(Working draft)
Having lived in different parts of the world, I have closely observed variations in social inequities and power structures that inform my project in the rethinking of difference through multiple angles. Below I’ll give an account of some first-hand experiences which have influenced my work. My own primer for the Stanford (Encyclopedia of Philosophy) primer on identity politics provides the conceptual apparatus which the following speaks to.
Having lived in different parts of the world, I have closely observed variations in social inequities and power structures that inform my project in the rethinking of difference through multiple angles. Below I’ll give an account of some first-hand experiences which have influenced my work. My own primer for the Stanford (Encyclopedia of Philosophy) primer on identity politics provides the conceptual apparatus which the following speaks to.
One of my most striking memories of living in China for the past 5 years was when I checked in to a hotel in Shanghai, and the concierge—upon seeing my Singaporean passport—said, “Oh, so you’re a laowai.” Laowai is a derogatory term which denotes foreigners, but literally translates as “old outsider.” It is usually used to refer to white foreigners, so the concierge’s application of the term to me was rather shocking. What that speech act accomplished, in no uncertain terms, was that I—a Chinese Singaporean in China—am as much of an outsider as white foreigners. This experience of being marginalized as a Chinese in China brought back other memories, e.g. people yelling out “Chinese,” or, even better, “Japanese,” during the years which I spent in London. The dynamics of the contexts were different: being a minority in the UK is not the same as being “not Chinese enough” in China. Whereas I felt like I had to escape from the people mis/identifying my difference in the UK, I never felt afraid in China, though I had to prove my Chineseness by reciting the syllabus for my Chinese music history course to the then chair of music education at my university. (She asked, in an innocuous conversational tone, during the first few months I spent in China, “So what are you teaching for the history of music in China?”)
Within my personal experiences of marginalization, there were definitive differences. There is, in addition, the difference in the way that racism operated in my encounters in London, versus in the tumultuous race politics of the US. Over the past decade, social media has contributed to the development of ever more insidious forms of racism, as racist discursive innovation is nurtured by the textual nature of voluminous Facebook posts and tweets. “All Lives Matter,” while maintaining the “plausible” deniability of being about a universal concern for humanity, is in fact intended as a racist invisibilization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Oppression exerts itself through both universalization and minoritization (“Japanese!”).
Because systemic racism is universal and can be found everywhere in racist society, so anti-racism must be vigilant against all acts and discourses—anti-racism must be universal as well. Yet the universalization of our anti-racist responses can create problems when we examine cases that depart from catastrophic oppression, because anti-hegemony constitutes part of the totality of social life, and points to strategies which we may use to fight back.
Over the past few years, I have been involved in the work of queer advocacy within the Society for Music Theory. In 2018-9, I was appointed to a Task Force for Diversity which recommended the formation of a standing committee for LGBTQ issues. The task force was comprised of representatives from various constituencies, including the SMT Executive Board, as well as groups dedicated to issues of race, gender, and accessibility. Together we formed an alliance that was dedicated to the advancement of queer advocacy, even though most members of the task force did not identify as queer—that is to say, members of the task force, coming from multiple anti-normative perspectives (whether race, gender, or accessibility), converged on the specific anti-normativity of issues surrounding LGBTQ music theory theorists and queer music theory. In this case, a paradoxical universality of anti-normativity within our alliance was critical to the advancement of minority rights, showing that even universals are not universally oppressive. Anti-normativity was a key tenet for queer theorists in the 90s (David Halperin, Lee Edelman), and continued to be the guidepost for more recent theorizations of queer temporality (Elizaeth Freeman) and queer phenomenology (Sara Ahmed).
Aside from my work and life in the US, UK, and China, my experience in Singapore has brought another perspective to the problem of inequity, related in this instance to the issue of difference and stereotype. Those of us from various parts of Asia are regularly consigned as “other” in the West and are expected to “perform” our identity. One of the Singaporean composers I work with, Joyce Koh, recounted to me the alienating experience of being expected by the French audience to write “intercultural” music incorporating Chinese culture into her modernist musical language, which she developed over the course of her doctoral degree at York University (UK), and a decade spent working in Paris, initially at IRCAM and under the mentorship of Tristan Murail. In this case, the cosmopolitan universality of modernism was a means of escape from enforced ethnic stereotype, complicating the colonial history of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. There are times when joining a progressive or cosmopolitan universality can be freeing.
I go into detail about all these experiences because they inform my rethinking of difference and universality, wherein the difference of identity can in some contexts be oppressive, and universality (of anti-normativity and cosmopolitanism) can in some contexts be progressive. Which is to say, that context is everything when we perform ethical analysis. This is why we need to recognize how difference and universality are each means to multiple, different ends. I realize that this level of detail is increasingly difficult to maintain in a US context which has been becoming more and more racist over the past 4 years. But as scholars, our responsibility is to articulate ever more finessed truths, because the complexity of systemic racism calls for a multiplicity of anti-racist approaches. This ties back to a fundamental point: As musicologists, we know that the articulation of historical and cultural difference, as well as difference within archival and ethnographic data, is one of the hallmarks of good scholarship. It’s time to bring this differentiation to the analysis of ethical frameworks and precepts.
