How might we define English opera in the seventeenth century? Whole books have been written on this topic, and because of the variable terminology with which seventeenth-century writers labelled their works (‘opera’, ‘dramatick opera’, ‘masque’, ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’), it is unlikely that absolute clarity will ever be had.1 Indeed, the English had a capacious and fluid notion of what constituted opera during the seventeenth century, and we should adjust our overly narrow definitions if we are to understand English opera as people in the seventeenth century did: as a genre that sometimes was fully sung, but, more often than not, included spoken dialogue.2

This chapter introduces key concepts in postcolonial studies and discusses recent developments of postcolonial criticism within biblical studies, such as empire studies, liberation hermeneutics, and cultural studies, including materialist, race/ethnicity, feminist, and queer approaches to empire and colonialism.

Building on the work of Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) scholars, this essay considers the limitations of international law (and the human rights legal framework more specifically) in addressing slavery, and the ways in which contemporary global fiction puts pressure on normative legal and literary conceptions of slavery and freedom. The essay begins with an examination of how slavery and the slave narrative take shape in the context of international law that is rooted in colonial encounters and predicated on the differential recognition of humanity. That analysis leads to investigation of how normative twentieth century human rights law delimits the concepts of slavery and freedom. In its final section, the essay how several contemporary global fictions challenge the familiar, generic logic of the slave narrative and, with it, human rights imaginaries of freedom.

This chapter discusses the different ways textual criticism and reception history are interrelated. Textual criticism is not simply the prerequisite to the task of interpretation but can help to illuminate the compositional growth, transmission, and early interpretation of biblical texts.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which topics and methodological approaches from LGBTI/Queer Studies have influenced LGBTI/Queer biblical interpretation.

Examining two of the most influential novels of late imperial China, Ransmeier’s essay finds enslaved people to be both omnipresent and unremarkable in this period. Both the high Qing era The Dream of the Red Chamber and the Late Ming The Plum and the Golden Vase are set in opulent households doomed to decline, in part by the emotional needs or sexual appetites of their fallible male protagonists. Consuming these narratives, readers become invested in their fate, and accept a world in which human trafficking, slavery, and sexual exploitation played a natural part of domestic life. While unfreely obtained labor was a characteristic feature of the households described in these epic novels and played a central role in attending to the creature comforts of elite masters and mistresses, and while the authors did not necessarily obscure the emotional struggles of individual enslaved people, neither text advocates for social change. The essay also shows how both Dream author Cao Xueqin and the anonymous author of Plum bind their protagonists to karmically determined ends, deploy enslaved people in service of their storytelling, and take advantage of the predominant hierarchical system of their time, creating worlds in which no one was truly free.

Generations after the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), West African digital creative writers imagine newer iterations of slavery or recreate parodies of the TAST. Whether a story revolves around a street child hawking goods in Accra traffic, or a gifted child who is trafficked from a village in Nigeria to America, these short stories perpetuate fears of—but also resistance to—new forms of trafficking and labor exploitation that are endemic in the West African sub-region. While research has examined the ways in which these tropes appear in cheap popular fiction, not much has been done regarding new media, such as online short fiction, which is avidly consumed by West African youth. This chapter uses two short stories to interrogate different types of slavery in online spaces and to explore literary choices that inform the treatment of this theme in the digital age.

Theorizations of slavery in the Indian Ocean world often draw upon analyses of enslavement in the anglophone Black Atlantic world, productively highlighting continuities between systems of unfree labor migration across oceans. This chapter, however, focuses mainly on how enslavement in the Indian Ocean diverged from Atlantic models, and the implications this has had for the literatures of slavery. If the anglophone Black Atlantic can be considered a sphere of autobiographical speech and legal silence, the Indian Ocean world of enslavement is one of autobiographical silence, but legal speech. The rich heteroglossia of Indian Ocean legal records stands in contrast to portrayals of the Atlantic Ocean slave trade as a process of silencing and erasure. The existence of these legal records affects the representation of the enslaved in later, fictional narratives of slavery, which share an interest in voice, testimony, and the law. After a brief summary of the historical contexts of slavery in the Indian Ocean world, this chapter examines depictions of enslaved voices in legal archives and fictional works. The final section turns to literatures of indenture, a more recent form of coerced labor migration, to suggest why we should not consider indenture as simply a continuation of slavery.

This chapter explains the nature of the social-scientific interpretation of biblical texts, tracing its recent development from the early 1970s and focusing on contributions that have come from sociology, anthropology, and social psychology.

Introduced in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century, Italian opera took a long time to conquer French audiences. The genre of the spoken tragedy, represented by the works of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, had brought French theatre since the 1640s to a point of perfection: the notion of a play being sung throughout was thus met with much scepticism. French desire for cultural hegemony also resisted opera, which was perceived as an Italian import. The fate of this genre was also complicated at the political level: Cardinal Mazarin’s attempt to impose opera in France did not sit well in the hostile climate generated by the Fronde (1648–1653), during which time several members of Parliament and high-ranking nobles vehemently opposed strengthening the absolute monarchy. While Italian influence was considerable in the artistic domain, it was progressively restricted to theatrical architecture, machinery, and décors, all aspects that would nevertheless become paramount for the development of ‘pièces à machines’, that is, spectacular theatrical plays mostly performed on private stages – princely residences, the king’s palaces – and in Parisian public theatres.

Opera was produced only rarely in the otherwise vibrant theatrical culture of seventeenth-century Spain and her American dominions, though Italian operas and occasional Spanish ones became a mainstay of public life in the Spanish-held territories in Italy, especially Naples and Milan. At the royal court in Madrid and the principal administrative centres of the overseas colonies (Lima and Mexico), opera was inextricably bound to dynastic politics and constrained by conventions about the gender of onstage singers. Several other kinds of plays with music were produced at theatres both public and private, however, and commercial theatres known as corrales were among the busiest sites of musical performance and cultural transmission. Some 10,000 plays were performed in Madrid in the course of the seventeenth century, although only about 2,000 such texts have been preserved. The principal theatrical genre was the comedia nueva, a three-act play in poly-metric verse in which the tragic and the comic were mingled to recreate the natural balance of human existence with varying degrees of verisimilitude.