Conference Agenda

In September 2022, a new opera by Namibian composer Eslon Hindundu, Chief Hijangua, premiered in Windhoek. A year later, in September 2023, the work received its European premiere in Berlin. Produced by a German–Namibian team – composer Eslon Hindundu, German librettist Nikolaus Frei, and German director Kim-Mira Meyer – this transnational collaboration was promoted as “Namibia’s first indigenous opera”. Drawing on oral histories and folklore from both Namibia and Germany, the opera presented a tragic love story set against the backdrop of the 1904–1908 genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples by German colonial forces.

Apart from its local setting and German-Otjiherero libretto, Chief Hijangua offered little innovation in terms of operatic composition or production. Viewed through Lorenzo Veracini’s theoretical model of settler colonialism (2010, 2015), the opera exemplifies what he terms “cultural elimination and replacement” characteristic of settler societies such as Namibia. Composed in the musical language of nineteenth-century Western art music, Lutheran church music, and some traditional Herero melodies, the opera tells the story of the destruction of a Herero clan at the hands of one of their own. This paper employs Veracini’s theory of settler colonialism as a critical framework to interrogate the opera’s colonial premises and demonstrates how the colonial premises of the work overpowers the indigenous intensions of its creators.

Damien Geter’s and Jessica Murphy Moo’s opera, Loving v. Virginia, premiered in 2025 by Virginia Opera. Based on the landmark civil rights case of the same name, Loving v. Virginia retells the compelling love story of Mildred and Richard Loving. Using reflexive ethnography and drawing from interviews conducted during my tenure in Virginia Opera’s Civic Engagement department, I situate the love story at the core of Loving v. Virginia in the current political landscape in the U.S. I place Loving v. Virginia and Black opera (Naomi André, 2018) in conversation with feminist, Black, and education theory that detail both the love and terror that co-exist and co-define in oppressive regimes (Baldwin, 1972; Spillers, 1987; Wynter and Nandita Sharma, 2015; Shantelle Moreno, 2022; Ashley Hall, 2021). I argue that Black opera, understood in the capaciousness and contrapuntality intended by Naomi André, operates as a praxis of love, a powerful monument against authoritarian regimes, its meaning made in the memories and ontologies of the beholders.

In the postcolonial afterlife of opera in Nigeria, the operatic voice emerges within a dynamic performance economy in Lagos, where singers continually adapt and recontextualize global repertoires. While dominant narratives of operatic modernity uphold Eurocentric vocal traditions as universal standards, Lagos-based performers expose opera as negotiated, contingent, and locally remade. This paper examines how contemporary musicians navigate the interplay between global operatic heritage and indigenous artistic logics, producing hybrid soundscapes that recalibrate tradition and modernity.

Focusing on Guchi Egbunine’s Yoruba- and Igbo-inflected revoicing of “O Sole Mio” and a nightclub rendition of the “Habanera” from Carmen—featuring soprano Chinwe Okorie with a rap verse by tenor Daniel Okereke—I argue that these artists enact “contextual modernities” shaped by sacred idioms, linguistic plurality, and site-specific vocal aesthetics. Together, these performances reframe opera as a mutable practice embedded in postcolonial conditions, articulating distinctly Nigerian modes of musical modernity that exceed inherited European frameworks.