Foreword: Music and Ethnic-Racial Relations

Abstract

By racializing the world, European modernity fragments, classifies and hierarchizes bodies and knowledge, producing colonial processes of extractivism and cultural appropriation marked by the extreme violence that sustains racism and anti-Black logics, which remain active to this day, grounded in a fallacious fiction of white superiority. This supposed superiority invalidates worldviews that do not fit into the exclusive standards of white, modern, Western, and cis-hetero-patriarchal cosmology. The production of musical knowledge is an integral part of this process. On the one hand, it reinforces colonial narratives and the original myths of white superiority, such as the purity of the Greco-Roman heritage or the direct use of enslaved spoils to support musical practices in Europe and colonized territories. On the other hand, the production of musical knowledge has also been a significant factor in the construction of political reorganization processes and the preservation of cultural legacies in the context of the African diaspora and indigenous peoples in the Americas. By keeping their musical traditions alive, inseparable from spiritual, political, ethical, and aesthetic values, these populations have built cultural resistance to the dehumanizing processes of European colonialism.