Music and Anti-Imperial Solidarity with Elaine Kelly (12 March)

Wednesday 12 March, 3pm – 4.30pm, Chrystal Macmillan Building, Conference Room 3.15

A seminar with Elaine Kelly (Music) on “Opera against Apartheid: Reiter der Nacht at the German State Opera”, a draft chapter from Elaine’s current book project Music and Anti-Imperial Solidarity: East Germany and the Third World. Set against the backdrop of East Germany’s fight for international legitimacy, decolonization in Asia and Africa, and the development in the socialist bloc of international solidarity as a political and ideological project, the book uses music to explore the frameworks of solidarity through which the Second and Third Worlds interacted between ca. 1960 and 1990. The chapter takes a single work, the anti- apartheid opera Reiter der Nacht, to examine how solidarity and the Third World (in this case South Africa) was understood within official discourses in the GDR.