Journal Article

Valuing Whiteness: The Presumed Innocence of Musical Truth

Johnson-Williams, Erin

2022

Overview

1 In the sections that follow I provide a musicological response to critical race and Indigenous studies scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's influential article \"Decolonization is not a Metaphor\" (2012). While a decade has now passed since the publication of this landmark essay, which launched the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, their work has not (yet) been taken up by music scholars in a sustained way. In the sections below I would thus like to also take up William Fourie's recent challenge that musicology has been slow to embrace critical decolonial analysis (2020), by outlining how fantasies about musical \"truth\" and \"innocence\" have been perpetuated in the Global North.6 Decolonization and Metaphorization: Sounding Tuck and Yang Tuck and Yang's decolonial critique has been instrumental in shaping the course of interdisciplinary academic literature on decolonization since its publication a decade ago, although it has had a slower uptake in musicology. Tuck and Yang take the bold track of arguing that decolonization-drawing on Frantz Fanon's definition of the word as a chaotic, disruptive, untidy break from the colonial condition (1963)-is not, strictly speaking, possible in academia because the actual act of decolonization is about the repatriation of Indigenous land, and it is counterproductive to metaphorize and conflate the idea of decolonization with other social justice projects.

• Publisher: Columbia University, Department of Music
• Subject: Colonialism / Decolonization / Fourie, William / Interdisciplinary aspects / Metaphor / Music education / Musicology / Postcolonialism / Presidential elections / Race / Racism / Repatriation / Slave trade / Slavery / Sovereignty