Julia Prest is Professor of French and Caribbean Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. She has published widely on early-modern French and Caribbean theatre, opera and dance, and is the creator of the trilingual (English-French-Kreyòl) Theatre in Saint-Domingue, 1764-1791 performance database: '[...]'. She has collaborated with theatre-makers to create new works that bring colonial-era theatre to today's audiences, and her edited collection, Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre: Issues in Research, Writing and Methodology is forthcoming in 2023.

The first book-length study of the underexplored relationship between public theatre and the enslaved population

The fullest account to date of the local, Creole theatre tradition

Foreign language quotations are in French or Creole and in English translation

1 Introduction.- 2 Mitigated Spectators: Enslaved People in the Playhouse.- 3 Unsustainable Tensions: 'Slave Ownership' among Theatre-Makers.- 4 Mitigated Portrayals: Enslaved Figures in Creole Repertoire.- 5 Concealed Contributors: Enslaved Participation in Theatre-Making.- 6 New Citizens: Shifting Roles in Revolutionary-Era Theatre.- 7 Conclusion.