Decolonising musicology: A Response and Three Positions

Stay quiet for a while. How could we? Witnessing the #RhodesMust- Fall and #FeesMustFall movements, academia – both in South Africa and elsewhere – was confronted, at times violently, by a disfigured vision of itself. What stared back at us was neither agenda-setting nor ground-breaking. It was neither rigorous, nor was it solemn. Instead, it was devastated. The devastated knowledge that we had built an empire of the unjust, which continues to reproduce structures of exclusion and fails to unshackle itself from the epistemic violence of coloniality. We were faced with an academy that appears aware of, and yet oblivious to, the ungathered dust left scattered in the wake of the colonial juggernaut.