Following on my previous post, I disagree with the use of the term “decentering” to refer to global music history’s impact on Western music history. In fact, the lack of specificity in “decentering” is precisely what I would refer as a “move to innocence,” to borrow Tuck and Yang’s term, indicating vagueness about what precisely is being resisted. The centrality of indigenous voices in decolonization in settler colonies is indisputable, and the viewpoints in Eve Tuck’s article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (coauthored with K. Wayne Yang) should therefore be given full consideration in settler colonial contexts. However, I have only ever heard that argument from settler colonizers, who focus all their attention on that term. One side effect of the exclusive focus on the (in)appropriate use of “decolonial” is the foreclosing of a fuller discussion of colonialism and the countering of it. Colonization does not only refer to the occupation of land. It also refers to cultural and psychological occupation, in the form of 100% Western music history courses even up to the early twenty-first century in Singapore (although the British left in 1959), and a rising gap in contemporary China between growing populations of students of Western music, versus falling numbers of students of Chinese music. Western music history as propagated by Western universities and academic societies is a colonial form, and thus global music history counters colonialism—if only inadequately and partially—in the retelling of music history from the viewpoints of myriad geographies. The countering of colonialism through global music history is partial because of the depth of colonialism in universities and academic societies that occupy indigenous lands, propagate Eurocentrism, conduct imperial surveys of global geographies and cultures, have historical links to slavery and the profitable opium trade that was forced by the West onto unwilling global partners, and mine BIPOC counterhegemonic knowledge, with elite universities commodifying it into DEI courses. However, focusing exclusively on the incompleteness of countercolonial actions such as global music history, and restricting the conversation to land only, results in the reduction of multiple colonialisms into settler colonialism (in the Americas and Australasia), thereby erasing other (Asian, African) geographies and colonialisms from the conversation. Western universities and academic societies occupy indigenous lands, AND also propagate colonial forms such as Western music history that projects purported Western superiority, which is the core justification for expansionist imperialism in Asia and Africa. The teaching of global (including Asian, African, and Afro Asian) music history therefore counters the colonialism of Western music history. The point is to counter the specific colonial aspect of Western music history by targeting the way in which it has excluded other histories, rather than Western music history per se (in its totality), which is one among many histories that should be studied.
