Course Details

This class will interrogate the field of ethnomusicology through the lens of its archives, those storehouses of sounds recordings that helped establish the field. We will look at how colonial, evolutionary, and racist mindsets helped forge the discipline and its archives, and how residual (or more) traces of those drives remain. By drawing on guest speakers and sources across fields, we will both learn about efforts to right these wrongs (e.g., repatriation) and work together to envision ways to increase and improve such efforts.