The seeds of this project took root in long, unbounded conversations in Paris and other locales, enriched by our shared love of France and the United States, our curiosity about cultural interconnections between them and within the Atlantic world, and our deep interest in interrogations of race, gender, and ‘silent’ areas of music historiography. This volume has also emerged out of a collective interest in the ways in which early encounters between France and America continue to resonate in today's geopolitical alliances, national com-memorations, and distinct but correlating ideas about transatlantic history. Events in the public spotlight in 2021, such as France's precipitous cancellation of its commemoration of French assistance in the American Revolutionary War over the AUKUS agreement in September, its decision to place the remains of African American singer-dancer Josephine Baker in the hallowed space of the Panthéon, or the puzzling responses to Haitian political, economic, and refugee crises by the United States and Europe, represent only a few examples that seem to echo the dynamics of past relations and perceptions. In this volume of collected essays, we have opted to interrogate French views of America, not only of the young United States, but also the wider ‘Amérique’ (or Amérique septentrionale’) that France knew in earlier centuries, encompassing parts of the North American continent as well as its own colonial islands of the West Indies.

As editors of this collection of essays, we quickly came to realise that our study of French representations of ‘America’ or ‘Amérique’ in music, theatre, dance, and spectacle could not escape revisiting the themes of revolution and race that played such prominent roles in transatlantic exchanges within our chosen time frame of the long nineteenth century. In light of present-day revolutions of thought and civic action that have begun to shine more powerful light on obscured subjects in the writing and teaching of history and culture – in particular, the history and legacy of transatlantic slavery – we have approached this project with a sense of urgency to contribute to the expansion of musicological enquiry about race beyond the more established studies of jazz-era Paris or the exoticism of Josephine Baker.