Music and Citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship is a fantasy of political community without others. How is it faring in today’s world of authoritarianism, failed states, and climate crisis? In a world where democratic experiment is, by now, a networked and global proposition? What might we learn from music—and from ethnomusicology? The relationship between the idea of citizenship and music is long standing, but it has not yet been looked at from a perspective informed by postcolonialism and today’s decolonizing debates. The case studies in this volume are, consequently, drawn from across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Its first chapter locates the current ethnomusicological interest in citizenship in broad critical landscape, focusing on approaches to audience, media, voice, and performance. The second surveys a growing body of recent ethnomusicological literature on citizenship, theorized in terms of identity, technocracy, and intimacy. The third comprises case studies developing an approach to citizenship and political subjectivity beyond conventional liberal categories, defined by mobility (“the citizen on his bike”), collectivity (“the citizen in the crowd”), and activism (“the citizen in the square”). The conclusion offers an argument about the implications for citizenship studies of today’s thinking in ethnomusicology, musicology, and sound studies, reflecting on the hardening rhetoric of political belonging in Europe.