This is a follow up to my 2021 post on How Other People’s Conception of Difference Erases My Lived Experience. Since then, I’ve recalled or experienced further incidents that I now regard as the colonization of global musicologies and musicologists. As someone who has lived and worked in Asia for most of my life, I count myself among global musicologists. (It's not so much that I identify as a musicologist as that others see me as one.)
The re-colonization of global musicologies is something that occurs when North American/European scholars appropriate the anti-racist movement led by BIPOCs, and then adopt a purist position, from which they paint global scholars outside of colonial-imperial centers as regressive. It is with the most “advanced” theory on race and decoloniality emanating from North America and Europe, which regards themselves as the vanguard of knowledge, that global scholars, often in former colonies, are re-colonized. The way this re-colonization occurs is through both publications and microaggressions, often a combination of the two.
Frequently, it is the case that the anti-racist and decolonial tenets in question (often new, but sometimes also old), are a much better fit for North American/European contexts than for material global practices with different histories and formations of racism, classicism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Yet when I point this out, I am treated as a country pumpkin from elsewhere. (As a counterpoint, let me simply say that excluding study group panels, I’ve convened 14 panels at AMS/SMT/SEM conferences since 2014). These newest ethical tenets become the means by which North American/European scholars impose their own understanding over global geographies and global scholars. Any deviation from the latest anti-racist/decolonial rules set in stone by North American/European scholars is taken to mean that global scholars are uneducated, drawing on methods as outdated as those from the 19C. There is little recognition that the methodological landscape of North America/Europe is a product of colonial history and designed to ameliorate asymmetries from the perspective of the colonial-imperial epicenter. For instance, anti-essentialism (in global music history) and identity have different significance globally than in North America/Europe because this is a matter of how global people are seen through North American/European lenses. What counts as, looks like, and is critical or feasible in “musicology” or “sociology of music” or “X of music” is not the same everywhere. For example, it is much easier to conduct research on queer musical modernism in the US than in China, where queer composers stay in the closet, and where queerness is often expressed in the form of its absence—in performances of straight-acting (see Wang's chapter in Lee 2018).
Often, when I raise the issue of racism and coloniality, I have been treated as being ignorant of research, some from the 80s, which is regarded as having satisfactorily addressed racism. From my perspective, this inability to discuss remnants of racism and coloniality in the music disciplines is a form of what Robin DiAngelo calls "white fragility." The problem is that music research—music journals and monographs—are regarded as anti-racist panaceas that have taken care of social problems in music-making and musical institutions. Racism is regarded as having been resolved for some time now, which implies a dismissal of recent discussions of anti-racism and decolonization. As for why global musicologists are treated as if they come from a land where knowledge is outdated and frozen in time, we have a familiar term for this—orientalism.
How can we counter epistemic recolonization and orientalism? I would be interested to know your thoughts.
