Late-twentieth century ethnomusicologists and anthropologists wrote against the “self-other” dichotomy by developing feminist critiques of knowledge production, recognizing the agency of their research subjects, and experimenting with new forms of representation. While scholars are increasingly skeptical of a binary between internally constituted, liberal selves and externally constituted, non-liberal selves, this roundtable argues that the conventions of ethnographic writing continue to divide the flexible, neoliberal academic worker from our interlocutors as singular, stable, liberal subjects. We examine how the figure of the liberal subject – an autonomous, rational, and coherent individual (Povinelli 2016, Mahmood 2005) – and the logics of argumentation that accompany it uphold extractivist, colonialist relations foundational to our disciplinary history.

Joining recent scholarship that denaturalizes the relationship between sounding, subjectivity, and political presence (Sykes 2018, Sprengel 2021), each participant considers how the specter of the liberal human haunts efforts to write illiberal, incoherent, and relationally contingent ways of being into legible academic knowledge. We ask how other textual tactics might undo coherence in our argumentation and representation, with profound implications for our claims-making and for the forms of evidence, subjecthood, and divisions between “knower” and “known” upon which we rely. Accepting that our structuring moves and conceptual distillations create fungible units of “intervention” that circulate in an academic marketplace, this roundtable grapples with how ethnomusicologists reproduce racial capitalism’s extractive processes in their texts and livelihoods. We envision moving beyond critique to an exploratory space that opens new ways of knowing - and unknowing - in musical ethnography.