Some of ethnomusicology’s most substantive and field-changing work happens in edited volumes. Collections of essays have historically enabled conversations that move the discipline in essential directions, a meeting space that reminds us how, despite the solitude of writing, research is a collective endeavor. Ellen Koskoff’s Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective in 1987, Hellen Myers’s Ethnomusicology: An Introduction in 1992, Gregory Barz’s and Tim Cooley’s Shadows in the Field in 1997, and more recently Barz’s and William Cheng’s Queering the Field in 2019 and Beverly Diamond’s and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo Branco’s Transforming Ethnomusicology in 2021, captured and advanced some of the most relevant disciplinary issues of their time, and demonstrate the intensity and relevance that an edited book can have for an entire field. It was a pleasure to review a book that will certainly join these other texts among the mandatory readings for graduate students, At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice, which won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s prize in 2023 for an edited collection of essays of exceptional merit.
Edited by Brenda Romero, Susan Asai, David McDonald, Andrew Snyder, and Katelyn Best, At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice stands out for blending ethnographies with firsthand accounts from established scholars, and aiming for inclusivity and growth in ethnomusicology by mentoring authors with diverse backgrounds and challenges. The volume is an example of the political activist projects it proposes, an exercise in truth-telling and listening lovingly, radical inclusivity, coalition building, and direct action, which are precisely the names of the sections that divide the publication. It is not practical to cover the seventeen chapters, a preface, and an introduction, so instead I will focus on what stood out to me as some of the volume’s highlights.
The introduction, subtitled “Pathways toward a Justice-Oriented Ethnomusicology,” is one of two chapters by David McDonald. McDonald’s introduction sets the stage for the interventions taking place throughout the volume, which include documenting musical activism, listening closely to historically neglected musical communities, and developing new methodologies born from a commitment to social justice. Without being prescriptive, this introduction invites ethnomusicologists to willingly interrogate their “unrecognized complicity in the systemic violence of the field” (8). McDonald goes so far as to suggest reimagining professional societies as instruments of direct action, institutional spaces gathering “a collective of activist-scholars who use musical thought and behavior as a means through which to imagine and enact liberatory sound politics” (15). This thought-provoking introduction not only charts a course toward a justice-oriented ethnomusicological practice but also orients the reader to understand the following chapters as instances of the steps such practice might take.
In the opening section, Truth Telling and Listening Lovingly, five distinguished ethnomusicologists—Kyra Gaunt, Steven Loza, Brenda Romero, Charlotte Heth, and Paul Austerlitz—recount their experiences, describing how their careers have been shaped by pivotal involvements with social justice. Gaunt’s narrative works as a platform to underline the mechanisms that reproduce and maintain oppression systems in academia and professional societies. Loza revisits key moments in his career as an ethnomusicologist to unravel how professional growth in teaching, composition, and research can go hand in hand with a commitment to social justice issues. On the other hand, Romero takes her time weaving stories of success and failure, racism, and classism to reflect on her academic journey, shedding light on systemic biases and advocating for inclusivity and diversity in music education. Charlotte Heth’s account foregrounds how the sounds and silences of music from Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada are inseparable from the contexts of exploitation, domination, relocation, and extermination. Yet, Heth highlights the agency of American Indians who adapt, reject, or embrace this musical heritage, which serves not only as a bridge to their past and a voice in contemporary activism but also as a multifaceted tool for memory, healing, celebration, unity, movement, and reverence. Closing this first part, Paul Austerlitz’s chapter illustrates engagement with music-making as a powerful experience and with socially engaged research, in his case, the development of a project around altered states of consciousness and the efficacy of music in his own ritual life in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The second part of the volume, Radical Inclusivity, contains chapters that amplify voices, perspectives, and historically marginalized or excluded groups. Katelyn Best argues that paying attention to musical expression in Deaf culture allows us to decenter the aural focus of music studies, revealing gaps in our understandings of inclusivity. Audism, hearing-centric practices, and the imposing of standards of hearing-abled individuals over Deaf musical art, provoke a sensory bias that wrongfully sees Deaf music as an “incomplete or partial experience of music and framed in terms of loss” (91). Katie Graber’s “Pink Menno Hymn Sings: Queerness, Inclusivity, and the Mennonite Church” questions the assumption that queer Mennonites will want to leave their church because they feel they do not belong. Instead, through Pink Menno, an LGBTQ ally and activist group doing hymn singing, queer folks become visible in public Mennonite spaces, gain a sense of belonging, and underline the need for inclusivity within the denominational structures. In her chapter on the Egyptian independent music scene, Darci Sprengel argues that Egyptian racial categories are not just a European import but also an Indigenous way of making sense of difference, yet “they necessarily interact with, and are entangled in, racialized global structures of power” that affect musician’s lives (123). Ho Chak Law’s chapter “Reclaming Nanook of the North” documents how Inuk artistTanya Tagaq attempts to counteract the colonial and primitivist gaze of the historic film through her musical mixing of cosmopolitan sensibilities with Indigenous practices, thus reclaiming the movie through her sounding performing body.
Closing this second part is David McDonald’s “Rethinking Popular Culture, Social Justice, and the Compassionate Gaze in Palestine,” which uses as its starting point criticisms of the representation of so-called honor crimes in video for the song “If I Could Go Back in Time” by DAM, the foremost hip-hop collective in the Arab Middle East. In the video, a woman is killed by her brother and father after trying to escape an arranged marriage. Informed by his decades-long relationship with the group, McDonald responds by demonstrating how DAM’s attention to so-called honor crimes is part of their search for new paths of political activism, and that this video and the movie Junction 48 are examples of looking at intersectional experiences of oppression within Palestine. Moving away from concentrating on Israel’s oppression and instead protesting religious patriarchy, domestic violence, intersectarian relationships, drug abuse, and mass incarceration is, McDonald argues, “politics through other means.” In a moving interview, DAM’s singer Tamar Nafar says to McDonald: “So, it is you guys [international audiences, scholars] that come in search of protest songs. If protest songs don’t exist, that means we don’t exist. If the occupation doesn’t exist, that means we don’t exist. That is romanticizing. And as an artist, I don’t like that…. After the demonstrations, we [Palestinians] go home, we pay bills. There is life. What the Israeli occupation is trying to do is dehumanize us and disconnect us from the world.... That is why it is important for me to show that we also die from car accidents. We also die from cancer. We find love.” (172). Ultimately, McDonald argues that scholars must allow Palestinians, and our interlocutors in general, the “privilege of being nonpolitical, the privilege of vulnerability, and the space to be seen and heard in their own terms” (173).
The book’s third part, Coalition Building, presents ways music-making and music performance can facilitate creating solidarity networks, mobilizing communities to engage in dialogue, and generating intercultural exchanges with the goal of social justice. Alexandra Carrico’s chapter showcases a project in which she facilitated traditional Irish sessions as a meeting space for neurodivergent and neurotypical folks. By taking advantage of the inclusive ethos and welcoming atmosphere of an Irish session, Carrico exemplifies how actively engaging with our research communities and skills as scholars and musicians can “help build bridges between diverse populations through collaborative partnerships” (196). The following chapter, by Susan Asai, uses African American and Asian American musical collaborations as examples of coalition building geared toward building solidarity networks, including the cases of Fred Wei-han Ho, Jo Jang, Nobuko Miyamoto, and others. Without ignoring the historical racial tensions and the strategic comparisons that have fueled discord among these groups, Asai demonstrates ways in which individual artists have mobilized Afro-Asian cultural politics toward highlighting their affinity and shared histories of oppression in the United States.
The final part of the book, Direct Action, begins with Andrew Snyder’s demonstration of how music can serve as a powerful tool for activism through a study of the Brass Liberation Orchestra, a politically driven brass band in the San Francisco Bay Area where Snyder was a member. Through a commitment to “use music to sustain and support direct actions, marches, and social justice organizations” (239), the Brass Liberation Orchestra participates in a range of political spaces, including immigrant rights, LGBTQIA+ advocacy, anti-gentrification efforts, Black Lives Matter, Occupy movements, anti-fascist actions, anti-war protests, and anti-corporate initiatives (239). In a brilliant case study at the meeting points of music and environmental justice, Rebekah Moore’s chapter is a compelling examination of the cross-continental maritime journey of the Arka Kinari, a ship in which artists blended music, dance, and video art to foster cross-cultural learning and environmental awareness. In a voyage that includes the harrowing experience of being caught at sea during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, US-born Grey Filastine and Indonesia-born Nova Ruth propose what Moore calls “a radical reimagining of the band tour, the concert setting, and climate activism that recollects and activates old knowledge of the sea” (261).
Finally, the concluding chapters written by Susan Asai and Brenda Romero serve as a reflective coda, underscoring the purpose and activist intentions behind this anthology. Throughout my reading, I found myself continually drawn back to McDonald’s enlightening introduction, where one particular quote resonated deeply and lingered in my thoughts: “Advancing the cause of social justice isn’t so much a function of adhering to a set of rules, as it is adopting a critically self-reflexive posture devoted to eliminating the continually emergent injustices inherent to the ethnographic encounter and interrogating our personal investments in White privilege and supremacy” (16). Like few edited volumes I have read, this collection maintains a cohesive thread across chapters through this “critically self-reflexive posture.” This makes the entire journey across chapters feel like a genuine dialogue among scholars who find their work at the crossroads of music and social justice and take time and effort to consider the implications, methodological challenges, and professional strains that this brings to them and their interlocutors. Congratulations to all the editors and contributors to this fantastic volume.
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[Review length: 1792 words • Review posted on November 1, 2024]