Last month, countless people—particularly in the Global North—made an annual outing to hear the ballet The Nutcracker (1892) with music by Peter Illich Tchaikovsky. This ballet continues to be so popular that it generates 40% of annual ticket revenues of ballet companies based on lands occupied by the colonial US state. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this familiarity, the ballet has not been the subject of a great deal of critical scrutiny. In response to this, the present text considers some entry points in thinking about how the ballet reiterates, rationalizes, and normalizes imperial logics of racialization and colonization. Written in Russia at a time when this imperial nation was engaged in territorial conquest, the ballet continues to resonate with Global North audiences, not least on occupied Turtle Island.
The Nutcracker’s plot explicitly enacts an archetypally colonizing voyage. For Palestinian cultural theorist Edward Saïd, a critical reading of the imperial work of literary and musical narrative necessitates attention not only to how narrative engages time but also to how it engages “space, geography, and location.” Following Saïd, one can trace how the ballet 1) begins in Germany, considered by the late nineteenth century to be central Europe, 2) in act 2 departs for the “peripheral” areas of Spain, Arabia, China, and Russia, and 3) ends by re-asserting signifiers of European-ness such as the central European genre of the waltz, harmonic tonality, and goal-oriented dramaturgy. Significantly, this voyage to empire’s periphery is driven by a quest for rare food commodities, recalling early modern colonizing-enslaving quests for the like. This scene refers to chocolate, recalling the Spanish colonization of the Americas, sugar, recalling European colonizing-enslaving activities in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and coffee and tea, recalling the activities of the Dutch East India Company.
This connection to colonial relations is even more explicit in the dances’ titles, “Chocolate: Spanish Dance,” “Coffee: Arab Dance,” and “Tea: Chinese Dance,” which reduce peoples and lands to docile purveyors of “resources,” an implication often reinforced by the usual approaches to choreographing these pieces. Similarly explicitly, the ballet’s scenario describes the setting of act 2 as the “The Land of Sweets,” recalling early modern inscriptions of colonized lands as “spice islands” and “sugar islands,” in which the lands are rendered as a terra nullius devoid of sovereignty, if not of human habitation altogether. In present day Southwest Asia, the legacies of this kind of resource colonialism are disturbingly present, with imperial quests for oil driving the region’s politics; for the imperial powers, Southwest Asia is, among other things, “the land of oil.” This legacy continues in recent attacks on Palestine, which have opened up possibilities for resource extraction, with BP and ENI being recently granted gas exploration off the coast of Gaza.
It is worth also considering how the supposedly apolitical “music itself” is also complicit in naturalizing imperial relations. The ballet uses musical temporality (i.e. particular ways in which music proceeds in time) to assert categorical differences between the different lands it depicts, reiterating damaging racializing figurations. While the European setting where the ballet begins and ends is written through harmony and texture as dynamic and progressive, the non-European settings of act 2, particularly of the “Coffee: Arab Dance” and “Tea: Chinese Dance” are characterized by harmonic and textural stasis. In such a way, “Arabia” and “China” are not only marked with respect to musical norms of harmonic tonality, but are also marked with respect to imperial bio-/necropolitical norms that confer full political subjecthood only upon subjects legible as dynamic and progressive. In a textbook Orientalist strategy, the stasis of both dances essentialize and fix their ethnic referents as inherently inert, and, in the case of the “Chinese” dance, also mechanical, if not grotesque. This racialization of temporality not only perpetrates epistemic violence against Arab and Chinese people, but also provides cover for imperial violence against Southwest Asia, North Africa, and China.
Read against the era of the ballet’s composition, this latter consequence is particularly acute. The late nineteenth century was the heyday of Western racializing notions of evolution, which was used as justification for peoples deemed to be modern (i.e. “the West” itself) to colonize and even commit genocide against peoples deemed to be primitive or otherwise inadequately modern. Peoples assumed to be less dynamic than the West were purported to have maxed out their evolutionary potential; evolutionist discourse asserted that these peoples’ demise was inevitable, normalizing imperial violence worldwide. This discourse is echoed in present-day denigrations of Palestinians (particularly those who are Muslim), as backwards: as hyper-religious, as technologically unsophisticated, and as innately violent, or, in a more contemporary racialist-evolutionist lexicon, as anti-queer, as misogynistic, and as mono-cultural.
Taken together, the ballet’s plot and music work together in disturbing ways. On one hand, the plot reduces lands to a terra nullius of “raw materials” that are simply there for the taking; on the other hand, the music writes these lands’ inhabitants as evolutionarily inert, justifying the imperial violence required to extract the desired “resources.”
Null Point 