Aidaand Nine Readings of Empire

What influence did contemporary attitudes towards empire and towards ‘Other’ peoples exert on musical works, especially when those peoples were perceived as being of a different race? The answer surely varies with the genre and also with the complexity of the given work. The late Edward Said – the most prominent and controversial figure in cultural critique of this sort – put it well: a work that is ‘rich in … aesthetic intellectual complexity’ must not be treated as if it were a crudely ‘jingoistic ditty’ – or, for the present context, a racist one. Said's specific example of a complex literary work, in that passage from his important book Culture and Imperialism , is Jane Austen's Mansfield Park , with its occasional, resonant references to a sugar plantation in the Caribbean and thus also to the British slave trade. 1 The problem becomes even more intense in music (of equivalent aesthetic complexity). Instrumental works are particularly difficult to interrogate on any ‘extra-musical’ basis, for an obvious and much-discussed reason: the relative inability of music, without verbal or visual anchors, to denotate and to narrate. 2