Special issue: Decolonising music and music studies (original) (raw)

Decolonisation is a cause célèbre that has been making the rounds on the agenda of an increasing number of universities in recent years, with rising staff consciousness and changing student demographics/ demands encouraging institutions to address overlooked narratives and silenced perspectives within still-operating systems of structural oppression. While many decolonial efforts have been undertaken actively in North America and Australia, and in departments of history, political science and sociology, increasingly in the United Kingdom, music departments are slowly, if sometimes reluctantly, seeking to address epistemological shifts in their very structures of existence. These exertions have ranged from questioning the raison d'être behind knowledge-building itself in an idealised (and unattainably) equal world, to curriculum reviews both superficial and extensive. Polite panel discussions have been organised alongside the rearing up of fiery messages channelling #RhodesMustFall campaigns on mailing lists, blogs, podcasts and vociferous social media platforms led by younger student voiceswith social media becoming platforms crucial for the decolonisation of narratives and methodologies themselves, particularly in the affordance of spaces to both marginalised voices and thinkers who choose not to speak in, for want of a better word, potentially elite language styles of 'academese'. 1 Tackling day-today anxieties of 'politically correct' versus 'triggering' discussions in classrooms of morphing and differently-privileged participants as well as teachers, has stepped up from the generic to the targeted. More specifically in the COVID-hit month of June 2020, the global fallout of the not-unrelated #BlackLivesMatter movement (henceforth #BLM), returned with renewed energy following protests against the murder of George Floyd, led to an increased call for actions on all academic and societal fronts. 2 An intervention was made by scholar-musician-activist Danielle Brown, whose open letter to ethno/musicologists on her blog 'My People Tell Stories' and to the mailing list of the Society for Ethnomusicology 3 exposed the longunsaid but widely-known reality: that systemic racism is embedded within the field in small and large degrees; that academia itself (including ethnomusicology) remains a neocolonial enterpriseby dint of its default setup of (often, BIPOC/ Black & Global Majority [henceforth BGM]) research informants as secondary inputs to the careers of (often, tenured, elite and white) scholars in established institutions. 4 That decolonisation is caught up in uproar, debate, activism and necessary institutional change is clear enough. But can (or will) it be incorporated into the periodisation of musical epistemologies à la modernism, postmodernism or the still-trendy