Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:18am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Imperial Hybridity Session Chair: David Irving | |
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Opera on the Edge of Empire: Articulations of Colonial Modernity in Rabindranath Tagore’s Valmiki Pratibha UC Davis In 1881, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), leading poet-composer of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal, wrote his first musical drama entitled Valmiki Pratibha (“The Genius of Valmiki”). The work dramatizes the origin story of its titular protagonist as he transforms from a dacoit leader to the revered poet-sage who would later author the Hindu epic Ramayana. Composed shortly after Rabindranath’s first trip to England, the musical idiom of Valmiki Pratibha integrates aesthetics of European opera alongside Hindustani classical and Bengali folk traditions. Through the analysis of its libretto, swaralipi musical notation, and archival recordings, I demonstrate that his integration of these diverse influences is not a mere grafting of styles but rather an active forging of new cultural articulations shaped by British-Indian colonial encounter. Drawing on postcolonial frameworks of modernity (Chatterjee 1993; Chakrabarty 2000) and hybridity (Bhabha 1994), I theorize Valmiki Pratibha’s role in negotiating a distinctive Bengali subjectivity within colonial structures and contemplate how the intimate cultural relationship between British imperial power and its Indian subjects was mediated through musical drama. In doing so, this paper illuminates the “transmutation” of opera (Nicholson 2022) as it shifts in positionalities and performances of coloniality, ultimately centering “shadow opera cultures” (André 2018) – marginalized works such as Valmiki Pratibha – in the narrativization of a global operatic history. | |