Abstracts
Abstract
For those of us with decolonial desires, the university classroom is a potential space of disruption and reorganization. Our courses, course materials, teaching tools, students, and our own bodies and minds are all technologies that can subvert the colonial machine (la paperson 2017). In the first section, I contextualize my decolonial desires as a non-U.S.-citizen settler Canadian musicologist in the United States. The work of David Garneau, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Andrea Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang illuminates my positionality and power. In the second section, I provide an example of one way I’m disrupting the typical curricula and classroom experiences in a Euro-American classical music school. I discuss my course entitled “North American Indigenous Music Seminar” (NAIMS), including the course structure and content, and decolonizing strategies. Student responses to interviews about the course are interspersed with the discussion of my seminar plans and challenges to claims of “decolonization.” Their responses reveal some successes and many limits for anti-colonial and decolonial work in a single-semester course.
Résumé
Pour ceux d’entre nous qui ont des désirs décoloniaux, la salle de classe universitaire est un espace potentiel de rupture et de réorganisation. Nos cours, notre matière, nos outils pédagogiques, nos étudiant-e-s et nos propres corps et esprits sont autant de technologies qui peuvent renverser la machine coloniale (la paperson 2017). Dans la première section, je contextualise mes désirs décoloniaux en tant que musicologue canadienne, non-citoyenne américaine aux États-Unis. Les travaux de David Garneau, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Andrea Smith, Eve Tuck et K. Wayne Yang soulignent mon positionnement et mon pouvoir. Dans la deuxième section, je donne en exemple une façon dont je perturbe les programmes et les expériences universitaires typiques dans une école de musique classique euroaméricaine. Je discute de mon cours intitulé « North American Indigenous Music Seminar » (NAIMS), notamment la structure et le contenu du cours, ainsi que les stratégies de décolonisation. Les réponses des étudiant-e-s aux entretiens sur le cours sont entrecoupées de la discussion de mes plans de séminaire et des défis relatifs à la « décolonisation ». Leurs réponses révèlent quelques succès et de nombreuses limites au travail anticolonial et décolonial dans un cours d’un semestre.
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Appendices
Biographical note
Alexa Woloshyn is assistant professor of musicology at Carnegie Mellon University. Current research projects examine Indigenous musicians’ use of mediating technologies to construct and interrogate notions of “modern” Indigeneity, including Tanya Tagaq, A Tribe Called Red, Cris Derksen, and Melody McKiver. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Intersections.
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