Bizet's Carmen has often been understood as a story of ill-fated love between two equal parties whose destinies happen to clash. But to read the opera in this fashion is to ignore the faultlines of social power that organize it, for while the story's subject matter may appear idiosyncratic to us, Carmen is actually only one of a large number of fantasies involving race, class and gender that circulated in nineteenth-century French culture. Thus before exploring the opera on its own terms, we need to reexamine the critical tensions of its original context – the context within which it was written and first received – as well as the politics of representation: who creates representations of whom, with what imagery, towards what ends?

Musicologists have long recognized Carmen's exoticism as one of its most salient features, but they usually treat that exoticism as unproblematic. Indeed, until quite recently, most of the exotic images and narratives that proliferate in Western culture were regarded as innocent: the “Orient” (first the Middle East, later East Asia and Africa) seemed to serve merely as a “free zone” for the European imagination. Edward Said, however, has shown that this “free zone” was always circumscribed by political concerns. Some of these were relatively benign. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the “Orient” offered a vantage point from which French writers could criticize their own society. Thus Rousseau addressed the East as a Utopian philosopher contemplating alternatives with the West, and Montesquieu adopted the persona of a Persian traveler writing letters home about the odd social practices he encounters in Paris.