Selected Areas for Special Study I: Music and Social Justice: The Aesthetics of Activism

Over the past several years, many disciplinary calls to examine the imperial legacies of musicological knowledge production have coalesced under the banner of Global Music History: to decenter Euro-American frameworks of nation-bounded historiography, and renew attention upon more-than-Eurocentric music and sound practices that comprise, connect, and constitute the globe. This seminar introduces the many facets of what this "global turn" can mean for scholars of Music Studies working in Euro-American academia. How does thinking globally differ from regional, comparative, networked, transnational, or cross-boundary modes of inquiry? What can we learn from the aspirations and failures of totalizing projects from our discipline's intellectual past, such as eighteenth-century universal histories of music and nineteenth-century comparative musicology? How do we democratize the material wealth, visibility, and perceived prestige of Euro-American channels of knowledge production for the benefit of scholars of the Global South, without becoming gatekeepers of institutional power? What is (or ought to be) the standard for "decolonization" on Global Music History's horizon? Ultimately, the course aims to demonstrate how "the global turn" is not simply an inclusionary call for the study of musics traditionally outside the realm of Musicology, but that thinking at the global register could be a new conceptual lens of relevance to any existing research project in music and sound.
Course Attributes: AS HUM; EN H

Selected Areas for Special Study I: Music and Social Justice: The Aesthetics of Activism

MUSIC 519

Section 01