The Musicolonial Politics of the Category of Man: The Case of Suriname

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Abstract This article examines the history of Suriname, a South American country that was a Dutch colony for three centuries, from the perspective of the colonial administration of sound. This period witnessed the construction of a particular understanding of the human in European colonial cosmology—the prescriptive category of Man, ideologically elevated above its animalized, gendered, and racialized others. Music and sound played pivotal roles in these processes. Accordingly, I show how the exploitation of people of African descent in Suriname was manifested in three sound-oriented colonizing tactics, all supported by various discursive reorganizations of the human-nonhuman boundary advancing the capitalist-colonial enterprise planted in the region: (1) an early modern silencing of the enslaved (ca. 1650–1770); (2) a post-Enlightenment sounding of them as part of their preparation for the abolition of slavery (ca. 1770–1900); and (3) an extractive synthesizing of non-European sonic traits persisting in the colonial dominion (ca. 1900-now). In sum, the article exposes a sonic lineage for the contemporary understanding of the category of the human to present a case of musicoloniality, a term I use to label diverse manners of sound management intended to enforce colonists’ authority and exploitative conditions of production from the 1600s to the present. Such a historical perspective urges us to extrapolate important questions about the posthuman and nonhuman theories that have gained traction in recent musicological scholarship.