they said, okay, so they piled their beautiful fabrics

up very high and put jewels in them and came out even more beautiful than before.

They were following the rules but not following rules.

So it's important to talk about these laws because by the time

they come to New Orleans, the laws even include Jewish people.

If you were Jewish and you arrived in Louisiana,

you had X amount of days to convert to Christianity or leave.

So it was of people --

they should have called the ‘code of anybody different’.

Right.

It's a crazy existence

because we defy certain laws in the way that we do them,

but we’re living in this crack and Joseph lived in this crack.

I like to give credit to his father.

Most plantation owners would not have taken their child

into a royal society and educated them and raised them in such a way.

It's one of those areas where I say, when we do right things, good things happen.

But over the centuries, we not only had the Black Mozart, we had singers.

Sissieretta Jones was called the Black Paddy.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was called the Black Wagner.

They've done this for many years because it somehow

boggles the mind that we are excellent on our own.

[applause]

It’s a real issue for me.

But Joseph lived kind of in that middle.

Now what's interesting for me -- I hope the movie will talk about it a little bit

-- he lived in that crack but when 200 of the aristocracy of royalty

of all of that were all beheaded, he was the only one that wasn't.

Yet they determined that because he had been part of that world,

his music was not to be played.

That was something that definitely came from Napoleon when Napoleon rose to power

and then his process of reinstating slavery.

Would it be worse to have been,

you know [motions], or to live and watch yourself be removed?

That's what’s powerful for me, that I want to know more about that.

Just like in New Orleans,

we have -- OperaCreole is dedicated to our free composers of color.

Edmond Dédé, Charles Lucien Lambert, Basile Bares,

all of those people that defied the code noir and are still

my mission is to get them to also be unlost.

What has happened,

in COVID, the advantage to COVID after the George Floyd event

is there were lots of meetings and lots of conversations.

In the opera world, I'm on national diversity committees.

The opera world has really been talking about what are we doing?

And his name, of course, has come up and the

Black composers names are coming up and then Bridgerton hits.

Because it becomes this big hit of this period piece

and you've got this Black queen and people are like, What?

So, [chuckles] the success of that I think helped.

I first learned about the Chevalier de Saint Georges when I was

education director for the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in about 2001,

and I have been saying his name since 2001

and when Opera Creole made its debut, we included one of his pieces in 2008.

Before that, when I went to Paris, I broke my neck finding the street

that was named after him because it was concrete reality.

There are those of us that have continued to speak his name.

- You said you first learned of it, was that your initiative

because of your interest... - Yes.

- or did someone else?

- Yes. - Because I think that's important.

- Yes.

- It’s different from you taking that initiative...

- Yes.

- from someone else saying, “Hey, of the things you should know.”

- Right.

- No, you didn't find it out.

You found it out. You sought it out... - Yes.

- which is different. You're not giving yourself enough credit there.

- Yes.

- That's one of the things I was wondering like who is who is not talking?

And so I had some hope that the music folks were, but they were not.

- A conversation that I had just yesterday or maybe this morning with

Dr. Ward over there was this idea of, yes, people existed,

but we need to do the work to be able to sort of start promoting them,

start recognizing their work, start performing, and start reading.

It's just about doing the work.

Before I sort of let you off the hook Denise,

I am really fascinated by the work that you've done, [chuckles] by the work

that you've done about essentially mapping presence

and absence in spaces.

And so you recently collaborated on a really powerful

play with Goat in the Road and Gallier House.

I don't think it was that long ago.

It feels like it was just yesterday, but maybe it's longer than that.

You had a conversation with Diane Mack on WWNO about it.

In that conversation you spoke about the spaces that Black bodies could

and could not be in these houses like Gallier house

which is a very famous house locally here in New Orleans.

I know Joseph Bologne was in Guadeloupe was in Paris in the late 1700s,

the second half of the 18th century and your work was set in the 19th century,

New Orleans, but what is striking is the architecture is identical.

The culture is pretty similar because of all the French colonial influences.

So I'm wondering if you could help us

understand through your much later work, if you could help us understand

the idea of presence and absence and sort of negative space

where Black bodies were not supposed to be, where we very much so see

Joseph was very, very present.

- Thank you for bringing that piece up.

The piece before that I worked -- I'm a company member of Goat in the Road,

which is a local theater company that does immersive theater here in the city.

The Stranger Disease was a production on the Yellow Fever pandemic

and so that is a part of this series of reconstruction plays

that Goat in the Road has been doing.

It was a weird case of art imitating life because it debuted in 2018

and then two years after that, the pandemic happened.

So in this show, more, so than in the subsequent show

which you're referring to, which is The Uninvited, which took place

in 1874 when New Orleans was on the heels of resegregation in the schools.

So The Uninvited was kind of playing with that theme,

and it goes back to what I had said earlier about this loop pedal of,

you know, we're desegregating and now we're segregating again

and then it's the Civil Rights movement, and now we're back to

schools are basically segregated now, but we're not calling them segregated.

So The Stranger Disease took place four years later in 1878.

That was the show that I was actually in and it told the real life of a woman,

a Creole woman of African descent called Adeline Stringer,

who had a boarding house, and she was a manager for other boarding houses,

and her lover was actually German Creole, and his name was Joseph Mathis.

It's a real life story.

There's documents about her correspondence to him -- wait,

his correspondence to her, but I don't think

we have a lot of evidence about her replies.

We know from the nature of his correspondence

that she replied to him, so she was also literate.

They had a complicated but open love affair in the late 1800s

here in New Orleans. And that translated

into her trying to be the beneficiary of Joe's estate was a was a huge deal

and it ended in a property battle with Joe's brother

who you know, who was racist by our standards.

Stories like these are

emblematic of the fluidity of race and class in New Orleans,

so the story of Joseph kind of connects with that show.

But what I wanted to say a little bit about that question

is what Joseph’s story opens up for us is the need to understand the complexity

of Black freedom and Black agency despite the plantationocene.

I want to go to Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, who I know Dr. Adderley

appreciates in her new book, Wicked Flesh.

She mentions this concept of Black femme freedom,

which I'm very, very interested in learning more about.

This concept provides a deeper understanding of the survival tactics

that have been used to allow specifically African-descended women,

but we might be able to apply some of these theories to African-descended men

and indigenous people, to support their survival under repressive regimes.

And this is a quote from Dr. Johnson, “Black femme freedom of fluid plurality

describes actions, expressions and excretions that move beyond the fractional

flesh of the traverse and the container of the Manumission Act

and the practice of refusal, whether in rejected labor or demands or sexual

advances and even refusal to concede in officials to manumission disputes.

Black women and girls claimed ownership over themselves.”

And she also goes on to talk about queer sexual identities as “fomenting

a type of Black femme freedom that dared to form intimate bonds with women”

and also mentions “becoming Black also healed as women, children and men

cast nets of chosen kin and community and relationships over and around each other,

despite the cultural and linguistic differences and the nature

of the plantationocene.”

So “the type of slavery in which an African descendant could be engaged

could be as diverse as urban versus rural,

contract workers for wage versus full time laborers and sharecroppers”

and owning other individuals, which we see, of course, here in Louisiana,

people of African descent owning other people of African descent here, too,

and indigenous people.

As well as the case in Louisiana, perhaps in other places

even, enslaved Africans, Maroons

all represent a wide variety of different ways

an African-descended person could take up space

in the colonial Caribbean and Louisiana and in this culture.

And so I actually thought of Phillis Wheatley, too, because I was

trying to think about people who I actually learned about

when I was in school.

So, she was born a little bit after

Joseph in Senegal, and she, of course, went on to be the first

African American woman to have a published work of poetry.

And I believe it's still poetry month. So I just want to say that.

There is, also, I've thought about Frederick Douglass

Crispus Attucks, Estevanico, all of these firsts.

I was trying to think of all of the firsts as I was preparing for this panel

or all the people who I was trained to think of as these firsts.

So these are some examples and we can be assured

that we are still only skimming the surface of fully acknowledging

and recovering these stories of strategies of visibility and resistance.

So, yeah, so what do we lose by flattening our histories?

What does white supremacy gain through these flattening of histories?

Is interesting, is an interesting,

I guess, thought process that I have.

So this country would not be the capitalist machine that it is

if it were not for the displacement and genocide of indigenous people,

exploitative extractive, genocidal practices of enslaved African descendant

people’s free labor the raping of our natural environment and ecological

resources. And how does that connect to how we think about Black bodies and space.

For The Uninvited for that specific show the actors actually were traumatized

by having to stay in certain places in the Gallier House.

So all of these issues that have translated over centuries

live in the cells of our bodies.

You know, it's related to how we eat, how we interact with each other over time.

And so the absence in our classrooms in the way we are trained classically

is also really traumatic.

And for a lot of people of African descent to enter the classical world

-- and I know Ms. Joseph can speak a lot about that --

it's an exercise in resistance.

And I know I constantly questioned, you know, why am I here?

You know, I was six years old when I had this

old white man actively try to stop me from playing the violin.

But I was attracted to that instrument and it wasn't until later

in life that I learned, look at all these people playing string instruments.

And, you know, in Africa, look at all these people bringing the violin

in enslaved colonial contexts here in the new world.

You know, this is not something new. I'm not special because I play the violin.

I'm a part of this long tradition. I'm taking up space.

My African descendant body is taking up space unapologetically.

But I had to face a lot of trauma and resistance to get there.

And I think every African descended, trained classical musician

can talk about the uncomfortability in the body when we're in these places.

I mean, you can even look at, you know, advertising for the LPO and, you know,

I just see a lot of white people in those advertisings.

- I think connecting [inaudible].

That this is a person that moves between spaces.

And I fear the film will track him

in certain spaces that will look like and help you out.

- Well, you know, one of the things that sticks out for me,

my class at Loyola starts in the 1500s

and there was a free man of color who was a royal trumpeter,

to kings, Henry VII and Henry VIII.

We talk about the Moors, how the Moors left Africa

made their way into Spain, France, England.

Our fingerprints are on every kind of music there is.

And for little kids to learn that and to know -- I always tell

in my lectures, I'm really glad that I was okay being weird.

What the reality is, I wasn't.

What that feels like, you know, this missing of information,

what would it feel like for a kid

coming up as we were to know that we were standing on all of these shoulders,

that we weren't stepping out and doing something that was odd or unusual.

But our fingerprints are everything.

And that royal trumpeter to King Henry VIII

managed to negotiate a raise from the guy who was beheading his wives.

He must have been very good at what he did, right?

So we need to get this information out.

We need to talk to our children and let them know, be who you are.

And I'm blessed that I had parents that felt that way.

My father said to me, you, right now you live in the ghetto.

The ghetto is not in you.

We got a civil rights movement going so you can be whoever

you want to be and whoever you want to be, we got you.

That's the parents I had.

- And that's the real risk of this film that what you both are saying,

which is a world, I know nothing of, is going to get erased

and it's going to be great and he's going to be exceptional

and there's going to be one of him [chuckles].

- Well, your parents sound like amazing people.

- They were.

And if I can turn to you, there was so much in all of those comments

that I want to dig into, but I know we have more ground to cover,

so I'm going to turn it to you, Givonna.

So, let's take it to the point in his life when Bologne family moves to France.

Can you sort of give us a CliffsNotes version of the social circles

that the young Joseph Bologne would have been running in?

And so who are the people he met, he studied with, perhaps?

And what were those relationships like

so far as we are able to know from the history left behind?

- Well, that's another interesting piece.

France is -- one of the positive things is there's

always been some faction of acceptance that we still see today.

There's this, you know, we still can go over there and

feel a certain level of acceptance.

And so he would have had those people.

His father had him, you know, training with the fencing masters.

They could have said, oh, absolutely not.

But of course, they were accepting and they were able to help him to, well,

you know, allow him to excel as he would, right?

But in the movie, they also deal with the fact that there were some people

who said, you know, in another world, you would not be this person,

you would not be dressed this way.

There was, in the movie when he is the king of England --

of France himself -- wants Joseph to take over the Paris Opera.

And the women of the major singers write a petition saying

their conscience could not allow them to submit to the orders of a mulatto.

So there were so many ways that he was in these cracks

and crevices where he was able to excel.

But yet at the same time, that was always the pushback of,

no, let's put you back in your place, put you back in your place.

So the fact that Marie Antoinette accepted him so beautifully,

also later, I think in the movie, it becomes a problem for her

that she gets pushed back.

- And if I recall...

the moment in history about the French opera,

which was for those who don't study French music, was very important opera

at that time.

It was growing and thriving and incredibly important, but they

the director moved on, so they needed to place a new director.

Joseph Bologne, by this time already, Chevalier Saint Georges

was considered the obvious choice and a shoo-in.

Marie Antoinette was advocating for him to have this, but as you said,

it was the three female singers who said they couldn't.

And so the end result was that

nobody was assigned to the French Opera and needless to say,

it did not survive much longer after that, which is really interesting.

And instead, Joseph Bologne

just went on to form his own ensemble, which was fabulous, by the way.

And so but you also mentioned

there are people who are pushing back, like those three singers.

And I have this vague memory of reading this when I was reading up on

his biography that, you know, it was not just any old fencing school.

It was the best fencing school in all of France.

And when he was excelling, there were some rather, for our time

and their time, rather racist people who were like, I do not believe

that this person can be better than my very white self.

I'm paraphrasing, I apologize or apologies for that.

So they would try to challenge him. Does that sound about right?

- Absolutely.

They challenged him.

They you know, they thought, we've got to deal with this mulatto.

We've got to put him back in this place.

And they just thought, you know, he's a party trick.

He's just this, exotic person that they want to say is something.

And of course, he beats everybody.

He beats all the best in France.

And that's why he's like, well, you know, I have nothing else to prove

so I can be head of Paris Opera. [chuckles]

- It wasn't just in the fencing arena.

There were at least three attempts that we know of where people,

more or less in modern terms, jumped him as he was walking down the street.

So he was just fighting them off and then he would go on to his main stage

performance like nothing happened.

True stories told by his friends in their own memoirs.

And so this is a bit of a jump,

but this will help me understand the way some biographers and people

when I read liner notes in recordings or sometimes introductions

to some of his musical scores, people question his financial prowess

because by the time he passed, he did not have any money in the coffers,

so far as we're aware of. So I want to understand that narrative of

was he really bad at managing his finances and wasn't such a great person

after all because of all of the stigma that goes with dying broke?

Or was there something else going on?

And so I'm hoping you could help us understand this a little.

So, Chevalier, his financial status and also that of his father

and frankly, all of France, really ebbed and flowed throughout his lifetime. Right.

So France underwent a severe economic crisis that ruined many very wealthy elite

His father, well, the estate, the family estate, under circumstances

that I'm still a little unclear on, wound up going to his white daughter.

I feel like there's a story there.

So essentially, there was no estate that went to Joseph Bologne.

And so, by the time he --

he also never held an official post with a steady income.

He always had patrons.

So, by the time he passed and he was in later in life,

he did not have bankable income that we’re able to tell in history.

And so when we look back at him

through the lens of history, he can be, and many people have described him

as living off of somebody else's fortune

and other peoples, other white peoples’, financial skills.