Thematic dossier: Insurgent Musico-logics and Decolonial Listening: bodies and epistemologies in crossing
Guest editor: Prof. Dr. Diósnio Machado Neto (EACH-USP / CNPq)
*** Note: for this issue, Revista Música will only receive works that are included in the theme of this Dossier. ***
This dossier invites contributions that explore musical practices and critical epistemologies that tension the coloniality of knowledge, proposing insurgent ontoaesthetic and musico-logical ruptures. We are interested in modes of listening, production and sound inscription that emerge from cosmologies and dissident bodies, not subsumable to hegemonic rationality.
Over the last few decades, the postcolonial and decolonial fields have shifted from the mere diagnosis of colonial wounds to the proposition of practices of epistemic and aesthetic reinvention. If postcolonial thought operated as a critique of the continuities of European domination in knowledge and culture, the decolonial turn deepened the denunciation by identifying coloniality as a constitutive matrix of the modern world, active in the ways of classifying, validating, and silencing bodies, knowledge, and forms of life. In this way, the insurgent horizon emerges, in which criticism is not limited to dismantling colonial hierarchies, but seeks to establish other practices — ontologies and cosmological regimes that resist, vibrate and perform non-hegemonic worlds.
In many of these other worlds – or possible worlds – music, or the play of sounds, refuses to be interpreted as an ‘object’ apprehended by universal categories such as work, style or form. It is lived and conceived as a situated and embodied gesture: a technology of presence, memory and existence. Against the aesthetics of neutrality, imposed as a normative measure by Western reason, space is opened for a critical and sensitive listening, which recognizes in sound a force of fabulation, belonging and insurgency.
Urged to this context that arises from the multiple political acts of the decolonization processes, musicology becomes decolonial, as an epistemic reform, and insurgent for ethical commitment. This does not mean hijacking the geography of the Eurocentric canon or repairing silences by adding repertoires to the assimilated canons. It is an epistemological and ontological rupture with the listening regimes founded on the coloniality of knowledge, which normalized the audible and domesticated difference. In this sense, this is a modality of thought that does not emerge as expanded ethnomusicology, nor as a postmodern key to historical-analytic musicology or a situated unfolding of cultural studies and critical theories. To recognize oneself in this way would be to accept, even if unconsciously, the permanence of a Eurocentric cosmology that subsumes other forms of musical listening and cognition.
The proposal, on the contrary, rejects this structural and epistemological dependence, as it recognizes that even the critical efforts internal to hegemonic academic musicology tend to reinforce its symbolic centrality, projecting itself as an interpretative center of sound alterities as well. What is at stake, therefore, is not a mere expansion of the analytical field — as if it were enough to extend the existing tools to the margins of the system — but the opening of another ontological field, capable of welcoming modes of listening and thinking that are formulated according to other musico-logical ones. In other words, more than a musicology — in the singular — we should aim for pluriversal, undisciplined, insurgent systematizing logics, which call us to relearn the musical in terms that do not belong to us.
That said, this dossier is born from a concrete utopia: that a decolonial musicology is possible when it is realized from a situated epistemic condition — not subordinate or derived, but constituent and proper. A musicology that pulsates because it is born from a condition adrift given in colonization itself. It is a historical condition of mestizo periphery, of diffuse fusion, of plurinational territories crossed by living layers of cosmologies. This condition occurs in Abya Yala. We were born made of mobile overlaps: of Amerindians, blacks and whites in a caboclo configuration; of modernities and archaisms; of juxtaposed temporalities that coexist in tension, as between the urban and the ancestral, the Amazonian and the cybernetic. Because we are latent contradictions, marked by a modernity that was imposed on us as a condition to colonize ourselves cyclically, but whose translation we tension from within, we become a living critical condition. It is in this weaving of worlds — woven in conflict and survival — that it becomes possible to listen to what escapes the universal grammar of Eurocentrism…