Audre Lorde famously suggested that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And yet for as long as human societies have been organized by structural oppression, disenfranchised peoples have managed to exercise subversive forms of agency by reinterpreting the societal structures and cultural resources they have inherited from their oppressors, retooling these structures to serve their own marginalized communities’ needs. This syllabus foregrounds the works of LGBTQ and BIPOC scholars and artists to discuss the various ways agency is exercised from below in the seemingly intractable context of heteropatriarchal white supremacist settler colonialism. As many of these writers and performers demonstrate, such agency often involves working directly with “the master’s tools” while strategically subverting these same resources in service of minoritarian goals. Throughout the quarter, we will use music and performance as our lens to interrogate these subversive forms of resistance and the performative power of artistic expression.

This course engages with historical and recent examples of “Performing the Other,” beginning with blackface minstrelsy and moving through representations of racialized Others on the operatic stage and the Hollywood screen. We will also consider cross-cultural performances that go “Beyond Appropriation.” What does it mean to take ownership of a culturally-specific art form in an increasingly global age where access to cultural resources is continually expanding? What are the ethics, politics, and problematics of cross-cultural engagement? Our goal will be to discuss the history of cultural appropriation in music and theater as well as to complicate contemporary applications of a term that has perhaps lost some of its nuance in the process of its adoption by pop culture and the mainstream media, as well as within academia. This syllabus stages a dialogue between performance studies and (ethno)musicology, exploring music as a vehicle for the performance of racial and cultural identity.