Race, Empire, and Global Music History, 1500-1800

A conference organized by Profs. Olivia Bloechl (Music) and Molly Warsh (History)
University of Pittsburgh, March 30-31, 2018
 
With generous support from the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
and the Humanities Center
 
Historians of early modern music have increasingly turned their attention to empire, and the last decade has seen a wave of research on music in early global expansion, trade, and settlement, especially by Europeans. Not so with race, although by the sixteenth century racial thinking and social organization were emerging as supports for these “global projects,” in Walter Mignolo’s terms. We know that racialism often shaped early colonial music institutions and musical education, composition, performance, and knowledge production. Racialized religion, ethnicity, class, or caste also increasingly influenced musical life in Eurasian urban metropoles. Despite these histories, race and coloniality have eluded study as elements of early modern world music history. One reason is that the racial dimension of early modern music history asks us to think across disciplines, musical traditions, and empires in order to grasp the phenomenon in a more holistic, integrated way.

This two-day international conference aims to lay the groundwork for this longer-term goal, by bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars and performers whose work converges on problems of race, empire, and music in the early modern period. The centerpiece of the first day will be a roundtable on “coloniality/modernity” as an alternate framework for historicizing music, featuring Mignolo as an honorary respondent.  On the second day, the distinguished Africanist historian Edda Fields-Black will offer a keynote address drawing on her intellectual and artistic work on colonial racial pasts and their legacies in modern life.