First published on Sound Matters, blog of the Society for Ethnomusicology, August 15, 2018
I recently decided to revisit the issue of teaching
opera in prison again with colleagues. Despite insightful responses by William
Cheng and Bonnie Gordon to the widely condemned post “Don Giovanni Goes to
Prison” by Pierpaolo Polzonetti (all on the Musicology
Now blog, published by the American Musicological Society), it seems that
musicologists as a community has not developed a deeper understanding of the issues
related to racial dynamics in the US as expressed through music and musical
institutions.
The reaction of many in the musicological community
reflected a progressive commitment to anti-racism and anti-colonialism as
anchored in the concept of cultural difference. Accordingly, many regard it as
unacceptable for a professor who is “white” in the contemporary US contex to
impose his music on students who are drawn from a prison population which is
majority people of color. “Colonialism” is a term I’ve heard in discussion with
colleagues which was used to describe Polzonetti’s educational endeavor.
Implied in “colonialism” is the power differential between the educator and
students, and the cultural mismatch between the “white” music and the target
audience consisting primarily of people of color. Many read Polzonetti’s post
through discursive lenses: Polzonetti’s portrayal of a black male student protesting
Donna Elvira’s shoddy treatment (by the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni) was interpreted as an instantiation
of the racist stereotype of the violent black man; Polzonetti’s self-described
attempt to get his students to “chill out” by focusing on the music analysis of
emotion was interpreted as a discourse of the civilizing force of white opera
on a black man.
More much needs to be said about opera and Western empire,
including opera’s racism and orientalism, and the contemporary globalized reverence
for Western art music. Here, I’ll focus on the reception of Polzonetti’s post and suggest alternative strategies
for the progressive movement in musicology, which is unavoidably contextualized
by heightened racial tensions in the US: recall that Polzonetti’s post appeared
in February 2016 as Trump was emerging as a presidential candidate and running
a campaign characterized by abhorrent racist discourses. What if, instead of
assuming the worst about Polzonetti, we had given him the benefit of the doubt,
assuming that educators who volunteer in prison have good intentions? Can we
regard Polzonetti’s work in prison, crossing racial and class lines, as
progressive to some extent? I wonder what the effect of the “calling out” of
Polzonetti through public denouncement on social media has been on him as a
scholar, educator, and individual. And I wonder if Ngọc Loan Trần, who has critiqued call-out culture
for alienating instead of engaging those deemed to be offenders, would approve of calling “in” Polzonetti, which means inviting
him to join an even more progressive agenda by developing conceptual and
pedagogical frames together with him. Is there a way in which we could have acknowledged Polzonetti’s effort
to reach across the aisles of race and class—albeit in a highly problematic
way—and persuade him to revise his position and adopt what progressives would
accept as a more ethical way of relating to racial others?
This is a
question that has been bothering me, and not just because of the “reparative”
view that seeks to acknowledge at least some traces of good intention, versus a
“paranoid” view that Polzonetti’s efforts were made in the name of naked
oppression. The question bothers me because call-out culture is fragmenting
progressive communities at large (which aim for social, cultural, and legal
reform) through policing in public platforms and a tendency to shame and cast
outside those aspiring progressives who are deemed not progressive enough. The more pressure that is applied on race
in the Trump era, the more aggressive call outs are likely to be, and the less
patient progressives are likely to be with one another. The result is that
instead of coalition building, parts of the progressive movement seem to aim to
become more and more progressive by slicing off other unwanted portions of
itself. This revolutionary avant-garde mentality that insists on the purity of
resistance seems a little paranoid—“You are not progressive enough, and so you
must be here to destroy the progressive movement by watering it down.” Sedgwick
appropriately describes the stylistics
of paranoid readings as that of “minimalist elegance and conceptual
economy”—sounds like call-out culture?
There are of course inherent problems with certain practices
of pedagogy which focus on the transmission of knowledge from expert to novice,
problems exacerbated in prison context; Polzonetti’s account seems to suggest
that he opted to convey specialized knowledge (the musical analysis of emotion)
as a response to the emergent feminist narrative of the student protesting
Donna Elvira’s treatment. In doing so, Polzonetti appears to have missed an
opportunity to create a community of learning where students collaborate in the
making of musical knowledge—this is particularly disappointing given the dire
need for avenues for negotiating the personal and social spaces of a harsh
carceral environment (Harbert’s research is instructive in this regard). Teaching
is a relational activity where race relations are often unavoidable and can
even be instructive. A unit on opera as part of a larger course can become a
chance for everyone in the classroom to participate in a discussion of the
history of the adoption of Western art music, including opera, by the white
majority in the US, and from there move on to the general racialization of
music. This could lead to further discussion of issues like the acquiring of
cultural capital (through opera courses) as well as sheer musical enjoyment, and
the complicated ways in which race, history, social status, and musical joy
intersect. Most often, however, many of my colleagues attach a “racist” label
to teaching opera in prison and stop there; and many of them, including opera
specialists, have yet to develop a conceptual frame for thinking about the
racial dynamics of the teaching of opera. This does not necessarily mean that
they hold beliefs about the superiority or inferiority of races; it means that
musicology as a whole is lagging behind other disciplines in its racial
reckoning. In the context of institutional racism, individuals may unwittingly
perpetuate a racist system or “formation” by maintaining conventions (such as doctoral
translation exams in the key operatic languages of German, French, and
Italian). They may even be aware of personal culpability within a racist system
without knowing how to walk out of it. It is a mistake to lump together those opera
scholars with no interest in reaching beyond racial lines, with opera scholars
who teach in prisons with good intentions and might even want to develop a
pedagogical framework that addresses race in a responsible way—if only we had
waited. In the age of online social media, literally waiting in terms of
quantitative time is improbable as we rush to comment. But what I mean is
waiting in the sense of withholding judgement, and opting instead to sow the
seeds of change in others’ minds. Is it possible that this less radical
approach might be able to achieve something that fiery critiques can’t?
In the age of Trump, it is important that we examine
how racial critique has had to suffer the additional burden of speaking ever
more loudly against power. Lived racial lives and race as a concept and symbol
have had to carry the heavy responsibility of serving as vanguards of the
resistance against Trump, which must surely have had the effect of sharpening
progressives’ racial awareness. But racisms within and
without AMS are not one-of-a-kind necessarily—they exist on a continuum of the capacity for physical and
social harm, have different genealogies, and call for different responses. Where there are good but
misguided intentions, where there are willing interlocutors, we might create
room for patient conversation. To recognize when and where “calling in” might
be appropriate, we have to differentiate: the institutional
racism of AMS that musicologists today inevitably and perhaps unwillingly
inherited is not necessarily the same as the kind of racism wrought alongside
political and economic forces in global hyper-mediatized neoliberal context. It
is not necessarily of a kind with racism wrought in the heteronormative
imaginaries of reproductivity and the organic body. We need to think in terms of radical intersectionality between racial scapegoating and
off-shoring of jobs in the US, between race and its symbolic reproduction,
between organic and inorganic racial bodies, and between anti-racisms that limit
rather than expand agency and participation—that is to say, we need to think of
race as part of a much larger material
“assemblage” (after Gilles Deleuze) or “queer assemblage” (after Jasbir
Puar) of different components that continuously change in terms of
relationality to another, relative visibility, and impact on racial lives.
Racism is real. It relies on, has a complex relation with, and can
sometimes even distract us from the equally
devastating effects of poverty, capitalist exploitation, psychological
manipulation, and environmental degradation. Because racism is rampant and is deadly, we can become impatient—in
light of that simple truth—for scholars undertaking European-focused
musicological or music theory studies to develop a critical awareness of race.
In not waiting for that, we risk
closing our ears to any anti-racist voice that is not already amped up to the highest volume. “No
aspiring progressives allowed!”
Particularly in
a moment of impending, intertwined ecological, economic and social disasters
brought on by global predatory capitalism that has been practiced by appointees
of the Trump administration (drawn from Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil etc.), it is
more important than ever that progressives find strength in one another and
work to broaden their base of support. We must apply innovative approaches to
address the rise of racial and other forms of social reactionism, and
understand the alignment between reactionary politics and ideologically
coherent, profit-driven practices (job offshoring, weakening unions, climate
change denial etc.) that have created a fertile ground of white poverty for
hate to fester in. It is against this background that we must ask, How should those
of us who are in relatively less precarious situations develop a strategy for
the complexities and ambiguities of confronting and working through our national legacy of
institutionalized racism and the current neoliberal racial regime, so that we all
are given a chance to evolve and build a stronger movement together?
