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 will consider musical fusion from two perspectives. First, what are the artistic challenges of working across multiple musical genres? How can different and sometimes contradictory understandings of melody, rhythm, and improvisation be brought into conversation? And second — what are the cultural and ethical considerations of borrowing ideas and sounds across genre lines? We will begin with a brief introduction to core metrics for listening to world and popular music, including melody and harmony, rhythm and meter, and composition and improvisation. We will then travel from canonical fusion albums like Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew through contemporary classics like Rosalía’s El Mal Querer, discussing the ways understandings of these concepts may differ between regions, styles, and communities. At the same time, we will engage questions of musical authenticity, cross-cultural communication, and cultural appropriation. How do we listen for cross-cultural encounter? How do we evaluate these encounters? We will listen to a full album each week alongside 30-40 pages of reading. You will also be encouraged to keep a listening journal, with the goal of helping us develop a vocabulary for talking about musics both familiar and unfamiliar. 

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.