Music, Travel, and Imperial Encounter in 19th-Century France

Each of this book's discrete but interrelated chapters is devoted to a different geographic and discursive site, examining French representations of musical encounters in North America, the Middle East, as well as in contested areas within the borders of metropolitan France. Rosenberg highlights intersections between an emergent ethnographie musicale in France and narratives of musical encounter found in French travel literature, connecting both phenomena to France’s imperial aspirations and nationalist anxieties in the period from the Revolution to the late-nineteenth century. It is therefore an excellent research tool for scholars in the fields of cultural studies, literary history, and postcolonial theory.