Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2243074
J. Bullivant
ABSTRACT How did musical activity intersect with imperialism and colonialism in the Cold War period (1948–89)? While musicologists have started to explore this question, most current research has focused on the role of the U.S.A. rather than declining European powers, and has frequently foregrounded those efforts at engagement and exchange that Christina Klein has termed ‘Cold War Orientalism’. With reference to the archival records of one Cold War colonial encounter in British Guiana, this article reveals a more disturbing strain of postwar cultural relations, one in which efforts at rapprochement were obstructed by imperial powers, and in which colonial cultural voices were denied or dismissed. At the same time, the article considers the surprising case of a British communist musician – Alan Bush – who, in spite of these barriers to encounter, was able to attempt a form of cultural hybridity in his opera The Sugar Reapers (1962–1965). Ultimately, this article demonstrates the importance of interpreting cultural artefacts like Bush’s opera as musical embodiments of complex colonial connections, and of exploring more deeply those Cold War encounters in which the imperial past was painfully present.
{"title":"Music, archives, and colonial encounter in the Cold War: a case study from British Guiana","authors":"J. Bullivant","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2023.2243074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2243074","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How did musical activity intersect with imperialism and colonialism in the Cold War period (1948–89)? While musicologists have started to explore this question, most current research has focused on the role of the U.S.A. rather than declining European powers, and has frequently foregrounded those efforts at engagement and exchange that Christina Klein has termed ‘Cold War Orientalism’. With reference to the archival records of one Cold War colonial encounter in British Guiana, this article reveals a more disturbing strain of postwar cultural relations, one in which efforts at rapprochement were obstructed by imperial powers, and in which colonial cultural voices were denied or dismissed. At the same time, the article considers the surprising case of a British communist musician – Alan Bush – who, in spite of these barriers to encounter, was able to attempt a form of cultural hybridity in his opera The Sugar Reapers (1962–1965). Ultimately, this article demonstrates the importance of interpreting cultural artefacts like Bush’s opera as musical embodiments of complex colonial connections, and of exploring more deeply those Cold War encounters in which the imperial past was painfully present.","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"134 1","pages":"433 - 447"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77910758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2243075
Yvonne Liao
ABSTRACT The not-so-bygone worlds of music and colonialism in the twentieth century have yielded a wealth of scholarly ‘paper knowledge’ in the twenty-first of which to build off new archival-musicological work. This article takes a particular archiving direction by turning to paper itself – and pivots the postcolonial pen around the texts and textures of re-engaging colonial history in postcolonial music scholarship. I explore these writing stakes through my adopted narrative of ‘the post/colonial music archive’, as shaped by paper and paper’s sounding elements of tone and voice. Crisscrossing between the colonial moment and the postcolonial pen, I straddle this developing narrative of the archive, and the registers and inflections of extant source narration for what they can jointly vocalize about the music making of the Municipal Brass Band in 1930s treaty port Shanghai, and the Sino-British Club in postwar colonial Hong Kong – two ostensible musical worlds of ‘Britain in China’ in the twentieth century, here thrown into disarray by the post/colonial archive’s own inchoate, counter-tales. Ultimately, in this process, postcolonial music scholarship gains further traction and meaning as a multi-articulating inquiry – and a turn of mind that does not let colonial history and its persistent challenges for writing go askew.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2243073
Philip Burnett
ABSTRACT What might the study of soundscapes bring to postcolonial understandings of past musical practices? In this article, I explore this question with reference to archives documenting that nineteenth-century mission activities are full of auditory information. Accounts of hymn singing, printed artefacts, and methods of musical pedagogy are a few examples of the evidence we find in the mission archive that indicates the part that music and sound played in the life of mission stations around the world. This evidence raises critical questions about the ways in which the soundscape featured in the encounter between missionaries and Indigenous peoples. For instance, how did Indigenous people interpret and refashion musical forms introduced by missionaries? And how did Indigenous musicality and understandings of sounds impact the musical culture of missions? I address these and other questions by examining three key elements of the soundscape—instruments, bells, and processions—found on the Anglican-Xhosa missions, established in the Eastern Cape, South Africa in 1855, in an attempt to articulate how music and sound mediated religious experience, and how this experience was contested by missionaries and Indigenous peoples.
{"title":"Resonating across an Anglican-Xhosa mission soundscape: a case study of instruments, bells, and processions","authors":"Philip Burnett","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2023.2243073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2243073","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What might the study of soundscapes bring to postcolonial understandings of past musical practices? In this article, I explore this question with reference to archives documenting that nineteenth-century mission activities are full of auditory information. Accounts of hymn singing, printed artefacts, and methods of musical pedagogy are a few examples of the evidence we find in the mission archive that indicates the part that music and sound played in the life of mission stations around the world. This evidence raises critical questions about the ways in which the soundscape featured in the encounter between missionaries and Indigenous peoples. For instance, how did Indigenous people interpret and refashion musical forms introduced by missionaries? And how did Indigenous musicality and understandings of sounds impact the musical culture of missions? I address these and other questions by examining three key elements of the soundscape—instruments, bells, and processions—found on the Anglican-Xhosa missions, established in the Eastern Cape, South Africa in 1855, in an attempt to articulate how music and sound mediated religious experience, and how this experience was contested by missionaries and Indigenous peoples.","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"406 - 432"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84553312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2243070
Philip Burnett, Erin Johnson-Williams, Yvonne Liao
The ‘ sounds ’ and ‘ silences ’ of the colonial archive have long intrigued scholars. Postco-lonial academics, of course, have intensely explored the nuances of archival fragmentation and the ethical issues of archival silencing, and are increasingly applying such questions to decolonial and other interrogative contexts of the twenty-fi rst century. 1 But there is still more to be said about aural sensibilities and their untapped potential for and after the archive. Coming to this special issue from the vantage point of historical musicology – as scholars of music, power and practice who are interested in the impacts and legacies of the British empire from the long nineteenth century through to the inter-war and post-war worlds of the twentieth – we are speci fi cally concerned with how renewed attention to the ‘ sounding ’ of colonial archives may expose, problematize, complicate and indeed resonate with, rising conversations about what might unfold next, archivally, beyond the ‘ archive proper ’ . 2 To this end, we suggest that historical musicol-ogy can provide a creative, if at times frustratingly elusive, arena of enquiry for highlighting the ambiguity of archiving: for through the record-keeping of empire, issues of race, gender and authority were intrinsically but also messily inscribed into decisions about who was represented, who was silenced and who was (un)heard. 3 As a starting point: let us begin with the question of how to study archival silence through the lens of a fi eld historically obsessed with sound . The disciplining ‘ hush ’ of the archive is a void that scholars are becoming ever more anxious to fi ll, and yet, as Saidiya Hartman reminds us, the voyeuristic act of attempting to resurrect and ‘ give voice ’ to the lost archive is problematic in itself, often reinforcing acts of neo-imperial-ism. 4 In light of increasing pressures to have
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2243072
R. Kok
ABSTRACT How were colonial music examinations received in South Asia? Since 1898, the British-based Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) has offered certificates in Western art music in the region. Focusing on Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Bombay/Mumbai (North India), this article delves into archival correspondence retrieved – not without challenges – from the ABRSM’s headquarters in London. The documents reveal that as with other pedagogical missions civilisatrice, Victorian values, practices, and gendered behaviours associated with European music were transmitted to South Asia. In Ceylon and Bombay, the examinations attracted English-educated, middle-to-upper class women for whom such music qualifications represented the potential for social, cultural, and economic capital. Men from well-off backgrounds, on the other hand, were deterred from pursuing music professionally. Most importantly, the letters speak of Indigenous resistance to systemic colonial assumptions, as postcolonial South Asians greeted the Board’s tacit notions in promoting music certificates with their own discerning, often-unspoken beliefs. Read contrapuntally, along, and against the archival grain, South Asian voices and agencies emerge fully engaged in the evolving intricacies of imperial music education.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-05DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2196147
C. Sharma, Bhaswati Borgohain
{"title":"Indigenization and vernacularization of social science in India: revisiting the debate","authors":"C. Sharma, Bhaswati Borgohain","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2023.2196147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2196147","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82828855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1986951
Prayag Ray
If locating the self and owning one’s story are good starting points for an ethical hermeneutics, as the author of Decolonising Governance suggests, then I could do worse than introducing myself, and locating myself vis-à-vis this challenging and rewarding work, before attempting to appraise or anatomize it. I am a teacher of English literature, and my relatively insular intellectual training and academic background – in a post-colonial India still attempting to decolonize the academy – posed a considerable challenge to the process of interpreting and contextualizing this richly interdisciplinary book. While interdisciplinarity is – in talk if not always in practice – widely touted in English Studies in India, thinking from within disciplinary silos has proven to be a difficult habit to break. I am grateful that this book gave me the opportunity to stray from the continent of my own ways of knowing. Decolonising Governance is an important contribution to Indigenous decolonization theory that champions the archipelago as a conceptual framework useful for a poetic re-education that the author sees as necessary for a decolonized governance, particularly of ecologically threatened spaces. To me, the importance of this book lies in its proposing a reconciliation between decolonization and globalization. While resistance to colonialism has often been theorized in terms of Manichaean opposition, what Paul Carter offers, drawing on thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Édouard Glissant, and in line with more recent work in decolonization that pays attention to a plurality of voices, is a framework that looks beyond binaries. The emphasis here is on cooperation and relationality rather than antagonism; albeit a co-operation that can only begin with a mutual acknowledgement of the mythopoeic processes that underpin the grand narratives of both the Western nation-state and Indigenous socio-political formations.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1986953
P. Carter
Elaine Stratford, Philip Steinberg, Prayag Ray and Johannes Riquet have generously invited Decolonising Governance into a conversation with their work. They have with great patience and forbearance grappled with the ‘archipelagic’ range and distribution of topics and, with equal courtesy, pointed out shortcomings of my presentation that, in the context of sponsoring critical dialogue, risk an inhibiting insularity. The first thing to say, though, concerns the tone of their commentaries, which is characterized by a combination of good humour, occasionally inflected by a certain ironic exasperation (so interdisciplinary and, perhaps for this reason, so elusive), and careful seriousness. One of the elusive concepts deployed in Decolonising Governance is exchange, or rather the setting of exchange rates: the idea is that exchange can be likened to the translation between different metaphoric systems. If translation of this kind is to produce new, relational understandings of place able to generate decolonized forms of governance, an awareness of difference, even perhaps incommensurability, is critical to the enterprise. And how is this marked if not by humour, by the revelation in the translation of views that, when relativized, reveal their lack of grounding? The delirium of the interdisciplinary ironizes all forms of disciplinary landedness; as a mode of exposition, it is a kind of literary take on Michel Serres’s ‘living syrrhesis’, allowing back in the ‘ocean of noise’ that, Serres says, surrounds ‘the tiny island of reality’ called the ‘rational’. This is a risky strategy, one that risks not seeing the archipelago for the islands. But it points to another feature of the exposition, its performativity, which, while not amenable to step-by-step rationalization, encourages further improvisation, diversion and anecdotal extension. As a number of my interlocutors observe, the discursive outreach and drift of Archipelagic Thinking hardly lends itself to practical application: even leaving aside the utopianism implicit in the decolonizing project itself, what settlement could be reached (beyond certain tactical hints) using my analysis? Exchanges between more and less powerful agents have markedly contrasting purposes: if the former seeks to terminate the discussion (preparatory to colonization), the latter seeks by every means to keep the dialogue going; from this latter perspective, the performativity of the communication act exceeds (and indeed may nullify) any conceptual acquisition or exchange. In this conception of coexistence, the trope of walking side by side, frequent in Aboriginal rapprochement rhetoric, replaces the end-game of face-to-face appearance, confrontation and neutralization. Hence the deferral of a clear outcome, while it is likely to frustrate the colonial administration, feels from a performative perspective as if something at last is being recognized, a point developed in Meeting Place, where the call for a deeper
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Pub Date : 2023-03-27DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2191394
M. Vatter
{"title":"The climate of history in a planetary age","authors":"M. Vatter","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2023.2191394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2191394","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90081200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2023.2188670
Xiaochun Lei
{"title":"Out of the dark night: essays on decolonization","authors":"Xiaochun Lei","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2023.2188670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2188670","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"87 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76372452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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