[ANPPOM-Lista] CFP: 20th-Century Music (CUP) Special Issue on “Settler Colonialism and Decolonization”

[Carlos Palombini]

Call for papers
TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC
Call for Papers: Special Issue on “Settler Colonialism and Decolonization”
(17/1 March 2020)
Guest Editors: Jeremy Strachan (Cornell University) and Dylan Robinson
(Queen’s University)

Articles are invited for a special themed issue on settler colonialism and
its relationship to musical processes and practices in the twentieth and
twenty-first century. As Patrick Wolfe has influentially argued, settler
colonialism is a ‘structure not an event’: an ongoing and reproductive
sociopolitical order that seeks to both vanish Indigenous inhabitants as
well as normalize and make invisible settler presences in colonized
territories. This special issue thus seeks to address the various
intersections between music, musical institutions, and specific histories
and political structures of settler colonialism. While a robust field of
settler colonial studies has had significant influence across the
humanities, social sciences, and political theory, music’s role in
maintaining settler colonial structures has received considerably less
attention. Modernist, avant-garde, and popular traditions in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century music have long been complicit in this process. While
part of this project addresses the ongoing practices of cultural resource
extraction in contemporary and earlier American “nativist” composition,
another part seeks to address how “non-exoticizing” western musical works
might be re-examined through the lens of settler colonialism. How might
settler colonial theory reframe our understanding of histories of musical
nationalism and exceptionalism (Copland, MacDowell, Ives, Somers), and
compositional practice more generally? “Borrowings” and misuses of
Indigenous song in North America, Australia, and other settler colonial
nations have often been scrutinized within the paradigm of exoticist,
nationalist, or postcolonial frameworks, but how can we reengage such
histories within a theoretical purview of settler colonial studies? In
addition to the analysis of specific works, topics for articles from
musicological, ethnomusicological, popular music and sound studies
perspectives might address the following:

– Music’s role in decolonization, and in particular work that moves beyond
the goal of consciousness raising, and beyond decolonization as a metaphor
(Tuck and Yang)
– Settler colonial logics that underpin music composition, performance,
listening and writing, as well as decolonizing approaches to these
– The positionality, ethics and accountability of working as a settler
composer, singer-songwriter or scholar of music
– The impact of intersectional theories of settler colonialism on music,
including diasporic, immigrant, “arrivant”, queer, and feminist perspectives
– Musical forms of extraction, or models of collaboration and alliance
between Indigenous and settler creators
– Repatriation of Indigenous songs (belongings) from archives and museums,
as well as the activation and re-mediation of these in new compositions
– Historiographic reappraisals of twentieth-century music scholarship from
a settler colonial standpoint
– Ways that Indigenous ontologies and cosmologies are reflected in
performance and musical works
– Music’s role in truth and reconciliation commissions
– Music’s role in Indigenous activism
– Rethinking critical site-specific / soundscape composition as settler
moves to innocence
– Reading key texts in settler colonial theory through the lenses of music
theory, musicology, ethnomusicology and sound studies

Submissions (6,000–12,000 words) are welcomed on aspects of music’s
relationship with settler colonialism and decolonization that prioritizes a
critical reading of historiographic, theoretical, and methodological
issues. For consideration for inclusion to this special issue, submissions
must be received by 1 March 2019. Decisions on articles will be made by 1
April 2019. Informal inquiries may be sent to the Guest Editors: Jeremy
Strachan (jjs525 em cornell.edu) and Dylan Robinson (dylan.robinson em queensu.ca)
.

--
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor permanente ppgm-unirio
editorial board 20th-century music (cup)