French-Speaking Worlds: Performing Empire: Afro-French Soldiers on the Bordeaux Stage

Please join the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now for a talk entitled "Performing Empire: Afro-French Soldiers on the Bordeaux Stage" by Professor Scott Sanders (Associate Professor of French, and Affiliated faculty of Music at Dartmouth College).

Abstract: By the late eighteenth century, a significant proportion of France’s Afro-French population resided in Bordeaux: among these residents were servants, merchants, artisans, and soldiers. Of interest are Afro-French soldiers who through their occupation and participation in performance culture participated in the formation of an Afro-French version of subjecthood. As these soldiers were garrisoned near venues, they engaged with performance culture as both audience members and occasional extras in plays. Notably, in productions such as Le Déserteur and Mirza & Lindor, soldiers were portrayed as subjects of the French empire, highlighting the complex dynamics of representation and identity. By speculating on the role of the extra and the representation of foreign-born soldiers, I investigate how theatrical works and soldiers both participate in the formation of a foreign-born version of subjecthood. On one hand, the soldiers’ limited roles as extras in the performance of Empire underscored the marginal position of foreign-born soldiers. Conversely, their participation as extras offered Afro-French individuals a unique opportunity to embody their position as subjects of the French Empire, distinct from the more common practice of blackface performances. Through this nuanced exploration, I examine how Afro-French soldiers, participating in French performance culture, navigated the tensions between their civil subjecthood and their racial identity, ultimately contributing to their evolving civic status.

Scott Sanders is an Associate Professor of French, and Affiliated faculty of Music at Dartmouth College. His research investigates British and Caribbean influences on French performance culture. His first book, Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature, won the 2021 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. His second book project, entitled An Uneasy Marriage: Reflections of the Black Atlantic on French Stages, examines the evolution of an Afro-French subjecthood through performance culture, especially in theatrical works produced across the naval admiralties in Metropolitan France, including the slave trading ports Bordeaux and Nantes.

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Hosted by the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now Research Group, sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Research Unit and co-sponsored by the France-Stanford Center and Stanford Global Studies.

This event is part of Stanford Global Studies’ Global Research Workshop Program.