Conference Agenda

Today, the West’s promise of liberal democracy subsists in a normalized state of crisis: disaster capitalism, privatized infrastructures, widened inequality, proxy wars, and profits flowing to political elites through the military-industrial complex. Within ethnomusicology, rethinking democracy, freedom, and liberation requires revisiting the Cold War paradigms that shaped the field’s epistemologies and methods. As the post-1945 Western capitalist world cast itself as postcolonial and modern—an age of independence, democracy, and development—ethnomusicological scholarship often aligned itself with this liberal project, privileging diversity, cultural difference, identity, and agency while sidelining political economy, division of labor, and socio-economic class.

This roundtable asks how ethnomusicology, as a listening praxis, cocreates shared pasts while also producing silences: forms of selective, institutionalized forgetting that shape the field’s present. Building on scholarship that has traced ethnomusicology’s entanglements with representation, geopolitics, and institutional power, we consider how materialist concerns were pushed to the margins and why they now return with renewed urgency at a moment when liberalism’s contradictions are impossible to ignore. The discussion centers on persistent questions of labor, ownership, collectivity, and emancipation. Four participants explore: contributive ethnomusicology and the possibilities and limits of participatory action-research in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas; the imperialism of the German Left and the impossibility of musical solidarity; popular front movements in Cuba and Haiti under U.S. occupation and post-occupation hegemony; and musical amateurism as a political project of popular emancipation under Eastern European state socialism. The session consists of four ten-minute position papers followed by a forty-five-minute moderated discussion with audience Q&A.