LORENZO LAZARO SÁNCHEZ-GATT
Boston University (USA)
SALEEL ADARKAR MENON
Michigan State University (USA)
JULIET HESS
Michigan State University (USA)
February 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (1): 48–82. [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.1.48
Abstract: Transcultural pedagogy, or what is often described as world music pedagogy, in U.S. and Canadian classrooms often utilizes an extractive logic, serving to essentialize culture, invisibilize logics that are incongruent to European, Canadian, and U.S.-centric epistemologies, and uphold the goal of white assimilation under the guise of multiculturalism. As former K–12 music educators, now in higher education, we worry about the potential for music teachers to engage in “world music” in the classroom via a touristic model. In this paper, we trouble practices we identify as transcultural in music education, drawing on anti-colonialism as a theoretical framework to trouble the colonial dynamics in these music education practices. We ultimately aim to construct an ethical approach to world music pedagogy through the use of narrative and counterfactual history.
Keywords: Anti-colonialism, colonialism, transculturalism, world music pedagogy, counterfactual history
Authors of the MayDay Action Ideal “Collaboration Across Cultures” call on music educators to “acknowledg[e] that power differentials are embedded in each inter-, intra-, cross-, and trans-cultural exchange [and] commit to ethical ways of engagement, which support multiple modes of thinking and doing that lead to meaningful musical actions.”[1] We emphasize attending to power differentials—particularly when transcultural practices occur between people in the Global North and Global South or in dominant and subaltern positions. We focus specifically on transculturalism in this paper and the power dynamics that occur in transcultural exchanges. We engage with multiculturalism as a crucial facet of the history of music education (which we explain later) as it pertains to transculturalism. What we identify in this paper as transcultural pedagogy in U.S. and Canadian classrooms often utilizes an extractive logic, serving to essentialize culture, invisibilize logics that are incongruent to Eurocentric, Canada-, and U.S.-centric hegemonic epistemologies, and uphold the goal of white assimilation under the guise of multiculturalism. Further, we view these transcultural pedagogies as sites that may support an insidious form of coloniality. As former K–12 music educators, now in higher education, we observed how music teachers engage in “world music” in the classroom, often via a touristic model (Hess 2015).
Vignettes
Saleel
Growing up in a conservative suburb of Houston as the child of two immigrant Hindu Indians opened my eyes to a number of cultural differences from my home life and my school life. Although my parents wanted me to be a doctor when I grew up, they both loved music and enrolled me in choir in elementary school. I quickly fell in love with singing and chose to continue with choir throughout my life. One of my proudest musical achievements in my youth was when I made it into my high school chamber choir—the top choir at the school. We attended and won several contests throughout the state and created our own sense of community due to all the time we spent together. Before we boarded the buses for these contests, the choir would engage in a prayer—a Christian prayer—for a good contest. I would not participate. Additionally, every Friday at the end of class, we would link arms and sing “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” before leaving for the weekend. I would participate because I longed to feel part of the community. One year we went to a high-profile contest with all the best choirs in the state. We left a day early to listen to all the choirs. All of the programs were constructed the same way: a Renaissance piece, a contemporary choral piece, and they would end the concert with a high energy Negro spiritual. My choir director was no different. He noted how formulaic the repertoire was and asked me if I knew of any good Indian “closers,” so that our choir would stand out. I told him that I did not but felt honored that he cared about my culture. It was not until much later that I realized he was only interested in my identity when it benefited his agenda.
Eventually when I began my career teaching high school choir in a different suburb of Houston, Texas, I replicated the practices and values that were modeled in my high school experience. The school where I taught was in one of the most diverse districts in the country, and my classroom reflected this diversity. While I tried to stay away from using sacred music in religious contexts, the majority of my concert repertoire reflected Western canonic sacred music. I was intentional about diversifying the music in my classroom, but often would learn non-European idiomatic folk music using Western modalities like notational literacy. I would even try to reinforce bel canto vocal technique when rehearsing music unsupportive of that vocal approach, such as Indian folk songs. Looking back, I see that I often chose rhythmically driven music from global traditions that positioned the repertoire as “fun” and perhaps “unrefined” relative to the serious and “high art” canonic repertoire of the Western “masters.”
Juliet
I grew up in a town with an overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. At my elementary school, there were two Jewish families—mine and one other. There were four Jews in my elementary school, two sets of siblings. School music content around Christmas never included any Jewish material. I remember singing a school concert comprised of entirely Christmas songs at the beginning of my time at the school. My parents decided that certain songs were “too Christian” and forbade me from singing them. The concert included one such song—Silent Night—and I was not allowed to sing it. That concert was not an anomaly. I went all the way through elementary school without encountering any content that reflected my religious experience. In my twenties, I taught elementary and middle school choral and instrumental music. I intentionally picked holiday songs that seemed more neutral in tone than deeply religious but struggled to find repertoire that represented different groups for beginner band. The Essential Elements method book series had a Christmas Favorites book arranged by Michael Sweeney, which included one token Chanukah song. I programmed it every year in an attempt to be inclusive, but the other band pieces on the Winter Concert were Christmas songs. My choral program always easily represented the full range of holidays celebrated at that time of year, but upon reflection, my own representation of religious diversity in the band program was tokenistic at best—perhaps surprising given my own experience.
Lorenzo
I was raised in a rural town in the southern United States. I was one of the few Afro-Latiné people in the area, and I was quite aware of that. I had a difficult time getting along with the white and Black kids, but I was able to fit in with the orchestra students. I loved the holiday concerts the professional orchestra in the nearest city programmed. The conductor made a tradition of introducing the audience to a few musicians at every big performance, it was his way of being friendly and letting the audience get to know us. I auditioned for the ensemble in high school and was accepted. I was quite lucky to even be in the group, most of the performers were freelance musicians across the state. The audience loved the conductor because of his charisma and choice of unique music. He introduced the audience to several members before he introduced me as “the Latin connection” before we performed “A Merry-achi Christmas”.
My first job consisted of teaching orchestra and guitar at a predominately Black school. I would often program jazz tune arrangements that had notated solos. I cared more about the technical acquisition of the music and made no meaningful effort to consider the cultural connections to the music, because the focus was on creating an excellent performance. This desire manifested in a nearly flawless product that was highly valued by the school’s administration. I failed to meaningfully explore the contexts of the various cultural influences with the students, however, and I rarely gave my students an opportunity to share their own opinions and experiences. I now believe that I motivated my students to see classical arrangements of music as being more refined.
Colonization, Colonialism, Coloniality, and Transculturalism: Defining Our Terms
While we do not claim Indigeneity, our three vignettes nonetheless point to complex power hierarchies and embedded colonial dynamics in our respective music education contexts. As anti-colonial scholars, we wish to trouble the dynamics of transculturalism from an anti-colonial perspective. We believe that interrogating coloniality is an ethical responsibility for all anti-colonial scholars and should not fall solely on Indigenous scholars. Before we explicate the presence of coloniality in transcultural exchanges in music education, we discuss the relevant terms. In this section we define and discuss colonization, colonialism, and coloniality and then consider geopolitically constructed hierarchies. We subsequently define and grapple with transculturalism in order to explore and trouble the ways that it manifests in music education and specifically “world music pedagogy.”
Colonization
We describe colonization as the act of settling and cultivating land for the extraction of material resources, usually by force, coercion, or subjugation. We contend that the material implications of colonization extend to social and cultural identities including music. Colonizers begin by stealing and appropriating land, falsely rationalizing their actions with claims that the land is “fertile” for growth.[2] Regarding culture, this move is the propagation of dominant social ideas and beliefs, where dominance is awarded to the colonizer, and assimilation or even genocide is imposed on those subject to colonization. Colonization has occurred throughout human history regardless of era or geography; however, European imperialism and globalization have imposed neoliberal economies and dominated the global arena of colonization in modern times (Lloyd and Metzer 2013). Settling land for material resources has implications for the populations that existed on that land prior to its colonization. Césaire (2010) explains that European colonization introduces a money-based economy that leads “to the destruction or weakening of traditional ties, the pulverization of the social and economic structure of the community as well as the disintegration of the family” (132), effectively challenging or erasing pre-existing cultural values to prioritize the new economic initiatives. We are concerned with how colonizing dynamics play out in contemporary practices via their potential ties to the erasure of pre-existing and historically hybridized cultural values.
Colonialism
We echo Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ (2007) claim that “colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire” (243). Agency and governance fluctuate in these colonial states to the extent at which colonizers choose how they distribute power. Different countries have a range of these relationships to colonialism. Colonialism can be an ongoing project, in which colonizers exert their power from a distance, or a settler-colonial state where colonizers appropriate Indigenous[3] land and subjugate Indigenous populations. Settler colonialism describes land that is forcibly occupied by colonizers. Settler colonial states, which include Australia, Canada, Israel, countries in South America, and the United States, function within matrices that include the ontologies of Indigenous, colonizer, and in some cases the enslaved. For countries that have gained independence from colonialism such as Ghana and India, neocolonialism or vestiges of colonialism may still occur via the dominant language and political or cultural practices. Colonialism manifests power relations that limit sovereignty of colonized peoples through policy, opportunity for social mobility, and access to resources to navigate newly imposed economies.
Tuck and Yang (2012) differentiate between external and internal colonialism: “External colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to—and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of—the colonizers, who get marked as the first world” (4). We include musics in the fragments of Indigenous worlds that can be expropriated and recognize the sometime extractive approach of world music pedagogy in schools in the Global North. Tuck and Yang (2012) define internal colonialism as “the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the ‘domestic’ borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control—prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing—to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white elite” (4–5). We draw on these definitions of internal and external colonialism in our theorizing.
Furthermore, Ania Loomba (1998) defines colonialism as “the forcible takeover of land and economy, and, in the case of European colonialism, a restructuring of non-capitalist economies in order to fuel European capitalism. This allows us to understand modern European colonialism not as some transhistorical impulse to conquer but as an integral part of capitalist development” (20). The role of capitalism, then, becomes an important consideration. In discussing transculturalism in music education contexts, we consider the complexities of transcultural exchanges across countries with different relationships to colonialism and power hierarchies embedded therein.
Coloniality
Coloniality is a broader concept that encompasses the lasting [globalized] impact of colonialism on contemporary social, economic, and cultural structures. Coloniality signifies the ongoing and systemic patterns of power, knowledge, and authority established over centuries of colonialism (Mignolo 2007; Quijano 2007) that shape global relations, influencing social hierarchies, economic exploitation, and cultural dominance. We argue that coloniality often shapes transcultural musical exchanges due to its pervasiveness across the globe and its insidiousness within cultural relations.
There are various logics that reify and falsely rationalize these colonial hierarchies. Césaire (1972/2000) provides further insight into how colonizers rationalized their violence through this process of thingification—the limiting of a subject to object status—that dehumanized Indigenous peoples.[4] These logics persist beyond the initial act of violence and manifest through cultural assimilation and cosmopolitan[5] ideals that favor the ontologies of the colonizers. In transcultural musical exchanges, musics that belong to groups that have experienced colonialism are often reduced to object status, divorced from their human practice. This process enforces an epistemic hierarchy that makes the music of subaltern groups more readily available to consume and discard.
Coloniality compels both dominant and subaltern groups to hold hegemonic cultural norms in higher esteem while diminishing and harming the humanity of subaltern groups. It establishes and reinforces sociocultural hierarchies by privileging Eurocentric perspectives, perpetuating racial and social distinctions, and marginalizing non-European cultures. Rationalization processes such as the thingification of Indigenous peoples (Césaire 1972/2000) and reducing Black people to chattel during the transatlantic slave trade have ongoing ramifications for the categorizing and hierarchizing of the human. Fanon (1967) uses a psychoanalytical approach to discuss the effects colonization and racism has on individuals, specifically descendants of the African diaspora (Fanon 1967). While his scholarship precedes the theorization of coloniality, Mignolo and Walsh (2018) clarify how,
the critique of coloniality and the possibilities of decolo nial horizons of praxis, knowledge, and thought (though not always with this same use of terms) have a legacy. W. E. B. Dubois, Anna Julia Cooper, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon are only several examples of the decolonial think ers visibly present in the early and mid -twentieth century. (8)
Fanon’s theorizing therefore provides valuable insight into the epistemic hierarchies we consider because this sense of inferiority is maintained through coloniality. Fanon (1967) ultimately contends that these effects create a racial hierarchy that enforces a sense of inferiority in those racialized as Black. As such, we argue that coloniality rationalizes the appropriation and commodification of non-European cultures by selectively borrowing elements of marginalized cultures while often stripping them of their original context and cultural significance. This commodification of cultural elements reinforces power differentials, as the dominant culture profits from the cultural production of marginalized groups without reciprocity.
Geopolitically Constructed Hierarchies
Constructions of both the Global North/Global South and the East/West reinscribe power hierarchies that favor the Global North and the West. Kloß (2017) describes the Global South as a term substituting the concept of the “Third World.” It is used comparatively with the Global North in regard to poverty and underdevelopment, focusing on relative deficits. Similarly, the notion of East and West is a hegemonic fabulation constructed through cartographic means. Mignolo (2014) contends that the construction of the East and West was an invention of Christianity around the fifteenth century. He further asserts that the construction of East and West was initially driven by Europe to justify its centrality in civilizing the world, with the North/South division becoming prevalent after World War II. This new division, constructed primarily by the United States, “was needed to legitimize a mission of development and modernization” (Mignolo 2014, para. 2). We, however, heed Haug et al.’s (2021) warning that “devising a widely accepted and clear-cut definition of the ‘Global South’ would not only fail in light of the existing proliferation of understandings but also neglect the potential fruitfulness of acknowledging the evolving and heterogeneous nature of an increasingly popular meta category” (1933). Considering these constructs thus becomes complex, even becoming intertwined, such as settler colonial contexts. In the context of transcultural music exchanges, colonial hierarchies both remain and shape the approach to the music.
Transculturalism
We describe transculturalism as the exchange of practices, beliefs, and ideas between different cultures and the results of those exchanges when they come together. However, the movement of culture happens in a variety of ways––some consensually, and some by force. A majority of recorded transcultural interactions are the product of colonization, including the work of Christian missionaries in Indigenous communities (Kwami 1994), the appropriation of religious practices, like yoga, for consumerism (Puustinen and Rautaniemi 2015), and the coopting of African aesthetics in Western popular culture (Young 2017). In these interactions, there is either blatant subjugation, such as Indigenous people being forced to relinquish their beliefs to survive Christian colonization (Koegel 2001), or a lack of reciprocity, such as when a fashion designer plagiarizes a pattern from an African tradition without sharing any of the profits or cultural context (e.g. Massai and Louis Vuitton) (Young 2017). Globalization, as a related but distinct phenomenon, has only added routes to the migration of culture and exacerbated the colonizing potential of transculturalism, particularly within the geopolitical constructions we outlined above. As we argue, these dynamics also occur in music education.
To better understand why we take up transculturalism, we define how transculturalism is distinct from other conceptualizations of culture. Because Merriam-Webster (n.d.) describes culture as “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group,” the root word trans- allows more specificity in how culture interacts within society. The term “trans” indicates the crossing of some boundary into another domain. For example, transatlantic refers to crossing from one land to another over the Atlantic Ocean, and transform is a change from one form or structure to something else. In the context of culture, this prefix indicates the move from one set of beliefs into the domain of another. This process involves the fusion of two distinctive elements or identities across some boundaries, such as national borders or cultural or religious beliefs, where extractive logics and coloniality might rationalize the consumption of ideas from one culture to benefit the other.
For transculturalism in music, this continuum of power and privilege reflects asymmetrical representations of cultures and assumes dominant understandings of music as a universal orientation. In such instances, North/West frameworks might explain music from the South/East, but South/East pedagogies cannot reconcile frameworks from the North/West. Therefore, it is rare for music from subaltern cultures to exist without a dominant frame of reference. A critical analysis of transculturalism questions this continuum of power and privilege and its capacity to perpetuate colonial dynamics. Transculturalism implies exchange. We employ this term because we believe that any recontextualization of music (Schippers 2010) involves an exchange. For example, when a song from Brazil is taught in a school in Michigan, there is an exchange between cultures. We are arguing that without intervention, colonial dynamics underpin this exchange. It becomes important to acknowledge the historical inclusion of world musics as “multiculturalism” so that we can illuminate the presence of coloniality in transcultural music.
Historicizing the Multicultural Turn and Defining World Music Pedagogy
The Tanglewood Symposium, which took place in 1967 in Massachusetts, made a distinctive turn toward the inclusion of multicultural music in U.S. music education. The second tenet of the Tanglewood Declaration noted that “music of all periods, styles, forms and cultures belongs in the curriculum of our time in its rich variety, including currently popular teenage music, avant-garde music, American folk music, and the music of other cultures” (Murphy and Sullivan 1968, 227). This turn represented a broadening of curricular music content to include a wider range of cultures in U.S. schools. The call for multiculturalism was taken up significantly in the 1980s through the 2000s, most notably by Patricia Shehan Campbell (2002, 2004), Huib Schippers (2010), and Terese Volk (1998). While much of the focus involved what James Banks (2013) describes as “content integration”—the addition of different material to the curriculum, scholars also grappled with pedagogical approaches, including questions surrounding oral/aural transmission practices (see, for example Shehan 1987) and questions of sociocultural context in instruction (see, for example, Abril 2003). In the U.S., the University of Washington (UW) was a hub for this work, and much of the scholarship on what is referred to as world music pedagogy, an approach evolved from multiculturalism, comes from scholars who have graduated from UW and worked with Patricia Shehan Campbell as well as from her frequent collaborators. This scholarship includes a Routledge book series on world music pedagogy including approaches geared toward early childhood music education (Watts 2018), elementary music education (Roberts and Beegle 2018), secondary school innovations (Howard and Kelley 2018), higher education (Coppola, Hebert, and Campbell 2021), and school community-intersections (Campbell and Lum 2019).
In the U.S., the term world music pedagogy is thus associated with a particular number of scholars and set of scholarship. In this paper, we take up the term similarly. Given the MDG focus on transculturalism in the MDG 34 call for papers,[6] we use the term world music pedagogy to describe the engagement with musics across a range of cultures in the music classroom. This engagement involves transculturalism and cultural “mixing” through the pedagogical encounter with different musics and their appropriation into the school context. We thus use the terminology of world music pedagogy as a term to describe engagement with “world” musics in music education and to further acknowledge the relational potential therein. We also look specifically to the extractive potential of world music pedagogy and the potential it holds for colonialism. In this work, we acknowledge the move from transcultural to multicultural and make this move because it is multiculturalism that has been taken up extensively in music education predominantly in the 1980s to 2000s, as noted (see for example Campbell 2002, 2004 and Volk 1998), while literature on transculturalism is limited. Specifically, we seek to examine transcultural encounters that occur within what has been identified as multiculturalism or world music pedagogy, as the majority of pedagogy that occurs within these approaches involves transculturalism.
Colonial Dynamics and Music Education
We argue that colonial dynamics often underpin transcultural exchanges in music education. Music classrooms often function in a Eurocentric modality. They use analytic musicological constructs such as form, texture, dynamics, etc. to describe musics that may or may not conform to or utilize such constructs, which are drawn from Western classical music. For example, Saleel recalls diversifying their concert programs, yet always being directed toward Western notational fluency. Music classrooms often preserve Western classical music by centering it within the curriculum, as evidenced by the widespread presence of Western classical ensembles in K-12 music classrooms. Roger Mantie (2012) goes so far to call it the band-as-music-education paradigm. Music from other cultures does not receive this preferential treatment in many circumstances, and it is often used as a means to support a deeply seeded investment in classical music (Kajikawa 2019). Moreover, the centering that occurs is often Christocentric, as evidenced in Juliet’s vignette. Lorenzo’s opening vignette highlights aspects of the supremacy of Eurocentric ensemble paradigms and Christocentric narratives, using a symphony orchestra to perform a caricature of mariachi-esque Christmas music. This haphazard approach at programming a transcultural piece of music was done with a complete disregard to traditional Mexican holiday traditions and dismissive of the actual transcultural roots of mariachi music.
Beyond compositional bifurcations, concert programming can reinforce colonial appetites for so-called world musics as exotic and unrefined by juxtaposing “high art” Western music against a crowd-pleasing ethnic “closer,” as exemplified in Saleel’s vignette. Kim (2017) traces the bifurcation of musicology and ethnomusicology, which “provided for European music … as being more universal, and on the other hand defined a more traditional ‘ethno-music’ as the ‘music of others’” (23, see also Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000). Walker (2020) asserts that the tonal harmonic principles that define Western music were defined within modern colonial rationales. Walker states that “the binary of home and away, or in tonal harmony, the binary of tonic and dominant, maps onto the equivalent and arguably more powerful binary of “self” and “other”” (9). It is this logic that rationalizes the indiscriminate appetite of the colonizer.
In employing constructs from Western music to world musics, notably, there is often some congruity between these constructs and the musics in question. World musics chosen for the classroom are often chosen because of their intelligibility within Western constructs of music. Ghanaian, and specifically Ewe music, is often included in programs as a world music. While Ewe music does not utilize all of the Western constructs cited above, it draws strongly on rhythm and form, making it intelligible to Western students. While this music uses similar constructs, however, it draws on an entirely different framework. While Western students often look for the downbeat in Ghanaian music, as Gage Averill (2004) has elaborated, the downbeat does not function in the same ways, as the music is cyclic. Constructs such as dynamics do not readily apply. While Ewe music may be considered through Western constructs, doing so does not serve learners well, as learning the music on its own terms allows for much richer engagement than applying constructs that have to be bent and stretched to fit, if they apply at all.
Colonial transculturalism occurs over time as populations integrate into new social taxonomies where subaltern cultures are diluted, assimilated, commoditized, or actively suppressed. In music education, this might look like a predominantly white high school choir singing a song about salsa[7] for Cinco de Mayo to celebrate what has become a consumptive U.S. holiday associated with partying (Alamillo 2009). Subedi and Macías (2022) warn that when schools attempt to represent varied cultural traditions like Cinco de Mayo, “the (racialized) celebratory texture of performing Mexicaness trivializes Mexican and Mexican American identities in the name of cultural learning and reinforces age-old racial stereotypes about who the Mexican Other is” (88). Due to these transcultural exchanges, Mexican Americans may feel essentialized and also lose the historical context or significance of Cinco de Mayo, which celebrates the victory of a Mexican militia over the invading French Army in Puebla, Mexico (Burciaga 1993). Through colonial transculturalism populations and cultures are integrated, yet there is less reciprocity between the cultural agents, resulting in consumption by the dominant culture. However, providing more nuanced contextualization with attention to reciprocity moves toward a more ethical transculturalism for students which shares power and representation between both cultures more equally. Importantly, this example contends with colonial dynamics between the U.S and Mexico as distinct from residues of Spanish colonialism in Mexico. Because colonialism is an ongoing project, local colonial agendas—such as the consumptive approach to Cinco de Mayo—further erase or embed coloniality inherent from historical encounters, such as Spain’s colonial relationship with Mexico. Without considering reciprocity and complexity, such pedagogical examples highlight colonial dynamics inherent in transcultural relationships and do little to challenge coloniality, particularly when the Global North intersects with the Global South.
Anti-Colonialism
In this section, we define anti-colonialism. Anti-colonialism offers a possible response to a transculturalism unconscious of power differentials. Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s (2012) foundational paper on colonialism is a reminder that decolonization involves the surrender of stolen Indigenous land. In this paper, we attempt to avoid typical pitfalls of decolonization as a metaphor, including “the easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization [that facilitates] yet another form of settler appropriation” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3). In considering anti-colonialism, we grapple with Tuck and Yang’s (2012) definitions of external and internal colonialism. External colonialism includes musics that can be expropriated and extracted for use in world music pedagogy in schools in the Global North. In considering internal colonialism, we implicate schooling as a particularized mode of control that enacts colonialism in ways that can include the transcultural aspects of world music pedagogy. Settler colonialism, which “operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5), becomes important to the conversation surrounding transculturalism, as settler colonialism involves the brutal cultural mixing of Indigenous peoples and settlers across dominant and minoritized groups. Moreover, considering the role of capitalism and capital in the extractive practice of world music pedagogy becomes essential to engaging its embedded power dynamics.
Transculturalism that disregards power differentials can occur in ways that effectively constitute what bell hooks (1992) calls “eating the Other”:
Within current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference. The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. (21)
While hooks’ book focuses on race and representation, the commodification and consumption she illuminates also applies to coloniality. So-called “Other” musics easily become commodities in the context of transcultural musical engagements. Tuck and Yang’s (2012) definition of external colonialism points to the “appetites” of the colonizers. In uncritical transculturalism, world music easily becomes “spice” as compared to the “mainstream white culture” of the band/orchestra/choir paradigm of music education. In her work on the museum, Julia Emberley (2006) notes “In the early part of the 20th century, the phantasmatic figure of ‘the Aboriginal’ was invented through various colonial technologies of representation and semiotic coercion that included the use of film, photography and print culture” (393). Music too participates in the construction of the Indigenous Other through engaging with music devoid of context.
We argue that colonial dynamics underpin uncritical transculturalism and approaches to world music pedagogy. Juliet Hess (2021a) argues that the practice of including multiple musics in music education is a cartographic practice that involves the mapping of racialized space. Indeed, when teachers bring a range of musics into the classroom, this practice is extractive and engages subject/object relations in a way reminiscent of colonialism. Brian Harley (2001) contends that cartography is a colonial practice and asserts that maps make an argument about the world. To include musics as “fragments of Indigenous worlds” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 4) in music education is not only extractive then, it also involves cartography and mapping. Cartography and extraction are intimately related. If cartography is a colonial practice as Harley (2001) contends, its purpose is twofold: (1) to assert a stake or ownership of the land; and (2) to map resources for the purposes of extraction. Maps are therefore not neutral (Harley 2001). The mapping of racialized space that world music pedagogy involves then maps the “found” musics as resources to be used in music classrooms. We argue that this coloniality via extractivism and cartography requires an anti-colonial intervention.
Anti-colonialism troubles transculturalism and facilitates the resistance of coloniality. We specifically conceptualize these forms of resistance as anti-colonial because of the action-oriented nature of the framework. It is worth noting, however, that various approaches we consider anti-colonial have also been described as decolonial (Walker 2020). Dei (2006) writes: “anti-colonial is defined as an approach to theorizing colonial and re-colonial relations and the implications of imperial structures on the processes of knowledge production and validation, the understanding of indigeneity, and the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics” (2). For Dei, colonialism “refers to anything imposed and dominating rather than that which is simply foreign and alien” (3). In terms of knowledge production, Dei asserts that all knowledges are socially situated and politically contested (3); in anti-colonialism all knowledge production is open to critique. Subjectivity, positionality, location, and history all become important in anti-colonialism. Anti-colonialism critiques and subverts dominant thinking, draws on multiple discursive traditions, opposes Eurocentrism, and the idea that the colonized can be “known” (4). It looks to the past to inform the future. Anti-colonialism provides a way to respond to the coloniality in transculturalism, resist it, and make something new (Angod 2006). Angod (2006) argues that “[p]ost-colonialism is a quiet politics. It can be used to read social texts in a way that has clear implications for resistance. Anti-colonial thought is political from the start. It positions itself as a counter/oppositional discourse to the repressive presence of colonial oppression” (165).
In music education, anti-colonialism requires deep contextualization and the nature of knowledges including of musics as situated in a social context embedded with colonial dynamics. Significantly, Arlo Kempf (2006) positions the goal of anti-colonial historiography as “rupture[ing] and interrogat[ing] dominant history and focus on the achievements, practices, and resistance of the oppressed” (134). An anti-colonial historiography of musics then involves disrupting musics rooted in dominant (colonial) relations and centering musics of Indigenous and other minoritized groups in a way that engages the power differentials.
Hess (2021b) delineates seven elements of anti-colonialism:
(i) its capacity to facilitate understanding colonial and re-colonial relations and their effects on knowledge production; (ii) its emphasis on Indigeneity and multiple epistemologies; (iii) its stress on resistance; (iv) its connecting of resistance to identity politics; (v) its emphasis on agency; (vi) its potential for facilitating analysis of power structures and dynamics; and (vii) its explicit centering of positionality. (30)
We center these elements in our analysis and resistance to transculturalism in what follows. Hess (2021b) synthesized these tenets from the scholarship of people who have written significantly against colonialism. These scholars include Frantz Fanon (1963), Dei (2006), Ania Loomba (1998), Albert Memmi (1965), Marie Battiste (1998), Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi and Dalton 1996), Aimé Césaire (1972/2000), and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012). The cultural and geographic locations of these scholars varies widely and represents positions from the Global North and the Global South. In this paper, we extend the scholars we draw upon to include Walter Mignolo (2007, 2009, 2014), Aníbal Quijano (2007), Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007), Sinah Theres Kloß (2017), and Christopher Lloyd and Jacob Metzer (2013).
Coloniality reaffirms the power differentials between both Global North and Global South and dominant and subaltern positions. World music pedagogy is implicated in reifying these relations. By extracting musics from the Global South for use in the Global North, coloniality frames world music pedagogy. We thus employ anti-colonial thinking in order to theorize how dominant groups rationalize their voracious appetite for the subaltern.
Transforming the Past toward the Future
We engage in imagining a different possible future through reenvisioning our pasts. The following vignettes are repurposed to showcase the possibility for anti-colonial interventions. These interventions serve to disrupt traditionally unexamined facets of music education where power and coloniality manifest insidiously. We ultimately aim to highlight instances where a voracious appetite for the Other erases subaltern epistemologies and contexts. If anti-colonial historiographies of music involve disrupting the centering and reproduction of dominant musics in favor of Indigenous musical epistemologies and knowledge productions, then we will reimagine our past music education experiences with attention to the aforementioned tenets of anti-colonialism. Specifically, we aim to show examples that redistribute inherent power differentials apparent in world music pedagogies to honor marginalized experiences and foster reciprocity in the music education processes. Reimagining the dominant’s voracious appetite for the Other might provide ethical pathways to move the field forward in responsible ways that honor the myriad cultures that students bring to the classroom.
The reclamatory work of Saidiya Hartman played a significant role in how we considered our own narratives. Hartman (2008) conceptualizes critical fabulation as a method to seek out moments of joy, resistance, and subversion in the lives of enslaved Black girls. Hartman (2008) writes that
By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. (11)
Hartman uses archival methods and infuses critical theory to shed light on the violent nature of archives. This approach to reenvisioning what once was, and exploring plausible realities, provides readers with a powerful lens for seeing the violence of the archive. Similarly, we hope that our narratives call attention to the violence of coloniality and seemingly harmless transcultural musicking in classrooms.
We were inspired by Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, but we noticed divergences between our own fabulations and Hartman’s work. Rather than critical fabulation, we engage in counterfactual history. Roberts (2011) observes that
the term counterfactual history is often used to describe works that are based on historical fact or where the point of divergence is caused by “realistic” circumstances such as a historical figure making a different decision in relation to what actually happened. Additionally, counterfactual histories can be works of fiction in which a realistic point of divergence occurs and the author offers his or her version of the altered world through the use of both fictional characters and real historic figures. In other instances, counterfactual history is written in a manner where the author describes an event, explains the point of divergence, and then illustrates how history might be different in an expository manner without the use of fictional characters (Schmunk 2010). (117)
We have reimagined our histories, creating counterfactual histories wherein the music teacher engages in anti-colonial pedagogy. Following Roberts, the teacher makes different pedagogical decisions than we experienced during our respective childhoods; we imagine that these decisions would have created affirming experiences for us as we were growing up and informed our future pedagogical practices as educators. In doing so, we aim to demonstrate the potential of anti-colonialism as an orienting framework for music teaching.
Saleel
Growing up in a diverse suburb of Houston, Texas, was a robust experience for a child of two Hindu-Indian immigrants. Engaging with community friends and families allowed my family to share our culture and appreciate other cultures within the diverse community. Music was always central to these exchanges, which led to enriched music programs in the area public schools. Singing in the choirs was a great way of bringing the community’s interests into the education system, and it made for a great reprieve from the academic rigor of college readiness. The choir program at the high school was structured to align with students’ interests. There were several choirs that had different identities within the community. There was a choir for students who were more interested in socializing and community building. This choir did not require or stress notational literacy and allowed students to share idiomatic songs, dances, and traditions from their lives—cultural or popular. Another choir was oriented toward teaching musical skills like literacy, music production, accessible instruments, and it involved several general music games and dances.
The competitive choir was for any student who wanted to compete in the regional choral festivals, which I chose to join. The programs were co-constructed based on the interests, abilities, and time constraints of the ensemble and frequently showcased the rich, diverse experiences of the students. The director was a member of the community and great at facilitating discussions about performance practices and cultural context. For this choir, the membership would sing the school song as a way of building community before heading over to contests. This helped build community within the choir and the school as a whole. The director taught us how to set musical and academic goals for ourselves, so that we could keep the classroom moving in a way that supported our own reasons for being there. Interested in Indian music, we often explored different music for different contexts including Diwali, Holi, and party songs. As a student who comes from an immigrant household, having a voice in my academic and musical journey has shaped my relationship with music.
In my own teaching, I would create spaces for students to express their own musical interests and cultural traditions. I would share some “hand clapping” songs from my childhood and teach music by rote. Similarly, students and community members could share their own musical traditions, including popular music genres, without the need of sheet music. We continued to engage with sacred music, but I was intentional about contextualizing the music and representing other sacred music traditions, with consent from and consultation with those communities. My own music education was largely devoid of exploring music from the Global South/East, so I prioritize attaining some fluency with those traditions to share with my students as a catalyst for critical conversations about these power differentials, with both my students and the community.
Juliet
I grew up in a town with a vast representation of races, cultures, religions, ethnicities, and languages. As a Jewish child, I was one of multiple Jewish families at my elementary school, and my friends spanned the richness of the population of my town, which included a broad range of religions. While there was a significant Christian population at my school, Christianity was never privileged in the curriculum, but rather presented as one religion among many, albeit one that was often centered in popular culture and in the school calendar. Our music program reflected the diversity of the population and my music teacher clearly spent significant time learning about the population of students in her classes. I learned to sing songs from many cultures and religions in many different languages and I always appreciated when I had the opportunity to sing a song that I learned in synagogue. The music teacher held concerts at multiple points in the year in which we students were able to share what we had learned. The concerts mostly functioned as informances and students had the opportunity to discuss the different songs included on the program. At one point, I was invited to share information about a song for Chanukah with the audience, and a couple of years later, I introduced a song for Diwali. The material we sang was deemed appropriate for a public school context, rather than sacred and deeply religious. I felt represented in my music program and at my school and never had to explain the specifics of Judaism unless I wanted to contribute.
In my twenties, I taught elementary and middle school choral and instrumental music. I was able to pick from the vast music resources available to represent the diverse population at the school. Congruent with my own experience, I chose a full range of musics from the cultures, ethnicities, and religions of the students and worked to include music in the many languages of the school population. In both choir and beginner band, there was a wealth of music that represented our diverse population written by composers who reflected the music they wrote. The beginner band book we used was a compilation of different musics written by multiple composers of different races, religions, and ethnicities. We also had a rich culture of composing and creating in the program and some of the songs we performed were student compositions. Like my own childhood program, the concerts were informances with significant contextualization and representation. Adults in the community were actively involved in the music program and regularly shared music with me to include in the curriculum. The administration provided money to compensate these community members for their contributions. While there were sometimes moments when the program felt tokenistic, I facilitated discussions with students in those moments and we worked through the challenges together, making collective decisions about the program.
Lorenzo
I grew up in a rural town in the southern United States. I was one of the few Afro-Latiné people in the area, but I was fortunate and grew up in an environment that encouraged me to understand my identity. My heritage was a blend of various cultures and influences, and I was regularly exposed to these elements. My elementary music teacher was a classically trained clarinetist and also an accomplished jazz musician. This teacher frequently used examples from the early days of jazz to explain how different ways of making music emerge through prolonged socialization and implicit power hierarchies, even when these moments were forced. I recall one specific conversation in class where we talked about the role racial oppression played in making jazz, and how many of these elements were present in popular music. I never felt forced to enjoy the same music as my teacher, but I saw myself in jazz, because it reminded me of my multi-faceted identity. My elementary school teacher never insisted that he had the best taste in music, or that he was always right. He regularly encouraged us to be leaders and to reflect on our own experiences.
I began teaching instrumental music in my twenties. I designed a curriculum and schedule with my students that created various opportunities for performances and conversations. There were four unique opportunities throughout the year to showcase music making with families and the local community. Our quarterly gatherings were not quite a rehearsal, and far from the typical Western music performance. These gatherings were more reminiscent of informances, concerts that allow listeners to get a glimpse of the learning that takes place in class. Students had an opportunity to showcase the music they chose, specifically noting the political, economic, and social structures that led to their development. The students were additionally tasked with explaining and, to a degree, defending their interpretive decisions and how they were mindful about uplifting the various subaltern cultures and traditions that contributed to the music they were creating.
Anti-Colonial Engagement
Wasiak (2009) challenges musical tourism and argues that multicultural music engagement remains superficial. He argues that superficiality occurs through “the facile appeal of exotic repertoire [and] the ease of pre-packaged instructional packages” (213) as opposed to deeper engagement. In music education, teachers often engage across cultures superficially, hesitating to enact some of the harder engagements. Indeed, musicking aligns with the “saris, samosas, and steel drums” (Alibhai-Brown 2000) model of multiculturalism that refuses to engage with cultural practices more distant from Euro- and U.S.-/Canada-centric epistemologies. We believe that the logics that justify colonial hierarchies play a similar role in justifying the disregard of subaltern cultural practices. Instead, we challenge the colonial logics embedded in the power differentials that occur in transcultural practices drawing in particular on anti-colonialism. The Action Ideal referenced in the introduction calls for ethical engagement.[8] We thus aim to construct responsible ways of honoring traditions while actively countering the logics that inform colonial hierarchies. We highlight transcultural potential in particular, drawing on Hess’ (2021b) seven elements of anti-colonialism and our reimagined past experiences via our vignettes. We draw on Hess (2021b) as a synthesis of multiple anti-colonial scholars, as noted above.
The sharing of knowledge takes many forms in music education, from the priorities in the curriculum to the repertoire with which music students engage. These experiences have the potential to uphold colonial hierarchies if unchecked or irresponsibly deployed by music educators. Lorenzo’s opening vignette highlights how their Afro-Latiné heritage became a caricature, devaluing their Puertorican and Cuban ancestry. Hess (2021b) asserts that anti-colonial music education necessitates a capacity to facilitate understanding of colonial and re-colonial relations to resist the coloniality of knowledge production. Toward this recommendation, music educators can provide informed introductions and contexts to each unit covered and all repertoire selected. Lorenzo’s second vignette exemplifies a student-centered approach at contending with the coloniality of knowledge production when performing. When coloniality is present, an explicit engagement with that power differential should be made apparent, as theorized with the informances in Juliet’s second vignette.
Regarding repertoire, conversations with the students can provide depth to colonial logics of programming. For example, programming a Nahuatl villancico by an anonymous composer might facilitate understanding of coloniality when mentioning that Christian content in this kind of work was used as musical evangelism (Koegel 2001). Koegel (2001) explains that “both Spain and France sent a considerable number of missionaries to their colonies to impart European cultural values … and musical practices to American Indian groups [placing] much greater emphasis on the conversion of the native population” (2). It is important to note that some of the Nahua community may identify with the form of Christianity that evangelized their people, giving rise to nuances of colonial dynamics when students encounter these contexts. Teachers might engage the community with an informance to express these tensions and rationalize their programming. From an embodied perspective, interrogating the ubiquity of bel canto vocal production for choral music points to the potential of this musical tradition to colonize different vocal styles (Olwage 2004) and erase the body as a site of knowledge.
Hess (2021b) calls for anti-colonial music education to emphasize Indigeneity and multiple epistemologies. The teaching and learning of and through multiple epistemologies threads through our reimagined pasts in the vignettes. Teachers and students engaged with a robust range of music in depth and on the terms set by the musics themselves, and the groups responsible for the creation of the musics. Teachers avoided tokenizing students, instead inviting students to share their knowledge and expertise if they wished, but on their own terms, as occurred in Juliet’s second vignette. Students never felt compelled to take up the role of the “culture bearer”—a problematic term that seems to imply that a singular person might represent a widely diverse and varied culture or group of people (Vaugeois 2009).[9] Teachers also took an approach to different musics that prioritized being idiomatically appropriate. Students thus might have opportunities to learn through both oral and notated traditions that emphasized the way a music is practiced in context. For example, rather than an aural approach of teaching by rote as found in many methodologies for elementary music teaching, students might experience learning a call-and-response song through repetition, as they might if they were in a community that practiced this musical tradition. While we avoid the word “authentic” given the introduction of different musics in schools, which is always already a “recontextualization” (Schippers 2010), we prioritize maintaining the idiomatic elements and practices of all musics shared.[10] An anti-colonial approach to music education then celebrates musics on their own terms and communicates the values of the full range of musics and their accompanying musical epistemologies (see Hess 2018 for discussion).
Resistance can manifest in a variety of classroom elements, ranging from curriculum to content, and through pedagogy (Solórzano and Delgado Bernal 2001). Hess (2021b) asserts the need for resistance in anti-colonial approaches. Our second set of vignettes demonstrate several stances that may act as sites of resistance. Lorenzo’s vignette consisted of a group that eschewed Eurocentric ensemble modalities. Taking this stance demonstrates that there are other approaches towards musicking and may allow for a more idiomatic representation of said music. Saleel’s vignette consisted of students making independent musical choices. The students in this vignette can resist certain musical choices as long as rationales are provided. Our vignettes also highlight the importance of resisting musical tourism by deeply engaging and connecting with local community members. Consuming music without any form of reciprocity or connection to those that create it is a colonial action that can be resisted by cultivating these connections. Ethical transcultural music practices also need to be sites where counterhegemonic thought is the primary logic. The only possible way to resist hegemonic thought is through connecting with others on their own terms.
In an anti-colonial music education, resistance connects explicitly to identity politics (Hess 2021b, 30). Creating a transcultural and anti-colonial music education then requires resisting the hegemonic music education paradigm and imagining other possibilities that privilege subalternity and active resistance to the dominant paradigm of music education. Our initial vignettes revealed the ways that we each experienced the imposition of hegemony through a dominant conception of music education. Our second set of vignettes prioritized resistance of such an ideological frame and instead centered a full range of student identities. Such resistance then requires creating a new music education paradigm that centers subaltern and Indigenous identities and further situates these identities in the larger sociopolitical climate. Honoring resistant epistemologies and centering identity politics in this way allows all students and teachers to engage with subaltern musics and identities in ways that attend to power dynamics.
Hess (2021b) then notes that an anti-colonial music education emphasizes agency. We conceptualize agency for both students and teachers, and we call in particular for teachers to privilege subaltern agency and center subaltern and Indigenous ways of knowing, as opposed to dominant ways of knowing. In our reimagined pasts, we exercised agency as students and teachers and had our own experiences and ways of knowing validated within our music programs. Hegemonic forms of education rarely center agency, and more consistently follow what Freire (2000/1970) critiques as a “banking model” of education, in which teachers fill the students—understood as “empty vessels”—with knowledge. An agential model of music education, instead, privileges Freire’s “problem-posing” education, in which teachers and students work together collaboratively on problems they identify. Such a model allows educators to prioritize student and teacher agency and understand teachers as learners and students as teachers (Freire 2000/1970).
Music educators can also enact an anti-colonial music education in a way that facilitates an analysis of power structures and dynamics (Hess 2021b, 30). Our vignettes highlight the importance of interrogating power differentials. Lorenzo’s vignette offers a glimpse into the possibility of discussing power and oppression through the history of jazz music. Deeply reflecting on the various influences that created jazz involves the exploration of space, power, and history. Similarly, music educators should take an active position on unveiling and resisting power structures and dynamics. Linda Pearse (2021) engaged students in an intercultural collaboration with local Indigenous groups. Their institution sits upon stolen land and carries a violent colonial history, which has strong implications for investing in Indigenous guests. It is possible that Indigenous individuals may not feel safe on campus, highlighting the importance of a clear analysis of power structures. Similarly, Pearse (2021) asserts the importance of unsettling the experiences of students, stating that “the disconnect, friction, and difference that settler students might experience would open a path towards a heightened awareness of their settler-normative university experience” (28). The understanding of such power structures and dynamics creates an increased opportunity for more ethical engagement.
Anti-colonial music education also necessitates an explicit centering of positionality (Hess 2021b, 30). Music educators must be aware of their status as outsiders in many subaltern communities, and that they need to earn the trust of those members, it is not guaranteed. Music educators need to resist the narrative of musical expertise and refrain from a touristic model that denies or eschews the context and richness of subaltern cultures (Hess 2015). There are various forms of music that have religious and ceremonial contexts that would make their use elsewhere improper or even sacrilegious. It is essential for educators to acknowledge the power they possess and to take extra steps in mitigating harmful consumption practices. Pearse (2021) has suggested using Indigenous music from popular streaming platforms because their monetization implies a secular context. However, we recommend being in conversation with communities directly.
Conclusion
Music education often reflects transcultural relationships in which non-dominant groups assimilate to hegemonic musical epistemologies. When these exchanges occur between the Global North and South or between dominant and subaltern positionalities, there is potential for harmful consumptive practices. An ethical transculturalism both subverts and overtly examines this unequal balance in power between all agents in music education classes. In Saleel’s second vignette, there was a move away from an emphasis on western notation which has historically been a barrier of access (Koza 2008). The intentional inclusion of other and authentic ways of learning music, accompanied with a contextualizing discussion, reinforces anti-colonial methods of learning music without privileging any particular way. In Juliet’s vignette we see an acknowledgement of a Christian majority, yet the classroom does not privilege those musical traditions. In fact, her vignette speaks of access to a vast assortment of resources which allowed for more equitable representation of music traditions, including informances where parents and the communities were involved. An ethical transculturalism might utilize an informance for its potential for analyzing power structures. Lorenzo’s vignette speaks of his own transcultural identity and the ability to nurture the discrete cultural elements that make it up. Music education has the ability to create opportunities for students to understand their own cultures, as well as the cultures within their communities through cultivating cultural identities while resisting identity politics. An ethical transculturalism acknowledges inherent power differentials within a cultural nexus, and seeks to respect the “Other” with an emphasis on agency and difference.
We have discussed various forms of power and control that are present in music classroom decisions. It is imperative for music educators and researchers to consider the significant role they play in maintaining ethical practices. Our positions grant us the power to engage in transcultural music making that invites different epistemologies. Students, however, need to be exposed to various musics in a manner that is not purely consumptive. Past approaches to multicultural music consumption have often consisted of consumptive musical tourism. Educational structures have and continue to play a significant role in socializing our students (see for example Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017), and unethical consumption habits cause harm. Music educators in the Global North need to ensure that their students receive an education that honors various people and cultures. There is always, unfortunately, potential for harm to occur. This reality should not discourage music teachers, it should be seen as a challenge to do better than we have in the past. We write this paper from our position in the Global North, having contributed what we believe is an approach that counters and lessens the impact of colonial consumptive logics.
In elaborating our vision of music education and the world as we would have liked it to have been for us in our second set of vignettes, we observed that Saleel and Juliet took a different approach to their vignettes than Lorenzo. Saleel and Juliet both elaborated a vision of the world they would have liked to have had—a world that was very different from our actual realities. Lorenzo, conversely, maintained their reality as a young person and improved upon it. Lorenzo’s approach points to the possibility of improving upon one’s reality through a more anti-colonial approach. An anti-colonial approach, then, may make a significant difference in mitigating oppressive circumstances. Hess (2020, 2022) points to the need for a philosophical or theoretical orientation in teaching. Here, we argue that anti-colonialism and the seven tenets we have elaborated offer an important orientation for transcultural teaching. Such a framework may allow music teachers to directly address and mitigate the extractive power dynamics that emerge in transculturalism in music education and work toward something more hopeful and reciprocal.
About the Authors
Lorenzo Sánchez-Gatt is a visiting lecturer at Boston University. They are a scholar-activist whose interests include anti-oppressive education, centering queer Black and Latiné experiences, Afrofuturism, and Critical Race Theory in music education. Lorenzo’s interests were shaped through their experiences navigating being a student, performer, and educator as a queer Afro-Latiné person.
Saleel Menon is working on his PhD in Music Education at Michigan State University. His research interests include intergenerational music making, experiences of first generation Americans, and Indian music epistemologies. Saleel has presented nationally and internationally on a variety of topics related to music literacy, choral music, and play-based learning.
Juliet Hess is an associate professor of music education at Michigan State University, having previously taught public school music in Toronto. Juliet received her PhD in Sociology of Education from the University of Toronto. Research interests include anti-oppression education, activism, social justice, Mad Studies, disability studies, and ethical issues in music education.
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[1] See http://www.maydaygroup.org/about-us/action-for-change-in-music-education/ for a complete list of Action Ideals.
[2] Lands were described by colonizers in legal doctrine as terra nullius or “empty land” (Mickelson 2014). The land was occupied by Indigenous people. Describing it as empty justified land theft.
[3] We use the term Indigenous to refer to Indigenous populations globally. When we reference specific communities, we specify their names.
[4] We consider Césaire’s scholarship because of his connections between ontologized forms of violence and the epistemological harm that ensues. Additionally, we make this move because his theorizations of Négritude directly contend with coloniality, and the need to decolonize the mind, which is central to theorizations of coloniality.
[5] We specifically engage with a Kantian conceptualization of cosmopolitanism, the notion that all humans share universal moral and ethical underpinnings. We agree with Mignolo’s (2009) assertion, however, that this Kantian ideal was informed by “a hierarchical view of humanity around the planet” (112). Thus, a universal approach to conceptualizing morality and/or culture enforces hegemony.
[6] This paper engages with the Action Ideal of “Collaboration Across Cultures” as this Action Ideal was the focus of the 34th MayDay Colloquium. We prepared this paper for MDG34. We acknowledge that this paper also aligns in some ways with the Action Ideal “Anti-Oppression and Justice” which states “We engage in anti-oppressive actions that challenge and oppose injustices and hate crimes, including white supremacy and cultural elitism, and contribute to equitable experiences in teaching, learning, and musicking.” Certainly anti-colonialism aligns with anti-oppressive aims, while also specifically focusing on resisting and transforming colonial dynamics. We focus on transculturalism, while acknowledging the ways that this work also aligns with anti-oppressive endeavors. See http://www.maydaygroup.org/about-us/action-for-change-in-music-education/ for the full list of Action Ideals for the MayDay Group.
[7] Chili con carne is a choral composition by Swedish born Anders Edenroth which has the following description in the choral catalogue from which music teachers can order the music: “An incredibly popular song from The Real Group – a jazzy, fun, upbeat concert work. Features syncopated, Latin-like rhythms and witty lyrics, with repeated figures that make this easier to teach and learn. Available for SSATB and SSA.” These lyrics include things like, “don’t forget the Mexican spices…” which essentializes and stereotypes Mexican culture. (https://www.giamusic.com/store/resource/chili-con-carne-ssatb-print-wrg1013)
[8] See footnote 6.
[9] The type of culture bearer that we problematize following Vaugeois (2009) is a person who is called by dominant groups to represent an entire community without seeking a diversity of perspectives with an understanding of the multiplicity and intersectionality that occurs within minoritized groups. In some instances, however, a person may be identified by their community as a culture bearer to share community knowledge. In such cases, a person may be authorized by the community to represent them in this way. The problematic nature of culture bearers then relates to the position of the group that identifies a person to step into the role of culture bearer.
[10] We acknowledge the embeddedness of modern schooling in the colonial project and nonetheless seek to make anti-colonial disruptions to the coloniality as we have described it. Taking up the coloniality of schooling is beyond the scope of this paper.