Voice, Empire, Global Music History

3.0 credits · Graduate

This seminar explores the recent “global turn” in music history: a call to confront the discipline’s imperial legacies, decenter nation-bounded narratives, and cultivate post-Eurocentric frameworks for a more equitable historiography. With a focus on voice and empire (when listening across colonial lines, who counts as a proper human?) we’ll read important literature in and outside music studies that have been central to the development of this field. Some questions we’ll grapple with are as follows: What are the arguments for and against the global turn? Is globality a relevant framework for any research project in music and sound? What does it mean to decolonize knowledge production in music studies?