Exoticism as Tragedy: Performing Race in the Tagalog Zarzuelas of the Early Twentieth Century

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Tagalog zarzuela became a multivalent form of popular musical theater that mirrored socio-political realities and created new fantasies of a national and post-colonial future. Bringing together literary, historical, and musical analyses, Dr. Miranda's lecture will show that unlike other exoticist works that shaped ideas about the Western "us" and the Orientalized "them," Tagalog zarzuelas challenged such binary constructions as they critiqued European and Japanese colonial expansion while remaining ambivalent to the US presence in the Philippines.

Note: This event will not be livestreamed.