Forum—Centering

Discomfort in Global

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
Music History
H ED Y L A W (C ON V EN OR ) , O LI V I A B L OE CH L,
J E S S IC A BI S S E T T P E R E A, A L E X A N D RI A C A R R I C O ,
P A R KO R N W A N G P A I B O O N K I T , P A B L O P AL O M I N O ,
AN D DA N I E L F . C A S T R O P A N T O J A

INTRODUCTION: THE DISCOMFORTS OF ENTANGLEMENT

IN GLOBAL MUSIC HISTORY
OLIVIA BLOECHL
249
The articles in this forum broach the practice of global music history or
global musicology from a perspective of discomfort, as both a phenome-
non we encounter in our work and an affective intensity that conditions
our practice.1 If discomfort is an embodied disorientation, or a sense of
not being at home in authoritative knowledges and norms, then it is worth
paying attention to uncomfortable moments in the archives and commu-
nities we work with in global music history, as well as to discomforts that
arise in our scholarly, teaching, and performance praxes. I will start by
telling a story that takes me well out of my comfort zone, which I hope may
contribute to the ongoing work of denaturalizing musicological discourse
as a white European or settler space. Following Jessica Bissett Perea’s
prompt (p. 255), which frames this forum “Indigelogically” as a gathering,

1
Discomfort has been on peoples’ minds in the humanities and social sciences, and it
was the topic of a roundtable session (“Centering Discomfort in Global Music History,” the
starting point for this forum) sponsored by the AMS Global Music History Study Group
(GMHSG) at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in 2021, as well as
a pre-conference symposium, “In Discomfort,” that the graduate-student-led coalition Pro-
ject Spectrum organized at the 2022 AMS-SEM-SMT joint meeting.

The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 40, Issue 3, pp. 249–307, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2023 by
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions
web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2023.40.3.249
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

I will introduce myself and situate what I am about to say in relation to my

own “Peoples, places, and projects.”
According to my family’s stories, our Irish and German ancestors set-
tled in Turtle Island in the late nineteenth century along Lake Michigan

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
and the upper Mississippi River. Their descendants raised my sister and
me in traditional Ho-Chunk territory [southern Wisconsin], although
my education suppressed Ho-Chungra People’s knowledge that “‘we have
always been here’ and more than likely, [will] always be here.”2 I now
live with my daughter north of Jaödeogë’ (between two rivers), a Seneca
name for Pittsburgh, not far from Cuweuhanne, a Lenape name for Pine
Creek. Much of my earlier professional life was spent in Lenape lands at the
University of Pennsylvania and in Gabrielino and Tongva lands at UCLA.
As a recent transplant here in Jaödeogë’, I pay respects to the Onödowa’ga
(Seneca) People as long-standing Keepers of the Western Door, as well as to
Lenape, Shawnee, and other Native Peoples who settled here in colonial
times and cared for this land, and I acknowledge the continuing presence
here of Indigenous people of many nations and the responsibility to try “to
live together in ethical kinship.”3
It is also important to me to acknowledge my ties to colleagues who
250 have contributed to this forum, especially Yvonne Liao, with whom I co-
chaired the AMS GMHSG from 2019 until 2021 and co-organized the
2021 GMHSG roundtable on this forum’s topic. Hedy Law, a friend and
fellow French music historian, graciously agreed to convene this forum.
Another contributor, Jessica Bissett Perea, was my first doctoral advisee,
and I am grateful for what I have learned from working with her over the
years. Likewise, my conversations with Daniel Castro Pantoja always
inspire me to think more critically about this work. Finally, I have admired
Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit’s research since meeting him during a speaking
visit, and I was delighted to meet Alexandria Carrico and Pablo Palomino
during the roundtable and get to know their work.
Their articles engage discomfort plurivocally, but two descriptions
will give a sense of how we have conceived it in this forum. Carrico defines
discomfort from a disability advocacy perspective as “an embodied state of
unease, anxiety, pain, or embarrassment” that ableist discourses tend to
conflate with disabled embodiment but is actually a product of uncom-
prehending and unwelcoming environments (p. 273). This critical

2
“About the Ho-Chunk Nation Government,” website of the Ho-Chunk Nation,
accessed March 6, 2023, https://ho-chunknation.com/about/.
3
I borrow this phrase from the acknowledgment made during the symposium “Settler
Colonialism in the United States,” which Alexa Woloshyn organized at Carnegie Mellon
University on September 7, 2019. “Settler Colonialism in the United States,” on Alexa
Woloshyn’s personal website, accessed April 14, 2023, http://alexawoloshyn.com/index.
php/settler-colonialism-in-the-united-states/.
 law e t a l.

understanding of discomfort complements Castro Pantoja’s definition,

which builds on Sara Ahmed’s queer feminist-of-color theorizing: an out-
come of failing to conform to a social space whose norms have been
shaped by and for other bodies (p. 301).

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
Discomfort suggests a scale much smaller than the global: indeed, it
can seem minute to the point of insignificance, especially in abstraction
from its generative conditions. Yet states of discomfort are never abstract,
even when they are provoked by processes and structures on a vastly larger
scale, because they register in the body. As Castro Pantoja argues, discom-
fort often comes of intimate contact across boundaries whose scales are
incommensurable, and he recommends considering intimacy in these con-
texts as “a way to hear the entanglements of the global and other scales”
(p. 304). This reminds me of historians Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette
Burton’s observation that “the body is in many ways the most intimate
colony, as well as the most unruly, to be subject to colonial disciplines.”4
Indeed, discomfort is often discernible in colonial sources that record
scenes of soundmaking in contact zones, especially soundmaking that
confronted participants with incommensurate scales or ontologies. For
example, by the 1500s Mi’kmaq Peoples across Wabenaki (Land of the
Dawn [New England and the Canadian Maritimes]) were selectively 251
acquiring and re-trading European manufactured goods, especially
copper kettles. Two of their uses for these kettles were as ceremonial
grave goods and as soundmakers, both of which are described in a French
merchant’s account of a disturbing exchange with members of the
Mi’kmaq community at La Hève (Bridgewater, Nova Scotia) in the
1630s.5 The French had persuaded reluctant Mi’kmaqs to open a grave
and to observe that the goods buried there had decayed, not traveled to
the world of the dead. One Mi’kmaq man, seeing a corroded copper
kettle, cried out that they were being tricked, but when he struck it and
heard its deadened sound he surmised that the ghosts must have needed
it “since it is among us a utensil of new introduction, and with which the
other world cannot [yet] be furnished.” Striking the kettle again, he
explained that its lack of resonance proved its soul had “abandoned it
to go be of use in the other world to the dead man to whom we have given
it.”6 The French scoffed at this logic, yet they were also chagrined as they

4
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Postscript: Bodies, Genders, Empires:
Reimagining World Histories,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World
History, ed. Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005), 405–23, at 406–7.
5
Calvin Martin, “The Four Lives of a Micmac Copper Pot,” Ethnohistory 22 (1975):
111–33, at 113–15, 122.
6
Nicolas Denys, The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia),
trans. and ed. William F. Ganong (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1908), 2:440, quoted in
Martin, “Four Lives,” 115.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

hoped to dissuade the Mi’kmaqs from burying items like pelts that the
merchants wanted for the transatlantic trade. However, the man persisted
in listening from a grounded Mi’kmaq ontology and articulated a trajectory
of cosmic scale for the kettle’s soul: a companion journeying with the dead.7

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
The articles in this forum contribute other historical and contempo-
rary cases in which a confrontation of different sonic knowledges and
praxes, against a background of unequal power or domination, proves
discomforting. Wangpaiboonkit discusses the case of a Thai sound art
tradition invented under colonial pressure to present itself as recogniz-
ably musical. When King Chulalongkorn sent an ensemble of court musi-
cians to an international exhibition in London in 1885, the English
theorist Alexander Ellis tried and failed to infer a theory of Siamese scales
from their instruments’ tuning. A Siamese diplomat responded with the
creative proposition that Siamese scales consisted of seven equidistant
tones, thereby illustrating “Siamese civilizational excellence” according
to a metric that Ellis recognized (p. 279).
Carrico also engages metrics of musical excellence, connecting World
War I–era eugenics-based measures of musical talent to the discomfort
that a “kripped” performance induced in a contemporary Irish traditional
252 music session. Through her case study she also explores connections
between critical disability studies and global music history, finding in both
a potential for decentering dominant music epistemes and aesthetics and
for community-driven advocacy. In another case of discomfort in contem-
porary musical life, Law’s article analyzes the ambivalence felt by Canton-
ese speakers around the world listening to Cantopop created after the
2020 implementation of the National Security Law (NSL) in Hong Kong,
aware of the self-censorship required to “just sound right” in the NSL era.
Developing Rey Chow’s analysis of sounding right as “a racialized scene
of…‘languaging’” in global anglophone contexts, Law turns this critique
on the fuller sonic performativity of Cantophone song subjected to aural
surveillance in a Sino-driven state regime with global aspirations.8
Other articles in this forum focus on discomfort as integral to our
scholarly and teaching practices of global music history. As noted above,
Bissett Perea proposes discomforting practices of introduction, critical
questioning, and affirming commitments as “Indigelogical” ways of cen-
tering Indigenous, Black, Trans, and Two-Spirit peoples’ “densities” in

7
The Mi’kmaq Nation’s website shares a story map based on Mi’kmaq scholar Ruth
Whitehead’s description of the six worlds, the last of which (the “World Above the Sky”)
leads to the land of the dead. Araminta Star Matthews, “The Six Worlds of the Mi’kmaq,”
Spirituality and Religious Beliefs of the Mi’kmaq, October 18, 2021, https://storymaps.arcgis.
com/stories/ee889ed588034218a63ce56971ebf820.
8
Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 9.
 law e t a l.

North American global musicological work. I also sense in her article an

opening toward an Indigenous-centering theory of globality or perhaps
trans-locality, as grounded in “(hyperlocal) Indigenous logics” that Indig-
enous Peoples have carried with them in diaspora (p. 256). Palomino’s

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
article stays within the western hemisphere and asks us to think from the
discomfort produced with the naturalization of “Latin America” as a field
of musicological inquiry—in his words, the invention of a “regional home”
(p. 297). In a sense, the idea of Latin America as a transnational musical
region is not unlike the Thai diplomat’s invented scale: both are strategic
fabulations by intellectuals under imperial and global capitalist pressure
to package their musical “traditions,” yet both could also be understood,
in Palomino’s terms, as aspirational “projects” born of dissatisfaction with
imposed paradigms.
The articles gathered here challenge us to take stock of what we are
doing when we focus on interconnection in global music history, by stay-
ing with the discomfort that these entanglements created in the past and
may still create when we research or teach them. Indeed, a recurring
source of discomfort in this forum’s articles is the connotation of the
heading “global music history” itself and uncertainty over the nature of
the formation it names. The second issue is more challenging: as Palo- 253
mino puts it, do the “material and symbolic circulations” across the bor-
ders that we study constitute “a single global ecology of musics” or plural
ecologies “linked to one another in unexpected ways” (p. 297)? Much
depends on how we answer this question, somewhat less perhaps on which
headings we invoke for our work, although their iterative and projective
functions matter. The greatest concern centers on recuperating terms
like global, music, and even history, given the western musicological leg-
acy of deploying totalized conceptions of the world and a worldwide scale
ideologically, alongside universalist discourses of music and history.9 This
legacy mandates caution and precision, not for correctness but because
words do things.
“Global” is, in my view, a useful misnomer. In the context of music
scholarship, I find its connotations preferable to those of “world” (as in,
world music history—a logical alternative that would acknowledge this
field’s debt to World History), mainly because music scholars may hear
that as referring to a history of “world music,” which ideally it is not.10

9
See Olivia Bloechl, with Melanie Lowe, “Introduction: Rethinking Difference,” in
Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey
Kallberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–52, at 1–4, 9–35.
10
The concept of world music is so tied to an older ethno/musicological division of
musicking into European-based classical musics (“music”) and everything else (“world
music”) that it is very hard, though not impossible, to recuperate without reiterating these
divisions. For a history of the term, see Bruno Nettl, “On World Music as a Concept in the
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

However, the transnational, regional, and translocal scales that are

evoked in this forum might better suit particular cases, or we might find
that the best heuristic is contemplating linkages between these different
scales, as Palomino concludes. Alternately, we might question the value of

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
fixed scalar terms at all, as Castro Pantoja advocates. As an early modern-
ist, I am also mindful that peoples’ lived and imagined worlds have not
been global (in the post-Copernican sense of the word as denoting
a spherical planetary whole) before the modern era, that is, for most of
remembered human history. We need ways of naming lived scales and
geographies that do not defer to the spatial imaginary of late-modern
globalization, while also being willing to identify a truly worldwide scale
when our cases demand it, as in Law’s article.
Global music history, as I understand it, offers a distinct perspective
on past societies’ musicking (including their sound artistry, movement,
materialities, and/or philosophies) that posits the historical significance
of peoples’ material and symbolic interconnections across boundaries
and proposes that these interconnections can sometimes uniquely
explain aspects of their musicking. It directs our attention to situations
in which peoples’ musicking became entangled with others’ lifeways,
254 often in contexts involving drastically disparate power or outright domi-
nation. Globally oriented music historiographies also invite a new per-
spective on these situations, asking how specific entanglements affected
peoples’ musicking or, conversely, how their musicking affected peoples
with whom they were entangled.
While I have found it useful to think with entanglement and other
metaphors, I often find “worlds” and “world-making” more useful. As
I understand it, world-making names interactions by which peoples have
forged generative connections with other peoples and places in ways that
are not necessarily “driven by any absolute sense of space or of scale,” as in
national or imperial geographies.11 Musicking can be a mode of insurgent
world-making in these situations, letting participants connect their here-
and-now to other spaces, times, and beings, including mythic or other-than-
human ones. I suggest that the Mi’kmaq man rapping on a copper kettle
and sensing its soul had departed was just this sort of world-making, enact-
ing a hyperlocal logic situated within an expansive Mi’kmaq cosmology.
This colonial confrontation over a kettle’s resonance brought incom-
patible sound worlds into proximity: where the French sensed lost profits
and superstition the Mi’kmaqs heard hungry ghosts. How might we do
global music history in ways that hold space for the unruly, discomforting
-
History of Music Scholarship,” in The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Philip V. Bohlman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 23–54.
11
Judith Madera, “Early Black Worldmaking: Body, Compass, and Text,” American
Literary History 33 (2021): 481–97, at 482.
 law e t a l.

sonic world-making that peoples have often improvised in response to

exploitative or destructive interconnections? Can global music historiogra-
phies prioritize these knowledges and praxes of entanglement, resisting the
impetus to uncritically celebrate globality as cosmopolitan diversification?

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
While these questions are far from comfortable, and I do not have answers
to them yet, the perspectives gathered here have challenged and provoked
my understanding of what it is that we do, as well as what its limits may be.

INTRODUCING [OUR] PEOPLES, PLACES, AND PROJECTS:

INDIGELOGICAL WAYS OF DOING GLOBAL MUSIC
HISTORY HOMEWORK
JESSICA BISSETT PEREA

This article proposes intentional and iterative practices of introducing

oneself as a sounded intervention to the discomforts of subjectivity and
relationality in global music history research. From a critical Indigenous
studies perspective, gatherings such as this forum should open in ways
that uplift intertribal visiting protocols, which ask all of us who gather 255
together to take time and space to introduce ourselves in ways that more
fully explain who we are in relation to what we know and what we do.12 At
their core, practices of introducing oneself—in speaking and in writing—
offer a way for musicologists both to build context through revisiting [our]
individual pasts, presents, and futures, and to consider how to collectively
reverse long-standing disciplinary practices that obscure context.13 I argue
that speaking/writing [our] subjectivities and relationalities is a necessary
step toward advancing critically needed expansions to musicology as
a field that would more fully account for and value dense constellations
of Peoples (ontologies or ways of being), places (epistemologies or ways of
knowing), and projects (methodologies or ways of doing).14
12
Do not worry, I deliberately use “intertribal” in a radically inclusive way here to refer
to everyone, all of us, in spite of the fact that musicology is a predominantly non-Native space.
My intention in using it here is twofold: first, to reinforce Native and Indigenous values of
relationality and responsibility between and across tribes; and second, to assert intertribalism
as Indigenizing academic spaces through the application of a Native organizing strategy.
13
My reasoning for bracketing [our] and [we] throughout this article is to draw
attention to the need for but the never fully realized potential of collectivity, in the field of
musicology and elsewhere. Just as practices of consent must be understood as necessarily
iterative—requiring regular practices of returning and reaffirming—so too must collective
identifications of “our” or “we.”
14
“Peoples” is purposefully capitalized and pluralized when referring to English-
language terms for Indigenous Peoples (e.g., Alaska Native Peoples, American Indian
Peoples, Native American Peoples, etc.) as a deliberate writing convention that refuses
historic and ongoing objectifications of our beings and instead uplifts our distinct and
international human rights as citizens of Nations, not racialized minorities contained within
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

At the outset, it is important to note that my proposal stems from my

personal and professional experiences as an Indigenous scholar working in
and around musicological spaces within North American places, which are
rightfully and more widely acknowledged as stolen Indigenous lands. It is

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
also important to draw attention to the fact that musicological research and
teaching across these Indigenous lands has been and continues to be con-
ducted primarily in the English language and privileges European classical
or art musics. Thus I propose the practice of intentional and iterative
intertribal introductions as a material starting point or project that,
although still involving the English language, exceeds existing hegemonic
Eurological structures rooted in Eurocentric canons, theories, and meth-
ods by instead uplifting Indigelogical structures rooted in Indigenous ways
of being, knowing, and doing. As I will explain, although my frameworks for
introducing oneself via Peoples, places, and projects are deeply informed
by particular (hyperlocal) Indigenous logics, or what I call Indigelogics, the
fundamental question who (e.g., who is asking, researching, speaking, writ-
ing, listening, musicking, and more) reverberates across emerging global
research contexts.15 This article will proceed in three parts in alignment
with my Peoples, places, projects framework and its attendant interrelated
256 logics—ways of being (ontologies), ways of knowing (epistemologies), and
ways of doing (methodologies), respectively—all of which comprise what
I refer to as one’s densities of relationality.16 Each part will also suggest that
more-than-Eurocentric and Eurological ways of doing global music history
require that attention be paid to three discomforting questions (one per
-
or possessed by colonial nation-states. See Jessica Bissett Perea, Sound Relations: Native Ways of
Doing Music History in Alaska (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 251n29.
15
My formulation of a Peoples, places, projects framework is indebted to the work of
Yup’ik scholar Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, particularly his explanations of the Yupiaq
worldview, or philosophy Yuuyaraq (from yuk [human being] + yaraq [the way to be / way to
live]). Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, A Yupiaq Worldview: A Pathway to Ecology and Spirit (Long
Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1995), 12–36. Regarding the triad of logics I use Noonuccal,
Quandamoopah, and Bidjara scholar Karen Martin and Booran Mirraboopa’s “Ways of
Knowing, Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for Indigenous and
Indigenist Re-search,” Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 76 (2003): 203–14. My use of
Indigelogics here riffs on George E. Lewis’s “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and
Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16 (1996): 91–122; see Bissett Perea,
Sound Relations, 29, 259. For more on questions of “who,” see Douglas L. Medin and Megan
Bang, Who’s Asking? Native Science, Western Science, and Science Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2014); and Ewout Frankema, Gagan Sood, and Heidi Tworek, “Editors’ Note: Global
History after the Great Divergence,” Journal of Global History 16 (2021): 1–3. Many thanks to
Hedy Law for sharing the latter piece.
16
My framing of “densities of relationality” builds on work by fellow critical Indigenous
scholars regarding the specific topic of Indigeneity, specifically: Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Defiant Indigeneity: The
Politics of Hawaiian Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); and
Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
 law e t a l.

part) that could serve as calls for action: (1) How can musicological
research do work with, by, and for historically excluded populations? (2)
Can [we] do musicology on stolen lands? (3) What would it mean for
musicologists to (re)turn [our] attention to home?

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
Part I—Peoples and/as Ways of Being: On the Value of Situating Ourselves
Yagheli du. Jessica Bissett Perea sh’iyi qilan
How are you? My name is Jessica Bissett Perea
Dena’ina dek’isna eshlan shida
I am a Dena’ina (Dena [Alaska Native]) woman
K’enaht’ana eshlan shida
I am Upper Tikahtnu [Cook Inlet] Dena’ina
K’enakatnu shgu shqayek qilanda
My village is Knik

Sh’eldinna Dghelay Teht’ana eshlan shida

My mother’s family are peoples of the mountains (the mountain band)
Shunkda Debra Platt inlanen q’udi
Debra Platt is my mother now (she is still here)
Sh’desna k’etsey dnay eshlan shida 257
My father’s family are European [French/Irish Canadian; Scottish/Polish
American]
Shtukda Ronald Bissett inlanen q’udi
Ronald Bissett is my father now (he is still here)

Shqizdlan Dgheyaytnu
I was born in Dgheyaytnu [also known as Anchorage, Alaska]
Shunkda Shtukda ała Niteh shgu koht’an ghat’na gheluda
My parents raised me in Niteh (among the Islands [also known as Palmer,
Alaska])
Hallie shdaja
Hallie is my younger sister
Rachel shdaja
Rachel is my younger sister

John-Carlos Perea shqen

John-Carlos Perea is my husband
Josephine stsa’a
Josephine is my daughter
Jacob shey’a
Jacob is my son

Chin’an hech’ qeshnash hu

I am thankful if I can speak to you this way
Dena’inaq’ dudeldih shit
I am learning the Dena’ina language
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

I open this first Peoples part of my article by telling you with whom I am
in relation and those for whom I am responsible—these relationalities
and responsibilities are core to my ways of being. Sharing [our] Peoples or
genealogy is, for many Indigenous Peoples, the most valuable information

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
[we] can give in the profound work of intentional and iterative introduc-
tions.17 For me, it is critical that I share this information in K’enaht’ana
Qenaga (Upper Tikahtnu Dena’ina language) because at last count there
are only five fluent speakers of our language remaining; thus, my speak-
ing/writing my genealogy in my ancestral language is a deliberate and
political act to sound and breathe life into Dena’inaq’ huch’ulyeshi, or
our way of living.
Regarding Peoples and/as ways of being—the first pillar of this intro-
ductions practice—I am thinking with and through feminist and Indige-
nous practices of situating who [we] are in relation to the work that [we]
do. From a critical Indigenous studies perspective, practicing introduc-
tions serves a very particular purpose. By literally speaking/writing [our]
relationalities, researchers can work to dismantle myths of academic
objectivity and their attendant exclusionary structures. Many feminist
scholars demonstrate the ways in which objectivity masks the many ongo-
258 ing violences of colonialism, imperialism, misogyny, white supremacy,
ableism, and more. Donna Haraway, for example, explained how paying
critical attention to “situated knowledges” poses a challenge to science
and technology studies’ insistence on objectivity as a “view from above” or
“from nowhere,” a false neutrality that obscures a hegemonic positionality of
white, male, heterosexual, and human.18 Indeed, Yup’ik scholar Angayuqaq
Oscar Kawagley’s theorization of Yuuyaraq (the way of the human being)
demonstrates the particularity of how Yupiaq knowledges come from some-
where (from interrelated human and more-than-human realms).19 More-
over, Douglas Medin and Ojibwe/Italian scholar Megan Bang’s
collaborative work to uplift Native ways of doing science asks us to remain
vigilant against the so-called objectivity of “Eurocentric ethnoscience” and
to attend to unsettling the colonial dimensions of knowledge produc-
tion.20 Following Medin and Bang, an anticolonial approach to global
music history—one that distinguishes itself from exoticizing “world
music” discourses and praxes by intentionally and iteratively centering

17
In spaces populated by predominantly Native Peoples, I would also name my grand-
parents and great-grandparents.
18
See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–99, at 590, 581, emphasis
added.
19
Kawagley explains how Yuuyaraq stems from Yupiit lands, waters, and lives, and
a person learns it “from having lived the life of a Yupiaq and having been tutored by the
people who embody it.” Kawagley, Yupiaq Worldview, 11.
20
Medin and Bang, Who’s Asking?, 15.
 law e t a l.

more-than-Eurocentric logics—requires close and sustained attention to

questions of who.
Regarding persistent inequities of humanity granted to different gen-
res of humans, my work is driven by the question of how musicological

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
research can do work with, by, and for historically excluded populations?
This question only intensifies with each new instance of settler-nation
violences and so-called reckonings. I propose that one of the many pro-
jects required for decolonizing existing systems and structures to the
benefit of all humans is to cultivate a sustained commitment to density.21
My use of the term density responds to Métis scholar Chris Andersen’s call
to consider “the density of our Indigenous being,” which is a riff on Robin
D. G. Kelley’s “On the Density of Black Being.”22 Andersen’s operationa-
lization of density as an analytic for and trenchant critique of institution-
alized “difference” or “diversity” initiatives and discourse demonstrates
how they racialize Native American and Indigenous Peoples into a singu-
lar constituency (thus flattening the reality of thousands of tribes with
distinct ways of being, knowing, and doing) and indiscriminately minor-
itize all historically excluded communities into a larger but still singular
constituency (read: nonwhite). Kelley notes, “We will discover in our
density a more profound complexity, greater clarity, and the potential 259
for emancipation,” a sentiment that when extended to Indigenous con-
texts can more fully account for a density of sovereign Peoples across our
thousands of communities globally.23 Within musicological research,
I argue that amplifying densities of relationality offers a desire-based
relational analytic and method that is preferrable to damage-centered
tokenizing approaches and pejorative valuations that relegate difference
and diversity as indications of scarcity or deficiency.24
21
Many scholars debate the usefulness or appropriateness of the term “decolonizing”
in contexts that do not involve the concrete rematriation of stolen Indigenous lands, as
argued by Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang in “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,”
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (2012): 1–40. Some Indigenous scholars
instead opt to use the word “anticolonial” to signal academic work aligned with decolonial
methods; see Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2021), 26 and passim. I use the verb form of “decolonizing” as an unfolding and emerging
Indigenous Peoples project, following writing by Linda Tuhiwai Smith and K. Wayne Yang
(writing as his avatar la paperson). See Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999); and la paperson, A Third Uni-
versity Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
22
See Robin D. G. Kelley, “On the Density of Black Being,” in Scratch, ed. Christine
Kim (New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, 2005), 10; and Chris Andersen, “Critical
Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2009):
80–100, at 80.
23
Kelley, “On the Density of Black Being,” 10, quoted in Andersen, “Critical Indige-
nous Studies,” 80.
24
Regarding shifts from damage- to desire-based research, see Eve Tuck, “Suspending
Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79 (2009): 409–27, at
416–24. Regarding “deficient” Indigene narratives, see Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen,
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

Regarding density in relation to presence, and the literal demograph-

ics of the field of musicology in my current United States context, I regu-
larly think about the fact that there are only sixteen Native American
people who endured the disciplining of music studies to earn PhDs in

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
musicology and ethnomusicology.25 This cohort, of course, does not
include numerous Indigenous music and sound studies colleagues
trained in related disciplines, nor does it account for Indigenous intellec-
tuals who worked with founding figures of ethno/musicology (e.g.,
Umonhon [Omaha] ethnologist Francis LaFlesche’s work with Alice
Fletcher), or untold numbers of our ancestors and materials currently
incarcerated in academic research collections across the globe. That
there are more dead Native American and Indigenous Peoples than alive
ones on university campuses—yet our bones, songs, and stories are situ-
ated as the origins, and in some cases futures, of several academic disci-
plines—speaks to the institutionalized inequities fueling our present
absence within musicology specifically, and academia more generally.26
Yet this present absence of Indigenous Peoples in academia speaks to
Kānaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s dual explanation of “endur-
ing Indigeneity”: on the one hand, structures of Indigeneity endure despite
260 our assumed absence—Indigenous Peoples and songs resist and persist
despite attempts to disappear our bodies and knowledges; on the other
hand, music and sound studies, which are overwhelmingly structured by
settler colonial logics, endure Indigeneity—forms of endurance that
require grappling with discomforts and hold within them the possibility
of enacting meaningful changes.27 Although musicologists may assume
[we] have little or no part to play in refusing colonial, imperial, racist,
ableist, and heteropatriarchal structures, [we] all participate in institu-
tionalized educational systems built to discipline and assimilate students
from historically excluded populations. All musicologists control access to
some places and spaces (e.g., classes, syllabi, committees, and more), and
thus can enact some changes over who and what is sounded and heard in
[our] places and spaces.

-
Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press,
2013), 16.
25
It is certainly possible that there are more than sixteen, but at this early stage in
researching Native American presence in music studies research, this is the working number
confirmed by my colleagues.
26
See Wendy Wickwire, “Theories of Ethnomusicology and the North American
Indian: Retrospective and Critique,” Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des
universités canadiennes 6 (1985): 186–221; and Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant
Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
27
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and
Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.7.
 law e t a l.

Part II—Places and/as Ways of Knowing: On the Value of Grounding Ourselves

My academic pursuits led me from my ancestral Dena’ina homelands…

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
…to Coast Salish lands named stubus, currently occupied by Edmonds
Community College, where I earned a general transfer degree and per-
formed with a semiprofessional vocal jazz ensemble;
…to Pshwánapam lands named K’ti’tas, currently occupied by Central
Washington University, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in Music
Education with an emphasis in jazz education and double bass
performance;
…to Numu, Wašiw, Newe, and Nuwu lands named Oodeno, currently
occupied by the University of Nevada, Reno, where I earned a master of
arts degree in music history and founded and directed the department’s
vocal jazz ensemble program;
…to Gabrielino and Tongva lands named Tovaangar, currently occu-
pied by the University of California, Los Angeles, where I earned a PhD
in musicology with a dissertation titled “The Politics of Inuit Musical
Modernities in Alaska”;
…to Chochenyo Ohlone lands named xučyun, currently occupied by 261
the University of California, Berkeley, where I held a postdoctoral fel-
lowship in the Department of Music;
…I currently work on Patwin lands named Putah-toi, currently occupied
by the University of California, Davis, where I am an associate professor
of and graduate advisor for Native American Studies;
…I currently live on Ramaytush Ohlone lands named Yelamu, also
known as San Francisco, California.

I open this second places part of my article by telling you where I am

from and whose lands and spaces have informed my ways of knowing. This
information performs the literal grounding work in an intentional and
iterative introduction by recognizing the role of land- and context-based
knowledges. Many Native American Peoples and critical Indigenous stud-
ies scholars demand a move away from sole reliance on “official” institu-
tional land acknowledgments and toward more dynamic and relational
personal narratives that include a concrete “action plan,” a discussion of
projects that I will return to in the third part of this article.28

28
For ways to go beyond a land acknowledgment, see the Native Governance Center’s
“Beyond Land Acknowledgment: A Guide,” September 21, 2021, https://nativegov.org/
news/beyond-land-acknowledgment-guide/. Some additional resources include: Native
Land Digital, accessed April 18, 2023, https://native-land.ca/; Whose Land, accessed April
18, 2023, https://www.whose.land/en/; and Robert Lee et al., “Land-Grab Universities: A
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

Regarding places and/as ways of knowing—the second pillar of this

introductions practice—I am thinking with and through both Kānaka Maoli
scholar Maile Arvin’s explanation of Indigeneity as an “analytic of contem-
porary forms of colonialism” and Kauanui’s discussion of whether Indigene-

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
ity, as “a category of analysis that is distinct from race, ethnicity, and
nationality—even as it entails elements of all three of these,” holds “any
substance that can be used as a foundation to make a claim.”29 Arvin,
Kauanui, and many more critical Indigenous studies scholars affirm how
Indigenous Peoples’ claims to sovereignty, land, and rights are deeply
rooted in the substances or materialities of place- and kin-based histories
and polities. And while many Indigenous studies scholars detail how Indig-
enous knowledge systems are deeply rooted in places and spaces, [we] must
also pay attention to the ways that these systems can and do move with
Indigenous Peoples, as they have always done despite centuries of forced
removals and displacements from ancestral homelands. For these reasons, it
is important to emphasize how ways of knowing can be linked with more
capacious (rather than narrow) explanations of places and spaces : the former
including [our] ancestral or adopted material lands, waters, and environ-
ments; and the latter including [our] given or chosen institutions or struc-
262 tures, such as academia, industries, departments, institutes, and fields of
knowledge. Sounding [our] roots, routes, and relationalities to places and
spaces is indeed important for musicologists, the majority of whom, due to
the realities of academia, do not work in [our] ancestral homelands.
On the topic of places and spaces, I want to briefly write/speak to
responses I have received in practicing my own intentional and iterative
introduction. When I offer my introduction with Native Peoples and com-
munities, there is a shared understanding that our telling of our particular
research stories is only possible because of our inextricably intertwined
Peoples, places, and projects, and the densities of relationality we carry. In
my own experiences across intertribal Alaska Native and circumpolar Arctic
Indigenous spaces, introductions of one’s Peoples and Places are meant to
locate relations—as in who is related to whom via blood, adoption, marriage,
and more—as well as to generate new relations via an invitation to those
listening to or reading an introduction to place themselves in relation to
the speaker/writer. When I offer my introduction and/as invitation with
non-Native Peoples and communities, most recently with/in intertribal
music studies spaces, there is a spectrum of misunderstandings that take
place. On the one hand, this information is perceived as overly confessional,
-
High Country News Investigation,” High Country News, originally published March 2020,
https://www.landgrabu.org/.
29
See Maile Arvin, “Analytics of Indigeneity,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie
Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
2015), 119–29, at 120; and Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event.’”
 law e t a l.

vulnerable, or emotional labor. On the other hand, this practice is perceived

as only something Native and Indigenous Peoples can or should do. In
music studies broadly, scholars tend to emphasize intellectual or profes-
sional lineages, as in who [we] studied or performed with, yet this partial

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
accounting denies some of the most foundational and personal relations
[we] bring to this work.30 I maintain that a transformative global music
history will require many different kinds of people engaging in many differ-
ent kinds of (re)attunement projects, projects that advance [our] responsi-
bilities to [our] particular Peoples and places.
As an Alaska Native woman living in diaspora, I find the question
“can [we] do musicology on stolen lands” a critical provocation, which
is inspired by a query voiced by my colleague Beth Rose Middleton
Manning to land conservationists (“can [we] conserve stolen land?”).31
To both questions, the short answer is yes, but with important caveats
that require engagement with and care for Indigenous-led, Indigeneity-
centered, and/or hyperlocal priorities and critiques regarding material
forms of land dispossession and extractivism. To be sure, dispossession
and extractivism have long been norms in musicology: Eurocentric ways
of doing music history both deprive local communities of their own
place-based histories and encourage a tendency toward insularity, 263
which leads music scholars to appropriate theories and methods from
other spaces (e.g., literary and cultural studies, to name just two) while
rarely reciprocating anything in return.32 If [we] refuse to perpetuate
these harmful practices by instead widening and deepening attention to
[our] hyperlocal contexts—both in terms of engagement with and care
for human and more-than-human kin—then musicologists could be
uniquely positioned to operationalize more radical and relational ways
of doing music history locally, which in turn could enrich and densify
global music history writ large.

30
In longer versions of this opening section I also include a thorough accounting of
Peoples outside of my immediate family, such as teachers and professional mentors, fol-
lowing Renee Pualani Louis, “Welina (Greetings),” in Kanaka Hawai‘i Cartography: Hula,
Navigation, and Oratory (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017), xv–xx; and Teresia
Teaiwa, “The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny,” in Theorizing
Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014), 43–55.
31
Beth Rose Middleton Manning, “Returning the Homelands: Successes in Indige-
nous Land Repatriation/Rematriation,” guest lecture at the University of California, Davis,
November 7, 2019.
32
Susan McClary references Hayden White’s observation of this extractivist tendency
in “Feminine Endings at Twenty,” TRANS: Revista Transcultural de Música 15 (2011): 1–10, at 5.
See Hayden White, “Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse,” in Music and Text:
Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
288–319, at 318–19.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

Part III—Projects and/as Ways of Doing: On the Value of Committing Ourselves

I am committed to uplifting Indigenous, Black, Trans, and Two-Spirit

Peoples and communities in my home regions and beyond.33 To do this,

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
I am engaged in several ongoing practices and actions, including:
…sustaining relationships with Alaska Native artists and musicians, espe-
cially those featured in my first book, Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing
Music History in Alaska (2021);
…co-editing Sovereign Aesthetics: Indigenous Approaches to Sound Studies in
collaboration with fellow Native North American–identified music and
sound studies scholars;
…founding and directing the UC Davis–based Indigeneity Collabora-
tory, an intertribal arts+sciences research collective working to advance
Indigenous resurgence projects;
…co-directing the NSF-funded “Radical and Relational Approaches to
Food Fermentation and Food Security” project in partnership with
researchers from Ilisimatusarfik Kalaallit Nunaat (Nuuk, Greenland);
…and co-convening an Asia-Pacific Indigenous Studies seminar in part-
264 nership with researchers from Universiti Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, Malay-
sia) and the APRU (Association of Pacific Rim Universities) Indigenous
Knowledges Working Group.

I open this third and final projects part of this article by naming my
ongoing practices and action plans that comprise my ways of doing. These
projects explain some of the responsibilities I carry as an Alaska Native
musician-scholar in diaspora to engage in specific practices and impactful
actions to live in good relation with and to generate more just futures for
human and more-than-human beings locally and globally. I frequently
revise, improve, and strengthen my statement of practices and actions
through intentional and iterative processes of visiting, researching, and
listening to feedback.
Regarding projects and/as ways of doing—the third pillar of this
introductions practice—I am thinking with and through Ngāti Awa and
Ngāti Porou (Māori) scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s “twenty-five Indige-
nous projects,” which proposes concrete methods—ranging across claim-
ing, remembering, envisioning, and, naming, to list just four—in the form
of verbs that reflect Indigenous ways of knowing and learning as active

33
The Peoples and communities named here are just some of the many historically
excluded populations, within academia broadly and musicology more specifically; they are
also those with, by, and for whom my collaboratory primarily works. Your own introductions
should name and center your Peoples and community priorities.
 law e t a l.

and experience-based.34 As an Indigenous academic, I am regularly

confronted by an enduring abyss between the types of identifiers, analyt-
ics, and methods that are valued by Indigenous Peoples and those that are
valued by the academic industrial complex. And how one introduces

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
themselves, or how one is introduced by another, reveals a lot about what
types of information are valued. My call for musicologists to invest in
intentional and iterative introductions practices seeks to fill a value abyss
by unsettling ideas of “value” and “excellence,” a theme that resonates
through this forum and is taken up more specifically in Carrico’s article.
What I propose here is a full-scale revisiting of academic introductions in
ways that exceed linear narrations of accumulated achievements by
accounting for a density of nonlinear commitments and responsibilities,
or projects.
Attending to the question of what would it mean for musicologists to
(re)turn [our] attention to home, I am reminded of Mescalero Apache
scholar John-Carlos Perea’s communications with founding ethnomusi-
cology scholar David McAllester, who offered a crucial prediction for the
field: instead of constantly privileging fieldwork, and its assumed attention
to a global elsewhere, McAllester hoped music researchers would instead
(re)turn to uplift home work, and its generative possibilities for a local 265
otherwise.35 In the context of an emerging global music history project,
there should be a profound discomfort regarding the silencing of
Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered sounds and sounding in favor
of mapping and remapping sounds and cultures from elsewhere. In my
United States context, I am troubled by the continued relegation of
Native American performers to “world music” status, an elsewhere that
is decidedly not “here” or “American.” Engaging in home work could be
part of our collective action plans that refuse Eurocentric and Eurological
musicology and move beyond the performativity of land acknowledg-
ments to uplift local and/or Indigenous logics for sensing and explaining
music and sound.
To answer questions of how to do musicology at home on stolen
lands, I listen to Indigenous land-based pedagogies that offer generative
approaches for visiting-in-place—forms of thinking globally while act-
ing locally—three of which I will share here. First, Nishnaabeg scholar
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a rationale for why [we] visit:

34
Tuhiwai Smith, “Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects,” Decolonizing Methodologies,
142–62. Tuhiwai Smith’s most recent edition includes a new chapter, “Twenty Further
Projects”; see Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd ed. (London: Zed
Books, 2021), 187–214.
35
John-Carlos Perea, “Jim Pepper, Don Cherry, and the Globalization of American
Indian Ways of Doing Jazz, 1969–1974,” presentation for the Music Studies Colloquium
hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, November 19, 2021.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

“Visiting within Nishnaabeg intelligence means sharing oneself through

story, through principled and respectful consensual reciprocity with
another living being. Visiting is lateral sharing in the absence of coer-
cion and hierarchy and in the presence of compassion.”36 Second,

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
Métis scholar Janice Gaudet offers an explanation for how [we] visit,
as visiting requires us “to do the hard work—to slow down, take time,
make the effort, knock on the door, sit down, listen, share, go to the
land, meditate, empty myself, and be present.”37 Third, this principled
and presencing work unsettles what Unangax̂ artist-scholar Haliehana
Stepetin names as economies of competition and scarcity. Through
intentional and reciprocal forms of visiting, which Stepetin describes
as dynamic and contextual practices filled with sound and silences, we
learn why and how “with one another, we are always rich.”38 Thinking
with and through these three articulations moves [us] closer to gener-
ating transformative change through an ethics of relational reciprocity
—not dispossession and extractivism—and is core to making space for
intentional and iterative visiting protocols in [our] homes, institutions,
classrooms, and more.
The intentional and iterative practice of introducing (and reintrodu-
266 cing) oneself compels musicologists to pay close(r) attention to [our] own
logics as well as the logics of those [we] encounter; indeed, such a gath-
ering of context performs and plays with “intimacies of scale,” as Castro
Pantoja will detail later in this forum. If a more ethical and sustainable
global music history revolution starts at “home”—both literal places of
residence and figurative spaces of occupation/vocation—and if [we]
must first heal ourselves to uplift and heal [our] families and communi-
ties, then part of living in better relation to one another is rooted in the
difficult work of dismantling the either/or thinking that pervades Euro-
centric and Eurological musicologies by instead valuing [our] densities of
relationality as both/and propositions.
***
I want to reiterate that the approach outlined above to intertribal visit-
ing protocols is radically inclusive and informed by my participation in
collaborative research and teaching activities in invitational intertribal
performance spaces. More specifically, from my own contexts, in Alaska
there is a drumsong genre known as an “invitational,” in which everyone
present in the performance space is invited to join in the singing and

36
Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 165.
37
Janice Cindy Gaudet, “Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way––Fostering an Indigenous
Research Methodology,” Aboriginal Policy Studies 7, no. 2 (2019): 47–64, at 48.
38
Eve Tuck, Haliehana Stepetin, Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, and Jo Billows, “Visiting
as an Indigenous Feminist Practice,” Gender and Education 35 (2023): 144–55, at 150.
 law e t a l.

dancing regardless of who they are, where they come from, and their
familiarity with the particularities of drumsong performance practices.
Through the act of improvising together, invitational drumsongs
facilitate acts of radical and relational ways of being together in

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
Indigenous-led space-time. In this way, intentional and iterative prac-
tices of introducing (and reintroducing) [ourselves] invite musicolo-
gists to perform a decolonizing of [our] shared space-time, despite
coming from disparate backgrounds and lived experiences, in ways that
advance more just and equitable projects for all Peoples. The value of
situating, grounding, and committing ourselves via intentional and iter-
ative practices of introduction disrupts academic work from the start.
Musicologists must also embrace introductions as truly emergent prac-
tices: [our] introductions should always already be in progress (as [we]
all are beings in progress) and should change as [we] encounter new
Peoples, places, and projects. In this way, [our] introductions become
a way to mark more holistically [our] relations and ease [our] discom-
forts along the way.

Chin’an, gu shegh nduninyu.

Thank you for coming here to me. 267
Q’u yet dahdi ki q’u negh tgheshduł.
I’ll visit you again.

RECONCILING DISCOMFORTING HIERARCHIES THROUGH

DISABILITY IN GLOBAL MUSIC HISTORY
ALEXANDRIA CARRICO

In What Is Global History?, Sebastian Conrad criticizes the “compartmen-

talization of historical reality” and instead offers an alternative of global
history “based on the concept of integration.”39 While Conrad is specifi-
cally addressing cross-border integration that complicates the typical
“container” approach to writing national history, his concept of integra-
tion is also useful in considering where significant crossovers between
global perspectives in music history and critical disability studies might
lie. Drawing on global history, global musicology, critical disability studies,
ethnographic accounts from traditional Irish musicians, and autoethno-
graphic reflections, I argue that global music history and disability studies
have three important points of connection. They (1) decenter traditional
ways of knowing; (2) challenge taste-making and ideas of excellence
39
Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2016), 5–6.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

rooted in dominant epistemologies; and (3) provide opportunities for

musicologists to engage in activism that advocates for and with historically
marginalized communities. These points are in keeping with Daniel
Chua’s vision of global musicology as an invitation to move past disciplin-

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
ary boundaries that divide us and to “grow by being in relation.”40 In this
article, I propose a productive dialogue between critical disability studies
and global music history.
As this discussion is a product of my own situated perspective and
lived experience, I would like to begin by following Bissett Perea’s exam-
ple of self-introduction. My parents were born in Ohio and grew up on the
ancestral lands of the Kaskaskia and Erie [also known as Akron] and the
Myaamia [also known as Sharonville].41 My mother tells the story that
I began singing before I could talk, and although my parents did not
identify as musicians, they enrolled me in piano lessons at the age of
five and voice lessons at seven. This early European-classical training was
augmented by a variety of genres, including Irish traditional music (a
musical heritage shared by both sides of the family). Over the years my
love of music and culture grew, leading me to pursue a bachelor’s in vocal
performance, a master’s in ethnomusicology, and a PhD in musicology.
268 My graduate training combined perspectives from ethnomusicology and
historical musicology, resulting in my identification as a “big M” musicol-
ogist, or someone whose research combines ethnographic and historical
methodologies.42
In graduate school I began to explore disability studies and work with
neurodivergent individuals, or those whose minds function “in ways which
diverge significantly from the dominant societal standard of ‘normal.’”43
This research began in the United States through my collaboration with
the Williams syndrome community and later expanded internationally
and culturally through Irish traditional music workshops with a group
of neurodivergent young adults in Limerick, Ireland. My research with
these communities has aided me both in recognizing and accepting my
own invisible disabilities, and in creating educational spaces that value
disabled experiences through my teaching at the University of South
Carolina, located on the ancestral lands of Tsalaguwetiyi and Congaree
peoples. To borrow Bissett Perea’s analogy of “home” and “visiting,” I find

40
Daniel K. L. Chua, “Global Musicology: A Keynote without a Key,” Acta Musicologica
94 (2022): 109–26, at 116.
41
I learned the Indigenous place names from https://native-land.ca/.
42
The term “big M” musicology was used within my graduate program at Florida State
University to describe an integrated approach to the study of historical musicology and
ethnomusicology.
43
Nick Walker, “Neurodiversity: Some Basic Terms & Definitions,” Neuroqueer: The
Writings of Dr. Nick Walker (blog), accessed May 19, 2022, https://neuroqueer.com/
neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/.
 law e t a l.

myself simultaneously occupying the role of resident and visitor. Although

the Western art music (WAM) tradition has become my “home” as an
academic and classically trained vocalist, I am also an Irish traditional
musician and do not fit neatly into either category. Similarly, although

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
I identify as disabled, I am not neurodivergent and therefore do not share
the same experiences as many of my collaborators. Such tensions are
discomforting in their in-betweenness, yet demonstrate that situated shifts
occur in relation to the people, places, and projects in our proximity.
This brings me to the first point of connection outlined in the intro-
duction. The majority of my projects are grounded in critical disability
theory, which thematizes the “scrutiny of normative ideologies…not for
its own sake but with the goal of producing knowledge in support of justice for
people with stigmatized bodies and minds.”44 Critical disability theory
actively attempts to decenter traditional ways of knowing rooted in able-
ism, which “renders disability as abject, invisible, disposable, less than
human, while able-bodiedness is represented as at once ideal, normal,
and the mean or default.”45 Global history shares similar goals of effecting
what Conrad describes as “a change in the organization and institutional
order of knowledge.”46 Here these two seemingly disparate fields not only
work toward a common goal but also attempt to unsettle “‘entangled’ 269
historiographies” steeped in racism, misogyny, and ableism that have his-
torically been situated within Western frameworks of power.47
This first point of connection is inextricably linked to the second: that
critical disability studies and global music history can challenge ideas of
excellence rooted in Eurocentric constructs of musical talent. Within
WAM, values of “excellence” and “musical talent” are tied to legacies of
racism, sexism, and eugenics.48 Disability has either been obscured or
fetishized through suggestions of composers heroically “overcoming” dis-
ability, as has been the case in narratives of Beethoven’s deafness.49 While
it could be argued that understandings of musical excellence in the dis-
course of WAM are culturally bound, the colonial presence of Europeans
across the globe resulted in the projection of WAM values onto other
cultural traditions and the subsequent rejection of Indigenous

44
Julie Avril Minich, “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now,” Lateral 5, no. 1
(2016), https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.9.
45
Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2017), 7.
46
Conrad, What Is Global History?, 4.
47
Olivia Bloechl, “Editorial,” Eighteenth Century Music 17 (2020): 173–76, at 175.
48
Johanna Devaney, “Eugenics and Musical Talent: Exploring Carl Seashore’s Work
on Talent Testing and Performance,” American Music Review 48, no. 2 (2019): 1–6.
49
For an important counternarrative to the trope of overcoming, see Robin Wallace,
Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2018).
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

understandings of musical excellence. A case in point is Wangpaiboon-

kit’s description in this forum of nineteenth-century Siamese intellectuals
attempting to reconcile their musical systems with a European musical
discourse. Attempts to appeal to entrenched musical values also occur in

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
discussions of disabled composers, who are recognized when their perfor-
mances align with aesthetic expectations of what Law describes as “just
sounding right,” yet are marginalized when they do not.50
What global music history offers is an opportunity not only to decen-
ter such European hegemonic assumptions of musical talent but also to
challenge the process of taste-making altogether. Taste-making requires
us not only to be discriminating but also to discriminate, reinforcing elitist
discourses that uplift certain aesthetic properties while denigrating
others. Such discriminatory judgments are challenged by global music
history and disabled music histories. Globalization, as Chua comments,
“requires us to adopt an indiscriminate taste. We need to be indiscriminate
—wonderfully indiscriminate—about the music we study and what meth-
ods we use. We need to be indiscriminate about standards and measures,
because the globe is uneven.”51 Such unevenness presents an opportunity
to draw a distinction between musical talent and musicality.
270 While musical talent is defined by aesthetic values that are culturally
bound and tied to notions of technical proficiency, musicality takes into
account social factors “apart from musical skill.”52 For instance, in a study
of music and Williams syndrome, Donovon Thakur describes musicality as
having four main aspects: “Affinity (e.g., interest, preferences, enjoyment,
motivation); Experience (e.g., musical training, community involvement
[i.e., band, choir, church, etc.]); Engagement (e.g., time spent playing/
listening, attending concerts); and Artistry (e.g., creativity, expressivity,
sensitivity, emotionality).”53 Other researchers from the fields of psychol-
ogy and neuroscience have argued that musicality is an innately human
quality that facilitates social bonding.54 From my experience working with
neurodivergent musicians in the United States and Ireland, I argue for

50
On the changing conceptions surrounding the music of Beethoven and Schumann,
for example, as their disabilities progressed, see Alexandria Carrico and Katherine Grennell,
Disability and Accessibility in the Music Classroom: A Teacher’s Guide (New York: Routledge,
2022), 66–70.
51
Chua, “Global Musicology,” 122.
52
Donovon Thakur et al., “Williams Syndrome and Music: A Systematic Integrative
Review,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 1–22, at 5, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.
02203.
53
Thakur et al., “Williams Syndrome and Music,” 18.
54
See Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen, Communicative Musicality: Exploring the
Basis of Human Companionship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Patrick E. Savage
et al., “Music as a Coevolved System for Social Bonding,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44
(2021): e59; and Nils Kraus and Guido Hesselmann, “Musicality as a Predictive Process,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44 (2021): e81.
 law e t a l.

a synthesis of these perspectives and suggest that musicality occurs when

an individual engages in creative and emotional expression with others
through musical means. This shared experience allows for interpersonal
and cross-cultural interaction that facilitates the development of relation-

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
ships between humans through musicking.55 Furthermore musicality
does not demand strict adherence to normativity but instead makes room
for a variety of expressions, be they musical, social, or emotional. It is
important to note that such departures from normative musicking can
cause discomfort for those whose “home” is situated within European
hegemonic taste-making conventions, leading to what Castro Pantoja
describes as the “soreness and pain (discomfort)” that results “when bod-
ies do not quite fit into normative spaces” (p. 302). Yet discomforting
experiences can create important shifts in perspective and locatedness,
ultimately resulting in greater interconnectivity between disparate com-
munities. Here I would like to offer an example from my own transna-
tional ethnographic research of an intersection between musicality and
discomfort I witnessed during an Irish traditional music (or trad) session
in Limerick, 56 involving the Roselawn Rovers Return (Rovers), a group of
neurodivergent musicians, and Cruinniú, a group of seemingly neurotypi-
cal community musicians.57 271
During this collaborative session I found myself sitting next to Jane,
one of the Rovers. Jane had been listening attentively to the Cruinniú
members, who were in the midst of playing a lively jig set. Toward the end
of the set Jane picked up the orange bucket that had become her favorite
form of musical expression and began to tap lightly on its side using
a triangle beater. Jane’s contribution was unusual for a trad session, which
typically foregrounds melody instruments such as fiddles, flutes, and con-
certinas, and may also feature stringed backing instruments, and the
bodhrán, an Irish frame drum. The unexpected sound of the bucket
disrupted the soundscape, and my eyes snapped to Jane and then to the
other musicians, who were initially taken aback at this new addition.
I immediately felt a tightening sense of anxiety as I searched the other

55
Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9.
56
Traditional music or trad sessions are informal musical gatherings held in pubs that
feature instrumental forms such as jigs, reels, and hornpipes interspersed with the occa-
sional song. Sessions are open to all musicians but can vary in inclusivity based on location
and purpose. Trad sessions occur all over the world, making Irish traditional music a global
phenomenon.
57
Cruinniú is a group of musicians from the community who meet on a weekly basis at
the University of Limerick to learn and play trad tunes and meet monthly for a session. While
in Ireland, I joined Cruinniú and recruited some members to participate in community
sessions with the Rovers. I use the term “seemingly” here to acknowledge that while most
people in Cruinniú did not present as disabled, this does not mean that some of them did
not have invisible disabilities they chose not to disclose.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

musicians’ faces, trying to discern their expressions. Then I leaned into

the discomfort and started to listen. Jane progressed through a variety of
playing techniques from rapidly tapping on the edge of the bucket to
pounding on the top, all the while carefully manipulating the timbre in

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
order to coincide with the changes in the melodic line. In that moment
Jane was kripping (or cripping) the soundscape, contributing a related,
yet innovative interpretation of this jig through unconventional
performance.
I use the term “kripping” both to highlight Jane’s unexpected musi-
cal contribution as a form of neurodivergent musicking and to place
her performance in dialogue with other disabled artists who have
claimed kripping as an important form of disabled musical expression.
Although the term “cripple” has been used pejoratively, disabled acti-
vists have reclaimed kripping to disrupt oppressive power structures just
as LGBTQ advocates have embraced the term “queer” as a positive
identity.58 Within popular music the concept of kripping is dominant
in krip hop, a subgenre of hip hop created by Leroy Moore Jr. and Keith
Jones that supports disabled artists who have experienced discrimina-
tion owing to their disability, race, gender, and sexuality.59 Kripping,
272 however, is neither genre-specific nor exclusive to music; it can occur in
any artistic tradition. Kripping resists the ableist gaze and foregrounds
the musicality of neurodivergent musicians as a valuable form of cul-
tural production. To krip is to unsettle normative expectations by cen-
tering the disabled experience. Despite the years I have spent in
disability studies and my familiarity with musical kripping—from the
standpoint of observer and participant—I almost missed Jane’s krip-
ping by letting my discomfort get the better of me. It was only by recali-
brating my listening to hear beyond expectations of normative
musicking within trad aesthetics (which have largely influenced my
“home” experience) that I understood Jane’s performance for what it
was—her own expression of musicality.
I intentionally link kripping as an expression of musicality to an inclu-
sive understanding of listening, which I conceptualize not only as an
action but also a way of perceiving and experiencing sociocultural and
global sound worlds. This form of listening goes beyond normative expec-
tations of technical skill and virtuosity and instead recognizes the values of
diverse musical expressions. It confronts hearing-centric understandings
of music and welcomes the richness of the embodied and visual Deaf

58
See Emily Hutcheon and Gregor Wolbring, “‘Cripping’ Resilience: Contributions
from Disability Studies to Resilience Theory,” Media/Cultural Journal 16, no. 5 (2013),
https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.697.
59
“About Krip Hop Nation,” Krip Hop Nation: More Than Just Music, archived at
https://web.archive.org/web/20210719035025/https://kriphopnation.com/.
 law e t a l.

musical experience, and it centers intersectional voices, music, and lived

experiences that have been routinely marginalized. This form of listening
is directly connected to the goals of global music history, which Chua
describes as “the true act of listening…, [which] means attending

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
to something we have no interest in.” This, he continues, “may seem
counterintuitive, but if we only listen to our own interests, nothing truly
new will happen. Genuine change only occurs in interaction with what we
do not know.”60 Such listening to understand is not passive but actively
challenges the aesthetic values that have been passed down to me/us
through my/our home of the academy. It also resonates with Castro
Pantoja’s discussion later in this forum of the potential inherent in “lis-
tening for intimacy”—an act that in this case reveals diverse expressions of
musicality, creativity, and humanity. Here musicality is an important form
of human expression that has the power to transform human perception.
Indeed Jane’s expression of musicality not only allowed me to re-confront
my ingrained musical biases but also altered stereotypes previously held by
some Cruinniú members.
In a post-session interview Cruinniú member Sean spoke about the
feelings of discomfort he had previously experienced when working with
neurodivergent individuals and how this tension dissolved during 273
the session:

I suppose I’m not 100% comfortable [working with disabled people] and
I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I feel as though I’m transmitting
that [discomfort] to them and it’s not very fair on them if I am. So that’s
it. But now something like the session that we had at the Hurler’s that
night—that was great. And it was good for me actually, you know?
Because [the Rovers] were lovely. They were really great. And it kind
of gave me an insight into their tremendous sense of rhythm.… And
I don’t know whether it was my imagination, but I thought [Jane] did
super work on [the bucket] because sometimes she was on the off-beat
and I loved that.61

In the first part of Sean’s statement he draws a connection between dis-

comfort and disability—a sentiment that I have heard many times from
nondisabled individuals. The notion that disability is discomforting to the
nondisabled is a common trope within disability studies. Discomfort as an
embodied state of unease, anxiety, pain, or embarrassment is closely
linked to ableist understandings of disability, which reject nonnormative
bodies and minds. Scholars such as Tobin Siebers have argued that dis-
ability serves as a source of anxiety for the nondisabled due to the
60
Chua, “Global Musicology,” 123.
61
Sean is a pseudonym. This interview was conducted by the author on March 28,
2018.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

permeability of the two identities: “Able-bodiedness is a temporary iden-

tity at best, while being human guarantees that all other identities will
eventually come into contact with some form of disability identity.”62
Disability can be experienced individually, be it the short-term result of

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
a sprained wrist or a permanent state brought on by birth, chronic illness,
or old age, or interpersonally through a friend, colleague, or family mem-
ber. In short, disability touches us all. Perhaps the very ephemerality of so-
called able-bodiedness causes humans to cling to it and view disability with
unease. Experiences of disability are, however, the rule rather than the
exception, a fact that directly challenges notions of the nondisabled body-
mind as normative and experiences of discomfort and disability as
“Other.” In this way, disability is universal, yet experiences of disability
—which are contingent on value systems that vary between and within
cultures—are not. The lens of the global provides a productive and
nuanced way to approach this difference. Like musicality and kripping,
global music history encourages us to listen for these variations and
reminds us that “identities are formed through their interaction with
difference.”63
This brings us to the third point of connection: the convergence of
274 disability and global music history creates opportunities for musicologists
to advocate for and with historically marginalized communities. Musicality
transgresses normative musical values and offers opportunities to
embrace neurodivergent musical expression. This sentiment is reflected
in Sean’s appreciation of Jane’s complex rhythmic performance on the
orange bucket. Furthermore, he suggests that Jane’s musicality in krip-
ping the trad soundscape allowed him to move past his initial discomfort
and connect with the Rovers on a human level. As demonstrated
through Sean’s narrative, musicality transcends culturally constructed
notions of musical talent and centers listening for difference as an act
of disability advocacy.
While Sean’s reflection highlights the potential for experiences of
musicality to facilitate social bonding between neurodivergent and neuro-
typical musicians, it is also a reminder that we must first be willing to step
away from our “home” and engage with discomfort. Through my collab-
oration with Jane and Sean, and my own self-reflection, I have learned
that discomfort is not only instructive but also potentially transformative.
Yet embracing this inclusive musicality also means examining ableist stan-
dards of musical talent in local and global contexts. For me this means
addressing these themes in my teaching of canonical WAM in university
settings and in my research collaboration with neurodivergent musicians

62
Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 5.
63
Chua, “Global Musicology,” 114.
 law e t a l.

in Ireland and the United States. More broadly, the commonalities

between disability studies and global music history highlight the potential
for generative discourse. The centering of generous listening practices
across and within cultural traditions, and the drive to challenge

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
hegemonic musical norms, suggest the possibility of a musicological
paradigm shift rooted in transformative activism that values relationality
and humanity over discriminatory definitions of musical excellence.

ON OFFERING ONESELF TO MUSIC HISTORY: PERSPECTIVES

AND POSITIONALITIES FROM COLONIAL SIAM
PARKORN WANGPAIBOONKIT

In Our Neighbors, Ourselves, Homi Bhabha theorizes the stakes of the pol-
itics of recognition through a primal scene of colonial encounter,
a vignette in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), in which the pro-
tagonist Charles Marlow stops to notice the pained visage of an ailing
Congolese man with a piece of white fabric tied around his neck.64 Offer-
ing the man a biscuit, Marlow focuses his attention on the scrap of cloth;
the white man becomes absorbed in pondering its meanings: “Where did he 275
get it? Was it a badge—an ornament—a charm—a propitiatory act? Was there
any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling around his black neck,
this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.”65 This is the moment of
recognition, when the colonial Other becomes human, when interiority is
recognized—in this case—through the commonality of sartorial practice.
The sight of the native man’s face initially moves Marlow to an act of
charity. But it is the latter’s pondering on white fabric that activates the
process of recognition, raising the possibility that this man might be a sub-
ject who possesses a belief system unknown to Marlow.
Bhabha focuses on this moment as an unsettling experience that dis-
turbs the recognizer’s sense of self: “In reaching out to the specific thought
of the other and grappling with what is not entirely intelligible within it…
there lies the possibility of identifying with the unconscious of the other, and
extending oneself in the direction of the neighbor’s alterity and unknow-
ability.”66 Recognition makes legible the gap of difference but does not fully
traverse it. The native man’s interiority is not granted a priori as a human
right, but ushered in through a moment of Marlow’s pondering the man’s
“startling” sartorial preference. The white thread around the neck serves as
64
Homi K. Bhabha, Our Neighbors, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2011).
65
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2006), 17, quoted in
Bhabha, Our Neighbors, Ourselves, 8.
66
Bhabha, Our Neighbors, Ourselves, 9.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

the mediating structure that enables the moment of recognition: its pres-
ence points toward an as-yet-unknown system of meaning but does not, in
itself, index or disclose the content of those meanings.
Marlow’s discomfort at being unable to grasp the native man’s belief

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
system offers an opportunity to reflect on the relationship of music studies
to the colonial archive. Bhabha’s analysis places both the agency of rec-
ognition and the onus to identify with the colonial Other entirely upon
the party in power. The subjectivity of the recognizer is the locus of
colonial discomfort, leaving that of the recognized “unconscious” absent
in a vignette of silent abject alterity. Marlow does all the thinking and
feeling; the native man lies dying.
Much recent Euro-American scholarship on music and colonialism
has been written from the perspective of the European-language
archive.67 Such histories center the experience of European imperial
officers in foreign lands, often accompanied by laments for the dearth
of documents preserved in non-Western archives.68 While this body of
work has been expert at demystifying white fantasies of colonial contact,
it risks repeating portrayals of a colonial Other as existing forever within
traces retold or rescued from the European archive.
276 I have written, so far, with the abstract distance of theory—theory
derived from a reading of fiction, no less—in order to question its porta-
bility. Let me now contextualize myself, in the spirit of Bissett Perea’s call
for intentional relationality in music scholarship. I was born and raised in
Bangkok, but have lived and studied much of my adult life in xučyun
(Huichin), the unceded land of Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people.69
Within the Euro-American academy, I am among the few scholars who
study music and Thailand, and often find myself standing in for all of
“Thainess” in a given academic space. I am, in turn, connected and dis-
connected in complex ways to Thai music scholars working in Thailand,
each of whom holds intellectual and ethical aims of scholarship that
variously overlap with and contradict my own.
In my work on the colonial history of nineteenth-century Siam, I often
come across moments of encounter in which the discourse of Siamese
67
Olivia Bloechl diagnosed this issue more than a decade ago in Native American Song
at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 23.
68
See Jen-yen Chen’s response to Thomas Irvine’s claim that archival sources of the
eighteenth-century Canton soundscape from Chinese perspectives cannot be found; Jen-yen
Chen, review of Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839, by
Thomas Irvine, Music & Letters 102 (2021): 158–60, at 160.
69
“xučyun (Huichin)…extends from what we know today as the Berkeley Hills to the
Bay Shore, from West Oakland to El Cerrito. The territory is composed of what we know
today as five Bay Area cities—all of Alameda, Berkeley, Emeryville, El Cerrito, and most of
Oakland.” See “Ohlone Land: What is xučyun (Huichin)?,” Native American Student
Development, University of California, Berkeley, last modified May 10, 2023, https://
cejce.berkeley.edu/ohloneland.
 law e t a l.

music served as the conduit through which European observers placed

the Siamese race in a hierarchy of civilizational advancement.
While accounts of Siamese music from the European archive routinely
paint the Siamese as passive subjects of evaluation, the Siamese archive—

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
diaristic, journalistic, and scholarly—is rich with strategic reflections on
the perceived worth of Siamese music within an admittedly global-
colonial order.
A salient instance of Siamese self-invention occurred during the Inter-
national Inventions Exhibition, which opened in London in May 1885. The
exhibition, touted as the first “devoted to the illustration of the history of
Music from the earliest times down to the present day,” featured perfor-
mances that made audible the linear development of music history: long-
unheard music from Dufay and Ockeghem to Bach and Handel alongside
an ensemble of Siamese musicians straight from the court of
Chulalongkorn.70 This was the moment when Siamese intellectuals became
aware that their music contained racially specific knowledge imperceptible
to its performers.
English music theorist and mathematician Alexander Ellis had long
hoped for an opportunity to experience Siamese music firsthand. In his
article “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” which he published in 277
March 1885, Ellis had left incomplete the section on Siamese tuning in
anticipation of this very opportunity to examine the musicians and their
instruments.71 Equipped with a battery of tuning forks, Ellis visited the
Siamese embassy in June 1885 to take pitch measurements of the Siamese
scale from two percussion instruments: the ranat ek (xylophone) and ranat
lek (metallophone).72 While it was easy enough for Ellis to deduce that the
instruments divided the octave into seven tones, the intervals between
each tone varied drastically between the two ranat. For example, Ellis
listed the interval between the second and third notes of the scale (II and
III) as 219 cents on the ranat lek, but only 165 cents on the ranat ek (see
table 1). Similarly, he observed that the intervals between the fourth and
fifth notes (IV and V) was larger on the ranat ek, at 200 cents, compared to
the ranat lek at 150 cents.73 The measurements Ellis took from these
instruments did not point toward any coherent theory for Siamese tuning.
Ellis’s examination of the Siamese instruments was presided over by
Prince Prisdang, Siamese ambassador extraordinaire.74 Upon seeing
70
“Music at the Inventions Exhibition, 1885,” Art Journal (1885): 153–56, at 153.
71
Alexander J. Ellis, “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” Journal of the Society of
Arts 33 (1885): 485–527, at 506–7.
72
Alexander J. Ellis, “Appendix: On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” Journal of
the Society of Arts 33 (1885): 1102–12, at 1103–7.
73
Ellis, “Appendix,” 1105.
74
On Prisdang, see Tamara Loos, Bones around My Neck: The Life and Exile of a Prince
Provocateur (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
 278
TABLE 1.
Alexander Ellis’s Measurements of the Siamese Scale (“Appendix,” 1105).
Observed
Ranat Lek
Vib. 285 316 358 386 421 458 511 562
Cents I 177 II 219 III 127 IV 150 V 149 VI 148 VIII 167 I
Ranat Ek
Vib. 285 317 349 383 429 471 522 577
Cents I 185 II 165 III 160 IV 200 V 159 VI 178 VIII 174 I

Theoretical

Vib. 285 315 347 383 423 467 516 570

Cents I 171 II 171 III 171 IV 171 V 171 VI 171 VIII 171 I

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
 law e t a l.

Ellis’s unsatisfactory readings, Prisdang proposed instead that the Siamese

scale consisted of seven equal tones, tuned to 171 cents per interval
(171.43 being seven equal divisions of 1200 cents in an octave).75 In
a moment of strategic self-invention, Prisdang replaced the jumbled inter-

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
vals of Ellis’s measurements and claimed the organizational perfection of
equidistance for Siamese music.
This encounter introduced the idea of mathematical consistency into
Siamese musical thought, a pivot through which Prisdang transformed the
strangeness of stark difference into legible diversity. In Bhabha’s example,
Marlow is the agent who recognizes the native man’s interiority through the
white fabric that indexes an underlying belief system. Prisdang, on the other
hand, becomes a strategic agent for manufacturing the conduit of his own
recognition. Understanding his representative role in Ellis’s evaluation, the
colonial Other offers up an invented knowledge that demonstrates music-
theoretical coherence for his own “culture.” The frame of music theorizing,
here, serves as the recognizable symbol—Bhabha’s fabric around the neck
—through which Siamese civilizational excellence can be illustrated in
a knowledge system legible to European cognition.
In thinking on my contribution toward a global music history, I have
been drawn to reflect on the work of invented signifiers and systems that 279
demand recognition, rather than the affective qualities of the fleeting
moment of encounter itself. This shift relocates the locus of colonial
discomfort away from the experience of European officers in foreign
lands (Marlow’s unsettled sense of self as he recognizes the native man’s
unknowable interiority) to the work that subjects of colonialism them-
selves undertook upon their entrance to the global-colonial register. His-
tories of music and colonialism, operating often in a prefabricated
paradigm of postcolonial struggle, frequently fail to account for these
agents who acted strategically to restructure their musical and sonic selves
in a bid toward global power. My approach centers the discomfort of
colonial targets (as reactive thinkers rather than unknowable subalterns)
in preparing a sense of self that is “worthy” of recognition.
Seeking to confirm the newfound theory of Siamese tuning, Ellis
devised an instrument in seven-tone equal temperament and played it
for the assessment of the Siamese musicians. Confirming Ellis’s assump-
tions and their prince’s observation, they professed a preference for
the scale based on purely theoretical measurements to the one based on
the tuning of their own instruments. As Ellis notes: “In order to test the

75
See Ellis, “Appendix,” 1105. See also Ellis’s notes in Hermann L. F. Helmholtz, On
the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, 2nd English ed., trans.
Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Dover, 1954), 556. We do not know Prisdang’s intentions in
conveying this information; his encounter with Ellis is recorded in neither Prisdang’s cor-
respondence nor the journal of Nai Kram, one of the musicians present.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

correctness of this information…I played [the equidistant scale] before the

musicians at the Siamese Legation. They unanimously pronounced the
scale good. I then played the scale I had heard from the Ranat Ek, and
they said it was out of tune. This experiment may be considered decisive.”76

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
In his fantasy of absolute control over pitch production, Ellis had conjured
an ideal scale that sounded the essence of “Siamese tuning” with an accu-
racy never before produced by a Siamese instrument: a perfection against
which the ranat, tuned with applications of lead and wax, became heard as
out of tune. In a weird mirroring of performing for recognition, the agen-
das of encounter drown out the sounds and make it impossible to actually
hear Siamese music—leaving only strategically reciprocal reflection on
pitch and tone as isolated constituents.
Ellis mapped these findings onto an imaginary timeline of civiliza-
tional progress, proffering Siamese music, with its emphasis on tone and
absence of vertical harmony, as evidence of what music must have
sounded like in Europe’s ancient times.77 The efforts of the Siamese to
convey a music-theoretical system that was legible to Ellis had failed to
preclude them from being relegated to an earlier stage in temporal devel-
opment. In the written publication—the space of knowledge production
280 that follows encounter—the rules of the game were stacked against Sia-
mese musicians as objects of study.
The discourse of civilizational progress was not mere rhetoric but was
crucial to the preservation of Siam’s sovereignty at the time. In the late
nineteenth century, Britain and France utilized the discourses of civiliza-
tional excellence, racial purity, and the right to rule as justification for
colonial expansion across Southeast Asia.78 This introduced to Southeast
Asian imperial dynamics the idea that a nation needed to justify its sover-
eignty through displays of racial-civilizational unity. At the close of the
Franco-Siamese War in 1893, Siam had lost many of its territories to
French and British control, a geopolitical seizure backed by unequal
treaties, international law, and ethnological studies on the racial impurity
and civilizational backwardness of Siam’s ruling class.79 Charting a careful
path through European theorization of Siamese music was, in this con-
text, pertinent to Siam’s colonial survival at this time.80

76
Ellis, “Appendix,” 1105.
77
Ellis, “Appendix,” 1103.
78
See Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), 1–19, 81–96.
79
See David Streckfuss, “The Mixed Colonial Legacy in Siam: The Origins of Thai
Racialist Thought, 1890–1910,” in Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths: Essays in Honor of
John R. W. Smail, ed. Laurie J. Sears (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast
Asian Studies, 1993), 123–53.
80
On the Siamese localization of European practices, see Rachel V. Harrison, “The
Allure of Ambiguity: The West and the Making of Thai Identities”; Pattana Kitiarsa, “An
 law e t a l.

The colonial history of nineteenth-century Siam is not, however, sim-

ply one of victimhood but of direct competition between Siam and Euro-
pean powers. Itself a prior colonizing force in Southeast Asia, Siam
competed directly with European interests in attempts to retain and

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
expand its regional empire.81 Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul has
demonstrated how the Siamese court coined the rhetoric of siwilai (civi-
lization) as a philological conduit to assimilate Euro-imperial rhetoric and
to stake out a position for Siam in colonial modernity. This new ordering
of the world was, in Winichakul’s terms, a “temporal consciousness in
which history, progress, and nostalgia were conceivable”—a civilizational
time that displaced Siamese indigenous notions of Hindu-Buddhist
temporal-cosmic stasis.82 The elaboration of a quantifiable consistency
of a musical system served, then, as a measure of civilizational achieve-
ment. Rather than playing out a dynamic of subaltern resistance against
imperial oppression, Siamese intellectuals constructed their accounts of
music history and theory with a view to securing their global-colonial
status through the approval of Europe’s imperial ear.
In scholarly hindsight, it is easy to imagine that either Prisdang himself
or the Siamese musicians could have indicated to Ellis the flaws in his meth-
ods. They could have pointed, for instance, to his presumptions that Siamese 281
tuning is a homogeneous practice, that one group of musicians could rep-
resent the whole of their race, and—even more absurdly—that Siamese
psychology itself was audible in the intervals of a purported tonal system.
As an oral tradition passed down in systems of apprenticeship, Siamese court
music supported competing schools and master lineages, many of which
subscribed to unique tuning practices as markers of style and differentiation.
The concept of a theoretical ideal scale, conceived outside of performance
and as something toward which performances should aspire, was a racializing
construct introduced to Siamese musical discourse by Ellis’s study. More-
over, Ellis assumed that all Siamese instruments followed the tuning of fixed-
pitch percussion instruments. Tuning depended, however, not only on
whether an ensemble actually included fixed-pitch percussion instruments
but also on the repertoire being played.83

-
Ambiguous Intimacy: Farang as Siamese Occidentalism”’; and Thanes Wongyannava,
“Wathakam: The Thai Appropriation of Foucault’s ‘Discourse,’” all in Rachel V. Harrison and
Peter A. Jackson, eds., The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 1–36, 57–74, 153–72.
81
See Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1–28.
82
Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of
Civilizational Thinking in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam,” Journal of
Asian Studies 59 (2000): 528–49, at 531.
83
See John Garzoli, “The Myth of Equidistance in Thai Tuning,” Analytical Approaches
to World Music 4, no. 2 (2015): 1–29; and Nattapol Wisuttipat, “Relative Nature of Thai
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

Siamese intellectuals in the ensuing decades, however, did not reject

European music-theoretical frameworks as extraneous intrusions to Sia-
mese thought. Rather, they endeavored to codify a Siamese musical dis-
course that reckoned with and incorporated the prestige of European

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
knowledge production. The first of such efforts was an anonymous article,
“Dontri” (Music), which was published in the court’s Wachirayanwiset jour-
nal in 1894. The article begins with a philological treatment of the origins
of the Siamese word for music, dontri, from the Sanskrit for a plucked
string, ostensibly demonstrating an ancient Indo-European lineage of
Siamese. It goes on to list and describe instruments of Indian, Burmese,
Khmer, Siamese, and European origin, before concluding:

Of the musics of various races described here, if I were to compare the

merits of each to honor one above all, I must commend the European
race for their peerless intelligence. Their music is capable of producing
twelve distinct pitches, greater than that of any other race, while Thai
music is the foulest of them all, capable of only producing seven.84

Fixated on the division of the octave as a measure of racial worth, this

282 Siamese theorist had expropriated the European concern for pitch orga-
nization as an index of cultural standing. Racializing comparativism was
not a one-sided concern of European intellectuals, but internalized to
Siamese musical thought as a matter of reflexive self-evaluation.
The ensuing decades saw further publications—in Thai and English—
that worked to authenticate the history of Thai music through Eurological
frameworks. Publications like Phra Apaipolrop’s Dontriwithiya (Musicology,
1912), Wichit Wathakan’s The Evolution of Thai Music (1942), and the gov-
ernmental Department of Fine Arts’ Thai Classical Music (1961) coined and
catalyzed narratives on the developmental history of national instruments
and songs, the theoretical coherence of Siamese tuning, and the localization
of European musical terms as naturalized concepts to describe Siamese
music.85 These efforts illustrate concerted attempts to claim a music history
for the nation such that civilizationally inferior conjectures could not be
ascribed through the musings of foreign observers.
I have given a brief example here of the ways in which Siamese
musical thought transformed in the face of newfound value systems.
-
Traditional Music through its Tuning System,” International Journal of Creative and Arts Studies
2, no. 1 (2015): 86–97.
84
“Dontri” (Music), Wachirayanwiset 9, no. 37 (1894), 433–36, at 434. The translation is
my own.
85
Phra Apaipolrop, Dontriwithiya (Bangkok: Rongpim Sophon Pipantanakarn, 1912);
Wichit Wathakan, The Evolution of Thai Music (Bangkok: Department of Fine Arts, 1942); and
Krom Sinlapakon [Department of Fine Arts], Thai Classical Music (Bangkok: Department of
Fine Arts, 1961).
 law e t a l.

These are not indigenous knowledges offered as a supplement or correc-

tive to Euro-American Music Studies but a history of self-unsettled reflec-
tions on what it meant to be evaluated by and incorporated into such
systems. This history renews ontological questions about “globe” and

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
“music” that are routinely posed as core problems for conceptualizing
a global music history.86 The impossibility of a global vantage point has
been much theorized: nobody lives at the level of the globe. It exists as
a knowable space through visualizing and virtualizing technologies such
as the tabletop globe and the internet.87 One way to approach this con-
tingency is through the experience of historical actors who find them-
selves having to adapt to being thrust upon the globe, to the upheaval of
having the globe arrive at their doorstep.
This process of locating oneself at the global register comes with
reductive and (self-)essentializing categories of regional emplacement.
The discomfort that Palomino locates later in this forum in the concept
“Latin American music” as an essentialist regionalism is one that is also an
issue of concern for scholars of “Southeast Asia,” a spatial identity of
relatively new coinage.88 Our approaches here build upon recent calls
for scholarly attention to listening positionalities from the Global South,
to examine how specific places come to find themselves as a “South” to 283
begin with.89 These inquiries upon categories of spatialized belonging
are, to anticipate Castro Pantoja’s contribution to the forum, a “play with
scales” (Siamese, Thai, Southeast Asian, Global South, and so forth) that
confronted and continue to confront historical actors and present-day
scholars alike.
Global music history, then, could offer space for recognition of the
discomfort that arises as certain non-European music practices navigate
their entry into a highly provincial global sphere—the weighing and bal-
ancing the guises of one’s music within a politics of colonial approval. In
turn, these processes of navigation, and the conditions by which non-
European musical practices become codified into legible forms of knowl-
edge, provide a means of reflecting on some of the problems central to
global music history, not least the Eurocentric question of what constitu-
tes music in the first place.

86
See Daniel Chua’s questions “how do we think globally as musicologists?” and “what
is music?” in Daniel K. L. Chua, “Global Musicology,” New Sound, no. 50 (2017): 12–16, at 12,
14.
87
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Planetarity,” in Death of a Discipline (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), 71–102.
88
See Donald K. Emmerson, “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?,” Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies 15 (1984): 1–21.
89
See Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, “Introduction: Remapping Sound Studies in the
Global South,” in Remapping Sound Studies, ed. Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2019), 1–36.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

JUST SOUND RIGHT: ACOUSMATIC LISTENING

IN A DISCOMFORTING GLOBAL MOMENT
HEDY LAW

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
How does music mark a historic moment of global scale? Cultural
changes, according to Sebastian Conrad, have an impact often more
profound than political and economic changes.90 This article uses one
case study to demonstrate a specific kind of cultural change—a musical
one—in response to a political change. I will explain my experience of
a recent global moment—the implementation of the National Security
Law (NSL) in July 2020 in Hong Kong—and its impact on music. Observ-
ing this moment as a musicologist who lives outside Hong Kong, I argue
that the Cantonese popular songs (also known as Cantopop) that “sound
right” served a storytelling function on a global scale ahead of the emer-
gence of narratives—including the official one authorized by the Chinese
Communist Party, peer-reviewed scholarly ones, and in other media forms
—of the recent history of Hong Kong.91
To ground this discussion, I respond to Bissett Perea’s call for a self-
introduction. As a musicologist, born and raised in British Hong Kong,
284
who has lived and conducted research in the United Kingdom, the United
States, France, and Canada since the United Kingdom handed Hong
Kong over to China in 1997, I have found myself evolving over the years
from an insider to an outsider, gradually transforming from a British
colonial subject who once called Hong Kong “home” into a settler in
a nation called Canada. I currently work in Vancouver, part of the terri-
tory of the xwməykwəy ̓əm (Musqueam) people. Consequently, my sense of
“home” has become increasingly multilayered. My grandparents on my
father’s side migrated from the Guangdong province to British Hong
Kong when they were teenagers. My mother is indigenous. Her ancestors
lived in Hong Kong when it was a village in southern China, long before it
was colonized by Britain in 1842. Nevertheless, like many musicologists
and scholars, I consider myself “global” because I am constantly “moving
and crossing borders.”92 My identification with various Cantonese com-
munities within and outside Hong Kong is often conditioned by the lan-
guages and dialects I use. I speak Cantonese, a language considered
a minoritized Yue dialect in Hong Kong, Guangdong, and Macau,
although spoken by the majority of Hong Kong residents, and

90
Sebastian Conrad, Introduction to part 3, “A Cultural History of Global Transfor-
mation,” in An Emerging Modern World, 1750–1870, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen
Osterhammel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 413–27, at 414.
91
On “sounding right,” see Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, 9.
92
Chua, “Global Musicology: A Keynote,” 120.
 law e t a l.

I understand a Cantonese Shunde dialect spoken by my grandparents, who

came from that district in Guangdong. I also understand to some extent
the indigenous Weitou dialect spoken in my mother’s village, which is a Yue
dialect closer to the Donguan dialect than it is to Cantonese.93

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
My understanding of Cantonese and its dialects helps me chart the
mobility of Cantonese music in a linguistic “region”—a key concept in
global history—across political borders. During the era of British Hong
Kong (1842–1997), most original Cantonese music was composed and
performed in the Canton region, including Guangdong, Hong Kong, and
Macao, but waves of diaspora, first from the late nineteenth century to the
early 1920s, and again in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2020s, have made Canton-
ese music mobile.94 Since the 2010s, in postcolonial Hong Kong, Canto-
pop songs have been officially released by record companies based in
Hong Kong on YouTube for a global audience and on region-specific
music streaming subscription services. The accessibility of Cantopop on
the internet has facilitated its transborder resonance and has created
a language- and genre-based community of global and local listeners
through which songs that address the impact of the NSL can be shared.
The NSL reflects the global context of Hong Kong as a region in the
Hong Kong–China “nexus.”95 Coming in the wake of a wave of street 285
protests, the NSL outlaws acts or facilitation of terrorism, subversion,
separatism, or collusion with foreign powers. At first glance, it aims at
imposing new legal restrictions on the freedom of expression of the Hong
Kong people who organized massive pro-democratic protests in 2014 and
2019.96 Yet a closer look reveals that this local statute enables the Hong
Kong government to apply what legal scholar Angela Huyue Zhang calls
“extraterritorial jurisdiction” to offenses “from outside the Region [Hong
Kong Special Administrative Region, or HKSAR].”97 Thus the NSL has
unveiled a Sino-driven order over and against a Eurocentric legal practice
at a global scale. It asserts a global legal reach that can criminalize

93
On speaking Cantonese in Hong Kong, see Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, 79–101;
on accents, see 108–10.
94
On the mobility of Cantonese opera, for example, see Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Chinatown
Opera Theater in North America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
95
On this nexus, see John M. Carroll, The Hong Kong–China Nexus: A Brief History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 3.
96
See Michael C. Davis, “Hong Kong Is Part of the Mainland Now: Beijing’s New
Security Law Has Stifled the Territory’s Autonomy and Hopes,” Foreign Affairs, July 2, 2020.
97
“This Law shall apply to offences under this Law committed against the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident
of the Region.” The Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security
in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, G.N. (E.) 72 of 2020, Art. 38, https://www.
elegislation.gov.hk/fwddoc/hk/a406/eng_translation_(a406)_en.pdf, emphasis added. On
“extraterritorial jurisdiction,” see Angela Huyue Zhang, Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How
the Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 34–35.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

individuals, organizations, or institutions both in and outside of mainland

China, Hong Kong, and Macao.98 Indeed the extraterritorial element of
the law has been exercised. On March 14, 2022, the UK-based organiza-
tion Hong Kong Watch was the first known foreign organization to be

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
accused of violating the NSL.99
The onset of the NSL-driven political era creates an international
ripple effect for global history. Major international media, having fol-
lowed the unfolding of the unrest in Hong Kong since 2014, are cognizant
of the extraterritorial feature of the NSL. Locals and expatriates in Hong
Kong have lived with periods of discomfort ranging from periodic physical
distancing and surveillance protocols to disrupted service in public trans-
portation and tear gassing, which might lead to the identification of Hong
Kong in the NSL age as an unfamiliar and uninhabitable place.
In the face of the implementation of the NSL, it has been imperative
to have narratives other than day-to-day journalistic accounts that shape
events into stories. Professionals in various fields have made attempts to
document or explain the impact of the NSL. In 2021 filmmaker Kiwi
Chow released a documentary of the 2019 protests, Revolution of Our Times,
and 2022 saw the publication of a number of major monographs on the
286 subject: historian John Carroll notes the confusion between the notion of
“reintegration” with mainland China and “recolonization” by it in post-
handover Hong Kong; Chinese Studies scholar Kevin Carrico explains the
claim of independence in Hong Kong that provoked a governmental
crackdown; journalist Louisa Lim recounts the happenings of the 2019
protest; and legal scholar Michael Ng demonstrates that freedom of
expression was permitted by the UK government only in the last fifteen
years of the British Hong Kong era.100 Countering these attempts to
document, explain, or criticize the governmental clampdown was the
official, state-sanctioned narrative presented by Xi Jinping, president of
the People’s Republic of China, on October 16, 2022, which spoke of
“order” being restored in Hong Kong after a “turbulent” period.101

98
The Law of the People’s Republic of China, Art. 29.
99
The accusation targeted Hong Kong Watch’s co-founder and chief executive,
Benedict Rogers, and prompted then–UK foreign secretary Liz Truss to denounce the
action on Twitter as “unjustifiable.” See “Foreign Secretary Issues Statement on the Unjus-
tifiable Action Taken against Hong Kong Watch,” Hong Kong Watch, March 14, 2022,
https://www.hongkongwatch.org/all-posts/2022/3/22/foreign-secretary-issues-statement-
on-the-unjustifiable-action-taken-against-hong-kong-watch.
100
Carroll, Hong Kong–China Nexus, 60; Kevin Carrico, Two Systems, Two Countries: A
Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 88–102; Louisa
Lim, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (New York: Riverhead, 2022); and
Michael Ng, Political Censorship in British Hong Kong: Freedom of Expression and the Law (1842–
1997) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 195.
101
Xi Jinping, “Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
and Strive in Unity to Build a Modern Socialist Country in All Respects: Report to the 20th
 law e t a l.

The NSL, in which national security takes precedence over individual

rights, regards acts of resistance as subversive.102 This has resulted in an
abrupt and almost total disappearance of incidents that signal political
resistance. The energy that propelled the protests of 2014 and 2019 seems

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
to have dissipated; dozens of leaders of the democratic-leaning movement
are in prison; combat-ready special police no longer need to raid the
streets; and lawyers in Hong Kong who take on human rights cases have
fled.103 Freedom of expression appears intact, but the NSL delimits and
repurposes this freedom. Prior to the implementation of the law, Hong
Kong’s constitution, effective since the 1997 handover, stated that “Hong
Kong residents shall enjoy the other rights and freedoms safeguarded by
the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”104 The NSL
declares a similar commitment to the protection of political freedoms and
human rights but, crucially, only in the service of the state. Article 4
declares that “Human rights shall be respected and protected in safe-
guarding national security” in Hong Kong.105 The response to this repri-
oritization has been mixed. For the liberals who live in or have left Hong
Kong, the loss of certain freedoms and rights brings with it a sense of
unease. For the nationalists who support the NSL, in contrast, the law
provides the necessary and reassuring legal means to eradicate any anti- 287
governmental activities that may continue to destabilize society.
The NSL era is marked by an absence of songs that perform overt
resistance. It has, however, produced a new category of songs that take as
their creative domain that which is outlawed as the “constitutive outside,”
to draw on Judith Butler’s concept. Perspectives that might violate the
NSL are not repressed but rather foreclosed in the creative process itself.106
According to Jacques Lacan, repression comes with the return of the
repressed, which means that “the subject cries out from every pore of his
being what he cannot talk about.”107 Yet foreclosure uses as constitutive
-
National Congress of the Communist Party of China,” October 16, 2022, http://bb.china
-embassy.gov.cn/eng/sgxw/202210/t20221025_10791802.htm.
102
On individual rights and liberalism, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion:
Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 9–12.
103
James Pomfret et al., “A Reuters Special Report: Lawyers Exit Hong Kong as They Face
Campaign of Intimidation,” Reuters, December 29, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/investigates
/special-report/china-lawyers-crackdown-exodus/.
104
The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s
Republic of China, Effective July 1, 1997, May 2021 edition, Ch. III, Art. 38, https://www
.basiclaw.gov.hk/filemanager/content/en/files/basiclawtext/basiclaw_full_text.pdf.
105
The Law of the People’s Republic of China, Art. 4.
106
On “foreclosure” as a “constitutive outside,” see Judith Butler, “Arguing with the
Real,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 139–
68, at 140; on “foreclosure” (Verwerfung), see Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in
English, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York:
Norton, 2006), 323.
107
Lacan, Écrits, 322.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

that which is expelled. In avoiding lyrics that may be interpreted as vio-

lating the NSL, songwriters need not repress a desire to assert freedom of
expression. Instead, the act of avoidance serves as creative condition.
In the pre-NSL era, achieving the correct linguistic tones was often

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
a sufficient aesthetic condition to sounding right in Cantonese music.108
Sometimes producers played with this aesthetic expectation by featuring
mispronunciations as an artistic effect. Faye Wang, a native of Beijing who
uses Cantonese as her second language, worked her accented Cantonese
into a signature singing style in her Cantopop songs, including 暗湧
(Undercurrents, 1997). Similarly, the vocal group C AllStar’s 2013 song
差詞 (Poorly Written Lyrics) provides self-conscious examples of infelici-
tous lyrics whose linguistic tones sound deliberately erroneous to Canton-
ese listeners.109 In the NSL era, in contrast, the correct reproduction of
political overtones rather than simply linguistic tones is the new criterion
for sounding right. These songs refrain from exploring mispronuncia-
tions as an aesthetic experiment. Rather, they sound linguistically right
while grasping the bare minimum of sounding the right political tone.
These songs sound right by exploring the expressive domain that audi-
ences would consider suggestive yet politically safe. Indeed, some of these
288 songs have maintained and even expanded their artists’ audience bases
because they do not polarize audiences.
C AllStar offers a good example of the use of taboos as the constitutive
outside for creating its award-winning 2021 Cantopop 留下來的人 (Those
Who Stay Behind). The official music video has had more than 3.4 million
views since its release on YouTube on April 21, 2021, less than one year
after the implementation of the NSL and before a flood of narratives—
including Xi’s official one—accounting for the NSL came out in 2022.110
The subject of this song is the wave of Hong Kong diaspora in response to
the NSL—the news agency Nikkei Asia estimated in August 2022 that about
113,000 people have left Hong Kong since 2020.111 Through iterations of
the character 見 (see) as a keyword and a rhyme legible and audible for
Cantonese speakers, the song centers a theme of reunion, expressing

108
On linguistic tones in Cantonese opera singing, see Sau Y. Chan, Improvisation in
a Ritual Context: The Music of Cantonese Opera (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991),
186.
109
Note that the melodies of about 500 Christian hymns with Cantonese lyrics are out
of sync with linguistic tones. The significance of these hymns in the history of Cantonese
music requires further investigation. See 普天頌讚 (Hymns of Universal Praise), ed. The
Hymnal Union Committee, 9th ed. (Hong Kong: Chinese Christian Literature Council,
1968).
110
C AllStar, “For Those Who Stay, For Those Who Had Left,” video, 4:14, https://
youtu.be/-a02RxrYF24.
111
Takeshi Kihara, “Hong Kong Population Drops by Record on China’s Grip, COVID
Curbs,” Nikkei Asia, August 12, 2022, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Society/Hong-Kong-
population-drops-by-record-on-China-s-grip-COVID-curbs.
 law e t a l.

a wish for those who stay behind and those who have left to be reunited—
to “see” one another—somewhere in the future. Crucially, the song does
not mention the NSL’s role in the diaspora and, as such, does not invite
listeners to take sides on the NSL. Yet the cause of departure serves as

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
a foreclosed message, which makes clear a gap in the song’s narrative that
invites acousmatic listening, a listening in for an unspoken source—not
the NSL itself but any sign that might violate the NSL—as something
already foreclosed.112
While the absence of oppressed voices in the NSL age signals a suc-
cessful remaking of a society that privileges national security, the sudden
and total disappearance of these voices marks a sonic vacuum. A period
characterized by a lack of noisy protest constitutes a new temporality that
disrupts the weekly protest rhythm of 2019. Using a Foucauldian optic,
Rey Chow might claim that this new temporality renders the inaudible
voices visible.113 Meanwhile, while this absence of oppressed voices sug-
gests the end of political unrest, new uses of the Cantonese language
outside Hong Kong by the global Cantonese communities indicate other
forms of “sounding right” in the NSL era. For example, the “Save Can-
tonese” campaign launched by students and alumni of Stanford Univer-
sity raised $1.6 million donated primarily by a businessman in Hong Kong 289
in 2021 to secure the teaching of Cantonese for students at the university.
A listening practice grounded in acousmatic listening helps to understand
a deep source that has driven seemingly unrelated, circumstantial cultural
changes that develop the use of the Cantonese language, including Can-
topop released in the NSL era and language courses outside Hong Kong
for global Cantonese communities. Acousmatic listening enables one to
hear the absence of taboos that might be outlawed by the NSL. Those who
share the acousmatic ear recognize the apparent absence of politically
sensitive elements in contemporary Cantopop, and may explain it as
a consequence of self-censorship. Those familiar with the work of Lacan
and Butler may even explain the apparent absence as the effect of
foreclosure.
Such processes of recognition build a global collective of listeners,
including those who still live in Hong Kong and those who have left the
territories. Understanding that taboos arising from the implementation of
the NSL are not repressed but carefully foreclosed enables listeners to
appreciate advanced lyric writing while acknowledging the emergence of
a global community in the new political order that adopts the same acous-
matic listening skill. Listening to music in such an effortful way might be

112
On “acousmaticity,” see Rey Chow, A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and
Foucault in the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 117–19.
113
Chow, A Face Drawn in Sand, 151.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

taxing or cause discomfort for those who equate Cantopop with easy
listening, which is the antithesis of listening for deep meaning. Yet this
listening practice in a historically and politically transitional and contin-
gent context constitutes a crucial component in music as oral culture,

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
critical as it has been for listeners who needed timely narratives to make
sense of an epochal event. In this sense, acousmatic listening may serve
cross-border community-building purposes other than simply empathy or
enjoyment. In the midst of multiple narratives that characterize a change,
listening acousmatically to Cantopop such as C AllStar’s 2021 song thus
calls attention to the gaps and silences. This listening technique also
addresses a need for storytelling that helps make sense of the NSL. The
short production cycle of Cantopop has enabled faster responses to the
political situation than what is possible through scholarly monographs,
trade books, and films. And the use of Cantonese lyrics in Cantopop to tell
stories adds a sonic dimension irreplaceable by print media. But it is the
sound of the Cantonese language that builds a transborder listening com-
munity, and it is the narrative gaps in Cantopop that build transborder
intimacy, making these songs sound and resound across global Cantonese
listeners at scale: most know how to practice just sounding right.114
290

DISCOMFORTS OF A LATIN AMERICANIST

PABLO PALOMINO

I approached the history of Latin American music as a cultural historian

in dialogue with ethnomusicology and a tradition of Latin Americanist
intellectual and political reflection. I grew interested in theoretical con-
structions of the global in music history through a journey across different
academic and cultural contexts: from my native Buenos Aires, where
I began to reflect, against the prevailing methodological nationalism of
the 2000s, on transnational approaches to Latin American music; to my
doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, during which
I discovered archives in many places within and beyond Latin America;
then to Chicago, where I explored the diverse connotations of the term
“Latin” in US history; and finally to Atlanta, where I finished my book, as
I developed a Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist curriculum at Emory
University’s Oxford College. The term “global” became ubiquitous, but its
meaning varied in each context. At the same time, this intellectual jour-
ney through archives and bibliographies, as idiosyncratic as any other,
suggests that the “global turn” is not a fashion but stems from the very
114
On resounding, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2007), 7–8.
 law e t a l.

intellectual and material conditions of our practice. The question posed

by this forum has thus haunted me for many years: how to build concepts
that capture the complexity of global music history without reifying it in
either abstruse or simplistic conceptualizations?

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
The Region as a Project

Conversations about Latin American music always reflect wider intellec-

tual and political interpretations of the region as a whole and its place in
the world. For example, whether or not Spanish pop singer Rosalía can
legitimately perform as a Latina, or the extent to which the Venezuelan
Sistema of youth orchestras perpetuates Eurocentric (i.e., supposedly not
Latin American) ideas of culture, are musical discussions that involve
conflicting ways of situating this region in global history.115 There is an
unexamined idea of “Latin America” as a de facto legitimate historical
concept underlying these interpretive battles. Both in common parlance
and in academic research the region is invoked as self-evident.
Inertia among Latin Americanists and in public parlance perpetuates
291
the self-evident, naturalized region. Hence, when Latin American music
appears, for example, in the multicultural curriculum, it does so as a token,
expected to authentically signify a clearly delimited cultural reality. The
signifier (“Latin American music”), the signified (the numerous musics of
the region we conventionally call Latin America), and their relationship
are taken for granted in a seemingly neutral geo-cultural-musical classifi-
cation. Since the conceptualization of “Latin America” in 1836 as the
Latin and Catholic strand of European civilization (opposed to the Anglo
Protestant one, both in turn bound to encounter their ultimate other : the
Asian civilization), the “allure” of the racializing discourse associated with
it has seemed irresistible.116
But defining the region is in fact a challenge. Three hundred years of
Iberian rule certainly gave unity to a region that for the preceding millennia
did not exist and that would be fragmented during the ensuing two centuries
of independent life. From a global comparative perspective, Latin America’s
115
Justin Agrelo, “Rosalía and the Blurry Borders of What It Means to Be a Latin
Artist,” Mother Jones (blog), October 11, 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019
/10/rosalia-and-the-blurry-borders-of-what-it-means-to-be-a-latin-artist/; and Geoffrey Baker,
“El Sistema, ‘The Venezuelan Musical Miracle’: The Construction of a Global Myth,” Latin
American Music Review 39 (2018): 160–93.
116
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2017); Cumbre Continental de Pueblos y Organizaciones Indígenas,
“Archivo Abya Yala / Abya Yala Archive,” 2007, http://www.cumbrecontinentalindigena.org/;
and Alejandro L. Madrid, “Diversity, Tokenism, Non-Canonical Musics, and the Crisis of the
Humanities in U.S. Academia,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 7 (2017): 124–29.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

Iberian imprint gives the region a homogeneous outlook when observed

next to the immense internal disparities of Europe, Asia, and Africa.117 In
academia, however, the region is the product of a romantic, racializing
essentialism concocted over more than two centuries in Europe and the

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
United States, blind both to the vast contrasts (demographic, cultural, polit-
ical, economic, environmental, and aesthetic) within the region and to the
region’s myriad and disparate entanglements with the rest of the world. Even
“decolonial” definitions contribute to this essentialism. Indigenous activists
condemning the colonial meaning of “Latin America” propose instead the
Panamanian Kuna term Abya Yala (land in full maturity or land of vital
blood) to designate the entire continent, signaling the persistence of Indig-
enous pre-Columbian worldviews in the twenty-first century.118 But these
definitions also perpetuate the essentializing Anglo-Latin divide by naming
the United States and Canada Abya Yala del Norte. What would make any
musical practice in this part of the world “Latin American”?
A different approach is to consider the region as a project—more pre-
cisely, as the historical sedimentation of multiple projects, one of them
being the musical Latin Americanism. “Latin American music” itself
appears as multiple aesthetic projects: sometimes in opposition to Iberia
292 and sometimes in continuity with it; as quintessentially folkloric but also
massively commercial; as popular expression and as a source of unique
modernisms. The first systematic attempt to organize musical and musico-
logical resources at a regional scale, the Boletín Latino-Americano de Música
(Latin American Music Bulletin, 1935–46), led by Francisco Curt Lange,
contained elements of all these contradictory definitions. It also maintained
ambiguous relations with the United States, a country Lange and his col-
leagues wanted to incorporate into their network. The Boletín was the first
explicit formulation of a Latin Americanist discourse in the terrain of cul-
ture—the fine arts, literature, cinema, and others came afterwards.119 This
musical region is thus young (less than a century old), remaining open to
new definitions. It is therefore more a project than an established tradition.
During the twentieth century multiple projects (compositive, institutional,
economic, mediatic, intellectual, ideological) pragmatically demarcated
a specific transnational region within the world and elaborated legitimate
discourses about music, in ways that were ambiguous enough to be produc-
tively transmitted over time and adopted by varied actors.

117
José C. Moya, “Migration and the Historical Formation of Latin America in a Global
Perspective,” Sociologias 20 (2018): 24–68.
118
Fabiana Del Popolom, ed., Los pueblos indígenas en América (Abya Yala): Desafíos para
la igualdad en la diversidad (Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, 2017), 21n1.
119
Pablo Palomino, “Introduction: Music Is Latin American History,” in The Invention
of Latin American Music: A Transnational History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020),
1–24, at 14.
 law e t a l.

Conflicting Projects

Since the late nineteenth century, transnational networks have articu-

lated, on the one hand, national systems of musical identity, taste, and

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
markets, and on the other, varied systems of empire and globalization. In
between these two types of systems, a musical region emerged. (Not only
musical: an array of intellectual, urban, economic, or juridical projects
also sought to articulate national specificities and global processes around
the idea of a regional experience of modernity.120) The structural sources
of regionalist discourses were and are varied: political exile and academic
nomadism;121 today’s transnational and multi-sited research, enabled by
expanded digitization and air travel; and music scholars’ domestic finan-
cial and institutional scarcities, as well as a sense of intellectual mission,
which turn them toward transnational collaboration. This can be seen in
Lange’s Boletín in the 1930s and 1940s, initially supported by the Uruguayan
state and later by public and private institutions throughout the
hemisphere; in the International Association for the Study of Popular
Music-Latin American Branch (IASPM-AL) founded in the 1990s; and
in the regional focus of national musicological journals, from the long-
established Revista Musical Chilena (1945) to the younger Revista Argentina 293
de Musicología (1996). The cross-pollination of national, regional, and
inter-American institutions and publishing, in changing political and
sociological conditions, made Latin Americanist musical research always
a deeply transnational endeavor.
The Latin Americanism of the twentieth century was marked by state
and civil society nationalist projects, transnational networks of expertise,
and competing ideological programs that, despite their antagonisms,
shared an idea of music as the ultimate expression of the “people.” But
today’s context is different. Latin American musical practices and their
entanglement with the globe are being challenged by at least three pow-
erful forces.

120
Adrián Gorelik, La ciudad latinoamericana: Una figura de la imaginación social del siglo
XX (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2022); Margarita Fajardo, The World That Latin
America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022); Carlos Altamirano, La invención de Nuestra
América: Obsesiones, narrativas y debates sobre la identidad de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo
Veintiuno Editores, 2021); Juan Pablo Scarfi, The Hidden History of International Law in the
Americas: Empire and Legal Networks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Fernando
Calderón and Manuel Castells, The New Latin America, trans. Ramsey McGlazer (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2020).
121
For example, Tulio Halperin Donghi, Storia dell’America Latina (Torino: Einaudi,
1967); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en América
latina: Ensayo de interpretación sociológica (Santiago: Instituto latinoamericano de Planificación
Económica, 1967).
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

The first challenge is the corporate view of the region as an aesthetic

source and as a market for global business headquartered in Miami, New
York, and Los Angeles, where both local and nomadic “Latinx” popula-
tions and producers shape musical commodities intended for US, hemi-

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
spheric, and global audiences. This view exoticizes and disseminates
“Latin” and “Latin American” music as Hollywood studios did a hundred
years ago, but now the music is increasingly performed by and for domes-
tic populations as well (nearly 20 percent of US inhabitants currently self-
identify as Latino/a or Hispanic). “Latin Grammy” market categories
include “urban,” “tropical,” “Christian,” “Portuguese language,” etc.122
How could a critical Latin Americanism influence this industrial dynamic?
The second challenge is the disdain toward regionalism among right-
wing movements in Latin America. The region is for them a nuisance at
best, and sometimes a leftist symbol to deride, but not a project to culti-
vate through music education and promotion. Right-wing politicians’ tra-
ditional Cold War, pro-Western, clash-of-civilizations worldview, in both its
conservative and liberal-cosmopolitan attitudes, is now giving way to a neo-
fascist rhetoric, paradoxically global and “anti-globalist,” which here, as in
the rest of the world, asserts a patriarchal and authoritarian attack against
294 the perceived enemies of inherited hierarchies—secularism, the welfare
state, immigration, feminism, gender ideology, cultural Marxism, critical
race theory, subaltern identities, etc. This narrative may hinder Latin
Americanist musical policies and academic practices if its supporters gain
market presence and institutional leverage.
Finally, the third challenge is a negative view of globalization and
“Latin America” itself as expressing Western capitalism and its racist epis-
temology. This “decolonial” perspective questions Eurocentric modernity
and therefore Latin America and its regionalism. On the one hand, it
unmasks the hierarchies that organize the region’s musical practices,
forcing researchers and teachers to inspect our own ethnocentric assump-
tions and pay attention to experiences of race, gender, and culture
occluded by the myths of mestizo nationalisms, which to an extent were
modeled after Eurocentric views. But on the other, it overlooks the
“anthropophagic” programs, grassroots traditions, and other forms of
musical production that are precisely the Latin American way of partici-
pating in musical globalization. Since it is unthinkable that a musical form
(let alone any cultural form) could be either completely detached from or
mechanically reducible to social relations, one must take the “colonial”
elements of a musical practice in the terms and relations set by the

122
The official Latin Grammy categories appear on the Latin Recording Academy
website, accessed April 23, 2023, https://www.latingrammy.com/en/awards/latin-grammy
-awards-categories.
 law e t a l.

historical actors, and not through an a priori ontologization of modernity

as unchanging racial-capitalist oppression. The decolonial perspective
risks thus becoming an antipolitical renunciation.123 And sometimes
Latin America is absorbed into an amorphous concept, the Global South,

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
a geopolitical term of technocratic origins that, even when aimed at ques-
tioning global inequalities and power hierarchies, also erases specificities,
casting doubts over its usefulness in historical and musicological research.

Latin Americanist Musical Scholarship and Global History of Music

Against the ideological challenges of the global as a corporate business

strategy, theater of racist fantasies, or denunciation of unchanging same-
ness, historians of music are exploring the creativity behind the projects
that produced “Latin America” as a musical region.124 In my archival
work, the actors who modernized the region’s music in the 1930s
appeared to perform multiple roles: trying to make a living, like the
musicians at the radio orchestras in Mexico City; building the cultural
infrastructure of the state, like Mário de Andrade at the São Paulo munic-
ipal record collections; and, among many other things, innovating music 295
composition and pedagogy, saving civilization, defending nations, estab-
lishing markets, imposing hierarchies, contributing to revolutions. These
actors shared a modernizing ethos: the idea that culture and society can
be improved through music. This impulse combined Eurocentric lan-
guages and prestige hierarchies with an active legitimization of local,
national, and pan-regional indigenous, indigenista, African, Afro-
national (Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, etc.), mestizo, and local avant-
garde musicking projects, and resulted in the adoption of varied and
conflicting criteria to evaluate music.
Depending on their employment and circumstances, musicians in
Bogotá or Havana, cities shaped by a whirlwind of capitalist transforma-
tions and migrations, may have been relatively better off professionally
than their peers in less vibrant cities of Europe or the United States. Yet all
these actors—the popular artist, the performer in a radio orchestra, the
123
For a critical view of the decolonial perspective, see Santiago Castro-Gómez, El tonto
y los canallas: Notas para un republicanismo transmoderno (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad
Javeriana, 2019), esp. 174–211.
124
For example, Vera Wolkowicz, Inca Music Reimagined: Indigenist Discourses in Latin
American Art Music, 1910–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022); Juan Carlos
Poveda Viera, “Hello Friends, cantemos: La música en las representaciones de lo latino-
americano en largometrajes de ficción hollywoodense durante el período de la Política del
buen vecino (1933–1945)” (PhD diss., Universidad de Chile, 2019); and Bradley Shope,
“Latin American Music in Moving Pictures and Jazzy Cabarets in Mumbai, 1930s–1950s,” in
More than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music, ed. Gregory D. Booth and Bradley Shope
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 201–15.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

innovative composer, the policy-oriented musicologist, the music

producer, the state pedagogue, the militant musician—found themselves
struggling against institutional and economic constraints, similar to the
struggles of their peers in other regions. Inequalities of professional

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
opportunities between centers and peripheries occurred both in individ-
ual countries and across regions, and changed over time. The institution-
alization of opera houses and concert systems in the Americas, for
example, followed a transnational dynamic that requires looking north,
south, east, and west simultaneously, because they developed at different
times in different places within Latin America.125 This musical cartogra-
phy is too diverse to be captured by any transhistorical dichotomy.126
“Global music history” should be thus a common home for specialists
working in and on multiple geographies to share linkages, circuits, and
overlapping histories, a home in which musical value or “excellence” is
contextual to these spatial and temporal mappings, and not something we
can take for granted.
Latin American music has been reinvented continuously over the past
fifty years in overlap with US-Latin music. Historians have shown, for
example, that Argentine musicians like Lalo Schifrin became Latin Amer-
296 ican by adopting Afro-Cuban music styles in the United States, which also
suggests that Latin American music is both foreign and domestic to the
United States, a country that absorbed through (musical) immigration its
conflicts and relations with the rest of the world as it created its own global
hegemony.127 Elsewhere, the “Latin American music” invented in the
1930s and 1940s was also engaged by understudied “Asian” musical actors.
Filipino entertainers, Japanese youth, and post-Mao elderly Chinese,
among others, added new meanings to “Latin-American music” through
their unique adoptions of, for example, mambo, salsa, and tango.128
These meanings were both real (the material history of migrating music

125
Claudio E. Benzecry, “An Opera House for the ‘Paris of South America’: Pathways
to the Institutionalization of High Culture,” Theory and Society 43 (2014): 169–96, at 181–85;
and Mario Roger Quijano Axle, “Zarzuela y ópera en Yucatán (1863–1930): Actividad del
teatro lírico y creación local” (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2016).
126
Julio Mendívil, En contra de la música: Herramientas para pensar, comprender y vivir las
músicas (Buenos Aires: Gourmet Musical, 2016).
127
Matthew B. Karush, Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular
Music (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 43–52; and Paul A. Kramer, “The Geo-
politics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long Twentieth
Century,” American Historical Review 123 (2018): 393–438.
128
We initiated a dialogue about this during panels on “Musical Travels between Latin
America and Asia” and “‘Asia–Latin America’ as Performance and Knowledge: Decentering
Global Music History in the Twentieth Century” that I co-convened with Yuiko Asaba at the
annual conferences in 2021 of the Latin American Studies Association and the Association
for Asian Studies respectively. The other panel participants were Yusuke Wajima, Moisés
Park, Yeongju Lee, Ketty Wong, Njoroge Njoroge, and Kevin Fellesz.
 law e t a l.

instruments, records, and performers) and imagined (Latin America as

otherness) for audiences and artists in other regions.
Finding a perfect match between place and music in Latin America is,
paraphrasing Schifrin’s famous tune, an impossible mission. Latin Amer-

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
ican musics (in plural) demand that we shift “the scale of our awareness
and knowledge bases beyond what feels like ‘home.’”129 This means look-
ing in the archive for the transnational and cross-regional musical
exchanges, business, and migrations that invented this regional home in
foreign places. From a Latin Americanist perspective, thus, global music
history is a history of the material and symbolic circulations among and
through which regions constitute themselves. These circulations may
comprise a single global ecology of musics, as Chua suggests,130 or may
be many ecologies linked to one another in unexpected ways. In either
case, regions have historically been a powerful way of demarcating musical
practices within these ecologies. The example of “Latin American music”
reveals the deep ideological tensions and discomforts behind the very
representation of a region. My elaboration on it follows Bissett Perea’s
suggestion in this forum, based on intertribal visiting protocols: we should
take time to ask ourselves how we relate intellectually and professionally to
the musical practices we study in order to make explicit the implicit 297
geographies (and our implicit position in them) through which we
approach those practices.

LISTENING FOR INTIMACY: SCALE, (DIS)COMFORT,

AND GLOBAL MUSIC HISTORY
DANIEL F . CASTRO PANTOJA

Intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces and usurps places meant for
other kinds of relation.
—Lauren Berlant131

To think through/with/around (dis)comfort in global music history

research is to reflect on the politics of scale. In short, pursuing the
large-scale orientations driving global music history runs the risk of down-
playing the impact of small-scale events and the agency of individual
historical actors.132 Too much focus on identifying similarities and
129
Bloechl, “Editorial,” 176.
130
Chua, “Global Musicology: A Keynote,” 114–15.
131
Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 281–88, at 282.
132
This is a paraphrasis of a recent debate between microhistorical and global history
approaches in Past & Present. See Giovanni Levi, “Frail Frontiers?,” in “Global History and
Microhistory,” ed. John-Paul A. Ghobrial, supplement, Past & Present 242, no. S14 (2019):
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

convergences across large temporalities and spaces may lead scholars to

ignore historical outliers that can only be detected by zooming in on the
microdynamics of social life. Furthermore, moments of schizophonia and
the erotics of sound can intensify the perception that we inhabit a bound-

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
less and interconnected space with no outside (i.e., an impossible totality
such as “the global”), a frame that could potentially depoliticize our his-
torical narratives in favor of what Sebastian Conrad calls global history’s
“obsession with mobility and movement.”133
There is, therefore, a need not only to historicize what Roland
Robertson calls “globality” (i.e., a “consciousness of the world as a whole”)
but also to develop alternative scales to study the workings of music and
sound in the making of the global past(s).134 Turning toward comfort and
intimacy, as I show, constitutes one way to do this. Indeed, whereas “the
global” conjures spatially extended-interconnected phenomena, the idea
of comfort elicits sensations and intimate memories of what happens in
small-scale spaces or inside the walls of one’s home. After all, the social
reproduction of comfort as an index of modernity across many liberal
societies was key in positioning the private sphere as a secluded and
sanitized interior space that is central to social life.135 This holds true in
298 Bogotá, where I wrote the bulk of this article, and where the desire for
bourgeois comfort played a major part in the domestication of
social space.136
My main argument is that listening for intimacy—which can be dis-
comforting to some—turns our attention to the “play of scales” that
unfolds in the exercise of historicizing the global music pasts.137 In what
follows, I first survey studies of scale in global history. I then explain how
intimacy operates as a historical scale to argue that listening for it repre-
sents not only a way to “play with scales” in global music history but also an
-
37–49. On large-scale spatialities and temporalities in global music history research, see
Olivia Bloechl, “Editorial”; and David R. M. Irving, “Rethinking Early Modern ‘Western Art
Music’: A Global History Manifesto,” IMS Musicological Brainfood 3, no. 1 (2019): 6–12.
133
Conrad, What Is Global History?, 226. On the erotics of sound, see Deborah Wong,
“Ethnomusicology without Erotics,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19
(2015): 178–85; and on the global as an impossible totality, see Urs Stäheli, “The Outside of
the Global,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 1–22.
134
Roland Robertson, “Global Connectivity and Global Consciousness,” American
Behavioral Scientist 55 (2011): 1336–45, at 1340.
135
Tomas Maldonado, “The Idea of Comfort,” trans. John Cullars, Design Issues 8
(1991): 35–43.
136
Stefania Gallini and Carolina Castro Osorio, “Modernity and the Silencing of
Nature in Nineteenth-Century Maps of Bogotá,” Journal of Latin American Geography 14, no. 3
(2015): 91–125, at 93.
137
The play of scales or “jeux d’échelles” is attributed to Jacques Revel, whose work has
recently been reconsidered in global history. See John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “Introduction:
Seeing the World like a Microhistorian,” in “Global History and Microhistory,” ed. John-Paul
A. Ghobrial, supplement, Past & Present 242, no. S14 (2019): 1–22, at 12n38, 16.
 law e t a l.

inquiry into the issue of interpreting scales in history vis-à-vis the spatiali-
zation of global musical pasts.138

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
Scale and Global History

The study of the politics of scale in the humanities and social sciences
predates the emergence of the recent global history turn upon which
global music history actively builds.139 Paradoxically, references to musi-
cal metaphors like counterpoint and musical scales were key to denatur-
alizing sedimented conceptions of geographical scale when these
discussions first took place.140 For heuristic purposes, I use the term
“scale” (e.g., the body, the local, regional, national, global) as both a social
construct and an object of research that broadly refers to the representa-
tion of a socially produced area that unfolds within a constructed tempo-
ral frame.141 This socially produced area accounts for the relation
between factors such as size (population, spatial, economic), level
(domestic, urban, rural), culture, geopolitics, and environment.142
Even though most scholars today rightly subscribe to a constructionist
299
framework and do not grant scale an ontological status, Sallie Marston has
noted that scale continues to show up in scholarship as a fixed container
of action that reproduces hierarchical divisions between scales (e.g.,
granting more political importance to the global than to the regional).143
One of the consequences of this usage, for example, has been the effacing
of spaces like the household, which scholars often treat as a gendered and
unaccounted space for social reproduction vis-à-vis the state or the
global.144 Because of this, Marston and other geographers have even
called for scale to be abandoned altogether and replaced instead with
138
Jan de Vries, “Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the
Nano,” in “Global History and Microhistory,” ed. John-Paul A. Ghobrial, supplement, Past &
Present 242, no. S14 (2019): 23–36.
139
On scale and recent historical methods, see Christian G. De Vito, “History without
Scale: The Micro-Spatial Perspective,” in “Global History and Microhistory,” ed. John-Paul A.
Ghobrial, supplement, Past & Present 242, no. S14 (2019): 348–72. On music related studies,
see, for instance, Ioan Sebastian Jucu, “Urban Identities in Music Geographies: A
Continental-Scale Approach,” Territorial Identity and Development 3, no. 2 (2018): 5–29.
140
Wangpaiboonkit’s article in this forum adds another layer to this discussion on
musical scales and geographical totalities.
141
Here I am building on the work of Sallie Marston. See Sallie A. Marston, “The
Social Construction of Scale,” Progress in Human Geography 24 (2000): 219–42.
142
Richard Howitt, “Scale as Relation: Musical Metaphors of Geographical Scale,” Area
30 (1998): 49–58, at 56.
143
Marston, “Social Construction of Scale,” 233–38.
144
See Elena Barabantseva, Aoileann Ní Mhurchú, and V. Spike Peterson, “Intro-
duction: Engaging Geopolitics through the Lens of the Intimate,” Geopolitics 26 (2021):
343–56.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

what they call a “flat ontology,” an approach that prioritizes complex

spatial relations that complicate facile scalar categorization as a means
to “problematize axiomatic tendencies to stratify and classify geographic
objects.”145

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
Recently, historians such as Christian De Vito have also tried to do
away with scale, owing to its multiple connotations that can make histor-
ical analysis a messy matter.146 For example, because scale can refer to
both the geographical extension (say, local or global) of historical pro-
cesses and the historiographical lens (say, micro or macro) through which
such geographical processes are interpreted, some analyses conflate the
local with the micro and the global with the macro. To circumvent this
issue, De Vito proposes to pursue what he calls a “microspatial history”—
that is, a history that focuses not on scale (on local music, for instance) but
on the study of concrete actors and objects and their interaction with
space-making and history. A microspatial history is one that rejects pre-
determined spatial and historical units in favor of engaging with the
spatial and historical categories used by historical actors themselves, but
not without losing sight of the social role of history and historians. Micro-
spatial history, according to De Vito, is thus an approach that brings
300 together “the epistemological perspective of microhistory and the spa-
tially sensitive methodology of global history.”147
De Vito’s call for a microspatial history is a productive one. Yet I do
not believe that global music history research can do away with scale
altogether given its aspirations to decenter and disarticulate imperial
and colonial world-making projects.148 After all, many actors, including
nation-states and empires, have mobilized and reified different scales as
representational tropes for variegated political and economic purposes.
We must therefore pay close attention to the symbolic and material
consequences of thinking globality (even if it is to refuse it), as well as
to the ontological and epistemological implications that naturalizing
the global has produced vis-à-vis other scales (i.e., the play of scales).
Writing about his discomfort with the idea of Latin America and even
the Global South, Palomino gives us hints on how to deal intelligently
with sedimented understandings of space in his contribution to this
forum.
To study the politics of scale does not mean that we must solely stick to
standard geographical scales (local, national, global) in our analyses nor
that we must reject the incorporation of flat ontologies and microspatial

145
Sallie A. Marston, John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward, “Human Geography
without Scale,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 416–32, at 422–23.
146
De Vito, “History without Scale,” 348.
147
De Vito, “History without Scale,” 349.
148
Bloechl, “Editorial,” 173.
 law e t a l.

histories as potentially productive methods for global music history.

Rather, we can attend to the “play of scales” while also creatively “playing
with scales,” an approach that prompts the study of alternative temporal-
ities and spatialities that result from “engaging relationally with processes

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
that are made powerful by the existence or erasure of borders.”149
This is why feminist geographers have treated scale not as a fixed
container of action but rather as a “leaky category” with overlapping
limits.150 Indeed, locating the body as the finest of scales or coming up
with counterintuitive categories such as the “global intimate” has
allowed feminist scholars to subvert the coded hierarchies of scale and
the essentialisms attached to them. As it will become clear in the next
section, intimacy works as a “leaky” scale in the exercise of writing
history.

Listening for Intimacy as Scale

According to Sara Ahmed, bodies acquire their shape by facing reitera-

tively toward a given direction. The capacity of a body to perform an
301
action such as reaching out to an object (including objects of desire)
depends not so much on its inherent capacities but on a form of space-
making reliant on the perception that the “world is available as a space for
action.”151 This repeated orientation retroactively creates the conditions
that lead to a space feeling familiar or like home. Ahmed calls this process
of (re)inhabiting a space a “homing device,” precisely because it marks
the “home” as the “here” where the body dwells, and therefore establishes
the home as a departure point or as a place of return.152
If bodies take the form of the direction they repeatedly face, then one
could propose that the global takes this paradigm to the limit. Indeed, if
the global is predicated on the metaphor of a planetary totality that func-
tions as a homing device, the “here” of the global might then deceptively
appear as a rootless and boundless space, hiding the seams of its very
contingency. But what happens to bodies when they face everywhere?
Do they stretch in all directions? Do they become spheric, hollow, torn
apart? Reflecting on the workings of comfort in the body can provide
some answers to these questions.

149
Alison Mountz and Jennifer Hyndman, “Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate,”
Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, nos. 1–2 (2006): 446–63, at 451. On the study of alternative spati-
alities, see Conrad, What Is Global History?, 120–24.
150
Mountz and Hyndman, “Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate,” 450.
151
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 109.
152
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 8.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

Phenomenologically, writes Ahmed, comfort “is the effect of bodies

being able to ‘sink’ into spaces that have already taken their shape.”153
Comfort, therefore, depends on what Ahmed calls a “feeling fetishism,”
whereby “some bodies can ‘have’ comfort, only as an effect of the work of

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
others.”154 To feel comfortable stands not only for the “self-conscious
satisfaction with one’s immediate domestic physical environment”155 but
also the feeling of being “so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard
to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins.”156 Comfort,
then, can be understood as a form of world-making, produced through
previous acts of domestication that are concealed from view, and whose
purpose is to create the fantasy of a “null state of extension.”157
To feel discomfort, conversely, is to experience one’s body as out of
place, a disorienting effect of “inhabiting norms differently” noticeable
when a particular spatial arrangement fails.158 Discomfort, put differently,
happens when a body tries to enter a space that has already taken the
shape of others (e.g., as a couch takes the shape of a person who has been
sitting on it repeatedly).159 Soreness and pain (discomfort) result when
bodies do not quite fit into normative spaces (e.g., when a queer person
tries to fit in a heteronormative space), and they ultimately “return one’s
302 attention to the surfaces of the body as body.”160 This raises questions:
When does the global fail as an arrangement? When does it stop or begin
feeling familiar?
The Latin root of the word “intimate”—intimare—means, for Mountz
and Hyndman, “to impress or make familiar.”161 This is the reason why
intimacy is often described as unfolding “within zones of familiarity and
comfort.”162 Intimacy, however, is also a space constituted by negative
emotions such as shame, embarrassment, and betrayal. Intimacy, we can
say, is thus a space and a moment that unfolds between the comfort of the
normative (personal, sexual, national, global) and the lived realities of
failing to follow this norm to the dot (i.e., the effects of a failed arrange-
ment or discomfort). Lauren Berlant evocatively sums this up when she

153
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2014), 152.
154
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 149.
155
John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern
Britain and Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 72–73.
156
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 148.
157
David Ellison and Andrew Leach, “Thinking through Discomfort,” in On Discomfort:
Moments in a Modern History of Architectural Culture, ed. David Ellison and Andrew Leach
(London: Routledge, 2017), 1–7, at 1.
158
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 155.
159
Ellison and Leach, “Thinking through Discomfort,” 2.
160
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 148.
161
Mountz and Hyndman, “Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate,” 447.
162
Berlant, “Intimacy,” 281.
 law e t a l.

writes that the secret epitaph of intimacy is “I didn’t think it would turn
out this way.”163 This secrecy also speaks to the concealment that lay
behind the production of the ideology of comfort, which, as Tomas
Maldonado notes, not only placed special emphasis on the pleasures of

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
private life but was also a mechanism meant to “block the excessive insta-
bility of the family.”164
But intimacy does not unfold solely within the comfort of the domes-
tic; there are also expectations of intimacy in the promised comfort of
institutional spaces and even in larger political communities such as the
nation-state. Michael Herzfeld notes, for instance, that identification with
a nation-state depends largely on the “‘transmutation’ of private senti-
ments into public acts,” such that belonging to a nation becomes familial
belonging.165 This transference paradoxically exposes the national com-
munity to the darker aspects of familial relationships, including shameful
histories. This brings Herzfeld to conclude that the idealized symbols that
grant nations legitimacy in a global modernity are always produced dia-
lectically in relation to the imperfect and discomforting elements that
make up the “privacy of nations” and the “sore zones of cultural sensitivity,”
elements that are nonetheless crucial to creating an intense feeling of
communitas.166 303
Might we, then, conceive of intimacy as an aesthetic of attachment,
one “that poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives
to the trajectories of the collective”?167 After all, it was the migration of
intimacy from the public into the private that transformed the public as
the space par excellence for rational decision-making in many liberal
societies. As part of this process, the desire of privacy and intimacy became
anchored to the domestic and feminine, while the public became
masculinized.168
The gendering of the private space demonstrates why the category of
the global intimate can serve to denaturalize these scales, revealing to us
how the global is constituted by the intimate and vice versa.169 To center
the global intimate implies a subversion of masculinist tropes that render
the global as “‘hypermasculine’ in force, prevailing, and ready to

163
Berlant, “Intimacy,” 281.
164
Maldonado, “The Idea of Comfort,” 37, emphasis added.
165
Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies,
and Institutions, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 12.
166
Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 2, emphasis added.
167
Berlant, “Intimacy,” 283, emphasis added.
168
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, nos. 25–26 (1990): 56–80.
169
See Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, “Introduction: The Global & the Inti-
mate,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, nos. 1–2 (2006): 13–24.
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

penetrate the local.”170 Moreover, turning to the global intimate ques-

tions the local/global binary wherein the local is framed as personal and
separated from the global, which in turn is framed as a stand-in for the
structural. In a paradigmatic example, Kimberly Chang and Lily Ling

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
have studied how the illusion of a white-collar transnational and mobile
work force is built on the labor of domestic, migrant women “who must
contend with low-wage menial labor, enforced intimacy, and incarcerat-
ing daily routine.”171
Furthermore, replacing the local/global binary with intimacy enables
a play with scales precisely because of intimacy’s aesthetics of attachment,
which bridges individual emotions with the collective. Whispers, gossip,
tacitly acknowledged secrets, and internal jokes become agents that use
the erotic efficacies of sound to both stabilize and disarticulate local and
translocal networks of people and the discursive-affective worlds that sus-
tain them. Cultural intimacy, for example, at times escapes the comfort
zones of the nation and erupts into public life, taking the form of negative
self-stereotypes that can paradoxically bind a community together
through ironic pride (e.g., laughing at a self-deprecating joke in times
of political upheaval).172 The exposure of intimacy, or fear thereof, to an
304 international audience can provoke defensiveness and discomfort among
loyal nationalists or agents of empire, who have no choice but to double-
down on the essentialisms and the often impossible claims that inform
identity, especially within larger political communities. As explored in
Wangpaiboonkit’s contribution to this forum, these acts of creative self-
invention can come to function as indices of sovereignty/coloniality in
a fine-tuned system of aural recognition that at once fetishizes and rejects
difference within a global modernity.173
Centering intimacy, therefore, constitutes not just a way of zooming
in and out (from the micro to the macro) but a way to hear the entangle-
ments of the global and other scales in, say, the performance of unofficial
sonic emblems of a postcolonial nation-state in public places (e.g., “Lift
Ev’ry Voice and Sing” in the United States during the George Floyd pro-
tests) or in the silences and sounds of labor in everyday global life (e.g.,
170
Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, “Feminist Lefebvre? Understanding Urbanization through
the Global Intimate,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 20 (2021): 366–86,
at 371.
171
Kimberly A. Chang and L. H. M. Ling, “Globalization and Its Intimate Other:
Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” in Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites
and Resistances, ed. Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (London: Routledge,
2000), 27–43, at 34, quoted in Mountz and Hyndman, “Feminist Approaches to the Global
Intimate,” 455.
172
See Daniel F. Castro Pantoja, Beatriz Goubert, and Juan Fernando Velásquez
Ospina, “Two Anthems and a Joke: Sounding the Colombian Uprising, 2019–2021,” Amer-
icas: A Hemispheric Music Journal 30 (2021): 58–93, at 73–82, 84.
173
This recalls Law’s notion of “sounding right” in this forum.
 law e t a l.

the gendered and racialized dynamics at play in the simulation of human

and local-sounding customer service agents in global communication
companies).174 Put differently, external embarrassment, shame, and
guilt—which hold together local and translocal identities from within the

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
comfort of the boundaries of these identities—can potentially drive for-
ward the circulation of sounds and ideas that may allow the conception of
the global in the first place.

Global Music History and Its Intimacies

In this forum, Bissett Perea and Carrico lay out effective ways to reject
settler colonial and ableist regimes as potential homing devices for global
music history research. But can we speak of an already existing intimate
zone of global music history? Where and what are its limits? What are
those tacitly acknowledged secrets and negative self-stereotypes that bind
us uncomfortably together as a community of scholars with an ear ori-
ented toward global processes? If we can speak of such a zone, how do we
perform these disciplinary intimacies? Do they show up cryptically in our
305
writings, anxiously awaiting to be exposed?
Let us also not forget that as scholars of music and sound we are
particularly equipped with the tools to listen for institutional and
power-laden intimacies. We are more than capable of exposing zones of
discomfort that disrupt grand narratives of global relations. Of course, this
comes at the expense of inviting others to be privy to our scholarly and
personal intimacies. And yet, this might very well prompt us to engage (to
use Herzfeld’s words) in a process “of rueful self-recognition,” a process
that includes poking fun at the positive and negative stereotypes that have
come to characterize global music history research.175 These stereotypes,
as some have written, range from a shared utopian desire for the democ-
ratization of the field of musicology worldwide, to the opinion that we
might very well be rebranding world music, or naively (even not so
naively) contributing to the recolonization of the field in the name of
the global.176
174
Here I am paraphrasing Mountz and Hyndman’s notion (“Feminist Approaches to
the Global Intimate,” 447) that intimacy is found in the entanglements of the global and the
local rooted in everyday life. On recent performances of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” see
Shana L. Redmond, “Indivisible: The Nation and Its Anthem in Black Musical Performance,”
Black Music Research Journal 35 (2015): 97–118. On the labor of simulated human voices in
call centers, see David McCarthy, “Labor, Machines, IVR-Enabled Automated Call Centers,
and the Design of an Audible Workplace,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, ed.
Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1:135–68.
175
Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 8.
176
See Bloechl, “Editorial.”
 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y

In my case (and here I follow Bissett Perea’s suggestion that we

introduce ourselves vis-à-vis discomforting questions around home, pro-
jects, and peoples), this would mean to disclose my personal and profes-
sional relationships with global music history research as a straight,

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
middle-class, Pastuso-Bogotano/Colombian (white) mestizo/Latin Amer-
ican/Latine scholar with a complicated visual disability, currently on
a work visa granted by the government of the United States to do musi-
cology in a site of meeting and exchange of native communities, especially
of Keyauwee and Saura peoples (currently occupied by the University of
North Carolina, Greensboro). In the spirit driving this forum, below
I share some discomforting intimacies and briefly describe how they con-
nect and conflict with how I relate to my own home, projects, and peoples.
The first intimacy I share is that when I was elected co-convenor of the
American Musicological Society’s Global Music History study group (I did
not nominate myself), I had very little knowledge about this emerging
field. I accepted the role as a strategy to accrue cultural and social capital
when I had to migrate back to Bogotá when the tenure-track position I was
offered at the University of Houston was canceled at the onset of the
COVID-19 pandemic. Even though I have found an intellectual “home”
306 in global music history studies, because of my Marxist political genealogy
(after all, my PhD advisor, Leonora Saavedra, and my mother, Nancy
Pantoja Cifuentes, are Marxists), I am wary of the potentially depoliticiz-
ing move of using the global as a primary orientation in music research.177
I do not think that global music history, however, is necessarily a uni-
versalizing, Westernized enterprise nor a call to disengage with the poli-
tics of one’s home—two common stereotypes that have quickly become
tied to the identity of global music history studies. For instance, although
some of my work has been accepted for publication precisely because it
deals with global music history, I am still committed to researching mes-
tizo (mixed-race) colonization in the Putumayo region (where much of
my mother’s family relocated in the 1930s and ’40s). I am also committed
to (re)learning Nariñense Andean Spanish (a transculturated linguistic
system that features elements of Andean Spanish, Quechua, Kichwa, and
Inga), which my mother spoke at home, herself an (internal) migrant
born and raised in Pasto, Nariño (a city near the border with the nation-
state of Ecuador). I did not learn Nariñense in school since its usage is still
deemed as non-normative, while the Pastuso accent was, and still is, made
fun of in Bogotá, the city where I grew up. This negative stereotype is the
result of center-periphery colonization dynamics still resonant in the

177
For, instance, see Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist critique of cross-cultural, cosmo-
politan democratic models. Chantal Mouffe, “Which World Order: Cosmopolitan or Mul-
tipolar?,” Ethical Perspectives 15 (2008): 453–67, at 461–67.
 law e t a l.

multicultural and pluriethnic nation-state of Colombia. Finally, despite

my emotional attachments to the many homes described above, I am also
reminded, from personal experience, that a home is not always a safe
place. I am cautious not to idealize it, to prioritize the politics of home,

Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/40/3/249/786763/jm.2023.40.3.249.pdf by Washington University in St. Louis user on 09 November 2023
or to desire its comforts.

ABSTRACT
This forum presents a conversation among seven scholars who
explore the theme of discomfort in the emergent field of global music
history. Prompted by Yvonne Liao and Olivia Bloechl, co-founders of the
American Musicology Society’s Global Music History Study Group in
2019, these contributions address ideas of globality by decentering
knowledge production and productively engage different ways to resist
hegemonic pasts, narratives, and processes entrenched at home, whatever
and wherever home may be. This forum thus confronts home-based
challenges that resist or obstruct the implementation of this decenter-
ing principle: What does it mean to locate a “home” and to identify var- 307
ious “discomforts” in the global musical and sonic spheres? How does the
thinking of “home” relative to “discomfort” help to theorize the concepts
of agency, locality, temporality, community, regionalism, and nationality?
All seven articles share one structural feature––an extensive self-
introduction in the spirit of Jessica Bissett Perea’s call for “intertribal
visiting protocols” developed by critical Indigenous studies. This grounds
each contribution by exposing the contingency of arguments and allows
for a weaving of themes of space, boundary, and interconnection across
articles. The forum’s topics range from world-making to relationality,
from cripping musical taste to making Siamese music legible to colonial
ears, and from listening for political taboos to problematizing “Latin
American” music and theorizing intimacy through the notion of “scale”
itself. Writing with candor, all contributors bring global music history into
uncomfortable terrains.

Keywords: global music history, home, discomfort, self-introduction,

critical Indigenous studies