Musicology and Decolonial Analysis in the Age of Brexit

Abstract

AbstractWhere postcolonial studies often retain a focus on the imperial metropole, decolonial analysis takes as an imperative the re-location of the critical nexus into former colonies. Yet with this shift there emerges a recalcitrant question about the need for decolonial analysis in the centre: if decolonization is something that happens in the periphery, why, for instance, should we engage with it in the United Kingdom? While this question might have been less pressing in music studies in the 1990s when systematic approaches to decolonial analysis first started gaining traction, I argue that the amnesiac appeals to the Anglosphere which have accompanied the Brexit vote implore us to consider the possibilities of decolonial analysis in musicology anew. I suggest that decolonial analysis can be reconfigured through the notion of the coloniality/modernity bind to turn the decolonial gaze upon the musical subject in the metropole.