Skip to main content
Department of Music
Music Hero Header Crop

Decolonisation: Reading Group Resources

This is a working bibliography, and we welcome any new reading suggestions from all of the pathways represented at Durham. If you have any suggestions or questions, please contact erin.g.johnson-williams@durham.ac.uk.

Session I, 20 November 2020

  • William Fourie, ‘Musicology and Decolonial Analysis in the Age of Brexit’. Twentieth-Century Music (2020): 197–211.

Session II, 4 December 2020

  • Margaret E. Walker, ‘Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum’. Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10/1 (2020): 1–19.

Session III, 22 January 2021

  • ‘Beethoven was Black: why the radical idea still has power today’, The Guardian
  • Nicholas T. Rinehart, ‘Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History’. Transitions 112 (2013): 117–130.

Session IV, 19 February 2021

  • Michelle Robin’s Kisluik’s Seize the Dance!: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance, chapter 1.

Session V, 12 March 2021

Session VI, 30 April 2021

  • ‘Opera can no longer ignore its race problem’, NY Times
  • 'No More Whispers: Opera’s reckoning with racism’, Ludwig-Van
  • ‘Theatre cancels opera over portrayal of Asian characters’, BBC
  • ‘Review: Peter Eötvös – The Golden Dragon’, 5 Against 4

Session VII: 21 May 2021

  • Michael Haas, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (Yale University Press, 2013), chapter 11 
  • David Baddiel on anti-Semitism: BBC News

Session VIII: 25 June 2021

  • ‘Can Music be bad’: YouTube
  • 'White Men Of Academia Have An ‘Objectivity’ Problem': Huffington Post
  • 'Can music be objectively good or bad?': The Odyssey Online 
  • Venter, Carina, William Fourie, Juliana M. Pistorius, and neo muyanga, “Decolonizing Musicology: A Response and Three Positions.” SAMUS: South African Music Studies 36–37 (2017): 129–154.  

 

The below working list of reading resources is not necessarily related to music but is relevant to the broader issue of decolonisation in higher education.

Arday, Jason, and Heidi Safia Mirza, eds. Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Attas, Robin. ‘Strategies for Settler Decolonization: Decolonial Pedagogies in a Popular Music Analysis Course’. Canadian Journal of Higher Education 49/1 (2019): 125–139.

Bradley, Deborah. ‘Good for What, Good for Whom?: Decolonizing Music Education Philosophies’. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, edited by Wayne Bowman and Ana Lucía Frega. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Bull, Anna. Bull, Anna. ‘El Sistema as a Bourgeois Social Project: Class, Gender, and Victorian Values’.  Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 15, no. 1 (2016): 120–153.

__________. Class, Control and Classical Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Chávez, Luis, and Russell P. Skelchy, ‘Decolonization for Ethnomusicology and Music Studies in Higher Education’. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 18, no. 3 (2019): 115–143.

DeLorenzo, Lisa C. ‘Is there a Color Line in Music Education?’ In Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice in the Classroom, edited by Lisa C. DeLorenzo, 176–196. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Figueroa, Michael A. ‘Decolonizing “Intro to World Music?”’. Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 10/1 (2020): 39–57.

Fourie, William, Juliana M. Pistorius, and Neo Muyanga, ‘Decolonising Musicology: A Response and Three Positions’. SAMUS 36/37 (2017): 129–156.

Fourie, William. ‘Musicology and Decolonial Analysis in the Age of Brexit’. Twentieth-Century Music 17/2 (2020): 197–211.

Froneman, Willemien, and Stephanus Muller. ‘Music’s “Non-Political Neutrality”: When Race Dare Not Speak its Name’. In Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science and Society, edited by Jonathan Jansen and Cyrill Walters, 203–218. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2020.

Gibson, Chris. ‘Decolonizing the Production of Geographical Knowledges? Reflections on Research with Indigenous Musicians’. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 3 (2006): 277–284.

Gramit, David. ‘The Transnational History of Settler Colonialism and the Music of the Urban West: Resituating a Local Music History’. American Music 32, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 272–291.

Head, Matthew. ‘Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory’. Music Analysis 22, no. 1–2 (2003): 211–230.

Hess, Juliett. ‘Decolonizing Music Education: Moving Beyond Tokenism’. International Journal of Music Education 33, no. 3 (2015): 1–12.

Hibbard, Shannan L., and Colleen Conway. ‘Preparing Music Teachers to Address Issues of Social Justice’. In Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice in the Classroom, edited by Lisa C. DeLorenzo, 197–215. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Hundle, Anneeth Kaur. ‘Decolonizing Diversity: The Transnational Politics of Minority Racial Difference’. Public Culture 31/2 (2019): 289–322.

Holder, Nate. ‘A New Music Exam Board’. https://www.nateholdermusic.com/post/a-new-music-exam-board, accessed December 22, 2020.

__________. ‘If I were a Racist’. https://www.nateholdermusic.com/post/if-i-were-a-racist, accessed December 22, 2020.

__________. ‘On the ABRSM and the Legacy of Colonialism’. https://www.nateholdermusic.com/post/on-the-abrsm-and-the-legacy-of-colonialism, accessed December 22, 2020.

Kallio, Alexis Anja. ‘Decolonizing Music Education Research and the (Im)Possibility of Methodological Responsibility’. SEMPRE: Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research 42, no. 1 (2020): 177–191.

Kok, Roe-Min. ‘Music for a Postcolonial Child: Theorizing Malaysian Memories’. In Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, edited by Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok, 89–104. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.

Levitz, Tamara. ‘Decolonizing the Society for American Music’. The Bulletin of the Society for American Music 43, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 1–13.

__________. ‘The Musicological Elite’. Current Musicology 102 (2018): 9–80.

Lovesey, Oliver. ‘Decolonizing the Ear: Introduction to “Popular Music and the Postcolonial”’. Popular Music and Society 40, no. 1 (2017): 1–4.

Morrison, Matthew D. ‘Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse’. Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (2019): 781–823.

la paperson. A Third University is Possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Recharte, Matias, ‘De-centering Music: A “Sound Education”’. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 18, no. 1 (2019): 68–88.

Robinson, Dylan, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

Stimeling, Travis D., and Kayla Tokar, ‘Narratives of Musical Resilience and the Perpetuation of Whiteness in the Music History Classroom’. Journal of Music History Pedagogy 101 (2020): 20–38.

Tuck, Eve. ‘Biting the University that Feeds Us’. In Dissent Knowledge in Higher Education, ed. Marc Spooner and James McNinch (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2018), 149–167.

__________. and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1/1 (2012): 1–40.

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 2012.

Venter, Carina, William Fourie, Juliana M. Pistorius, and neo muyanga, ‘Decolonizing Musicology: A Response and Three Positions’. SAMUS: South African Music Studies 36–37 (2017): 129–154.