Towards decolonial pedagogies of world music

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship has addressed the roles epistemological colonialism plays in music education. Following several publications on decoloniality in music studies and education, this article discusses how ethnomusicological pedagogies and scholarly practices can engage in unsettling practices of critique and creative action that attend to sites of oppression beyond the reflexes of tokenism, nativism, and other ‘settler moves to innocence’. This article presents some pragmatic directions that come out of the critiques highlighted therein, inspired by pedagogical practices proposed by Chérie Rivers Ndaliko, Marco Cervantes and L.P. Saldaña, and others. This includes a three-module lesson facilitating students through the examination of coloniality in the musical histories of a place, the challenging of coloniality in the practice and consumption of musics today, and the creation of entirely different musical possibilities that re/centre students’ lived experiences, his-/her-/their-stories, and ancestries.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoloniality
• critical pedagogy
• ethnomusicology
• music and culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 George J. Sefa Dei and Meredith Lordan describe anticoloniality as the action, means, or path by which people can achieve a decolonial future, a future in which ‘Indigenous and colonized bodies take control of their own thought processes […] to act in concrete ways to address colonialism, patriarchy, and other forms of social oppression’ (Dei and Lordan 2016). The title of my article – borrowing from the co-authored piece ‘Ethnomusicology & Performance Studies: Towards Interdisciplinary Futures of Indian Classical Music’ (Prasad and Roy 2017) – attempts to highlight the always unfolding, unfinished work behind these movements, and the complex interventions they make to conventionally fixed understandings of ‘world music,’ ‘research,’ and ‘pedagogy.’ The content of this article bears no relation to a similarly titled article ‘Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum,’ published by a senior scholar who had editorial access to two early drafts elsewhere.

2 In the open letter, Brown emphasizes that SEM, ‘whose predominantly white members by and large research people of color, is and can be nothing other than a colonialist and imperialist enterprise […] No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise, until ethnomusicology as a field is dismantled or significantly restructured, so that epistemic violence against BIPOC is not normalized, Black lives do not matter’ (https://www.mypeopletellstories.com/blog/open-letter).

3 See ‘In Support of Dr. Brown,’ published June 14, 2020 by The Scare Quotes (TSQ): https://thescarequotes.carrd.co/. Also see ‘Open Letter to the Society for Ethnomusicology,’ published August 28, 2020, co-written by Project Spectrum and TSQ: https://www.projectspectrummusic.com/publications.

4 Drawing from her experiences learning dance, Sherry Shapiro describes how the body – especially the female body – is shaped and reshaped to the ideological contours of society, noting how it is not only inscribed by power, but also expresses resistance to a hegemonic culture (1999: xx).

5 Colonization constitutes the formal and institutional processes of governance of subjection, whereas coloniality consists of the on-going propagation of knowledge and ideas to foster and cement the interests of the dominant (Grosfoguel 2002; Maldonado-Torres 2004; Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2007, 2011; Dei and Lordan 2016). Colonialist systems of knowledge occur when epistemological, ontological and even cosmological relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner and his property, and Indigenous relationships to land are interred and made pre-modern, backward, or savage (Wolfe 1999). Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event (Wolfe 1999), that is reproduced virtuosically by individuals in positions of authority, privilege and power. It is a practice of ‘homemaking,’ in which Indigenous epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are remade into property, and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property (Tuck and Yang 2012: 5).

6 See: https://www.projectspectrummusic.com/open-letter-to-sem.

7 It is my understanding that efforts are underway in the United Kingdom to promote equality, diversity and inclusion in Music Studies. The cross-organizational network known as Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Music Studies (EDIMS) ‘supports and promotes work seeking to redress historical exclusion and under-representation in relation to a range of areas’ through support networks, mentoring, safe spaces, resource development, and events. EDIMS is dedicated to ‘raising awareness and facilitating change [that] will lead to a revisioning and hosting of educational and research environments that are welcoming to all and in which everyone feels enfranchised’ (see https://www.edimusicstudies.com/about).

8 For discussions on the disciplinary barriers that segment and stymie the study of music and other performance disciplines, I (conveniently) refer to the collaborative article ‘Ethnomusicology and Performance Studies: Towards Interdisciplinary Futures of Indian Classical Music’ written by Pavithra Prasad and myself (2017).

9 See Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). Also see Thomas Solomon’s ‘Where is the Postcolonial in Ethnomusicology?’ (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeff Roy

Jeff Roy (they/them) is a professional musician, filmmaker, and Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at Cal Poly Pomona. Roy holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA and is a two-time Fulbright recipient, Film Independent Fellow, and recent Postdoctoral Fellow at le Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS) à l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. Their work centres on the politics and performance of queer, transgender and hijra cultural movements and identity formations at the intersections of race, class, caste, and religion in South Asia.