Towards decolonial pedagogies of world music

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has addressed the roles epistemological colonialism plays in music education. Following several publications on decoloniality in music studies and education, this article discusses how ethnomusicological pedagogies and scholarly practices can engage in unsettling practices of critique and creative action that attend to sites of oppression beyond the reflexes of tokenism, nativism, and other ‘settler moves to innocence’. This article presents some pragmatic directions that come out of the critiques highlighted therein, inspired by pedagogical practices proposed by Chérie Rivers Ndaliko, Marco Cervantes and L.P. Saldaña, and others. This includes a three-module lesson facilitating students through the examination of coloniality in the musical histories of a place, the challenging of coloniality in the practice and consumption of musics today, and the creation of entirely different musical possibilities that re/centre students’ lived experiences, his-/her-/their-stories, and ancestries.