There is a specific, pernicious sticking point for people when thinking about decolonization or decolonial work. Many people naturally equate decolonization with issues of racialized exclusion and diversity work more broadly. It is a trap into which many decolonial scholars are susceptible to fall as well, though I think it comes from an honest place.

I should say that I am absolutely a proponent of diversity work both within and outside institutions of higher education. In UK higher education, there is still much work to do in enrolling students from households with lower incomes, students of underrepresented ethnicities, and students with disabilities, particularly in conservatoires. If these institutions had higher enrolment of these students, it is likely that some relevant issues pertaining to decoloniality would also improve, although if this were the only approach to solving issues of coloniality, the opposite is also certainly true.

Thus, I think it is vital to make clear the difference between doing decolonial work and doing diversity work, at least in the context of higher music education (HME), so that is the issue I am presenting for consideration in this post.

Before proceeding with the issue presented, however, I want to consider how this problem would arise in the first place. A considerable factor is that the decolonial workspace is rather disorganized in a conceptual way. There are some relatively cohesive schools of decolonial thought (for example, those which coalesce around the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire), but it may be more useful to think of a spectrum of thought in this area.

Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1970) — Paulo Freire, author of *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* (1968/1970)

The literalist perspective presented in Tuck and Yang’s 2012 piece ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ can be seen at one edge of this spectrum. For them, any use of ‘decolonization’ that does not ‘[bring] about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ is a metaphorical use, and these uses are potentially ‘incommensurable with decolonization.’ While I absolutely do agree about the repatriation of stolen life, a statement as strong as this comes with caveats. I think the colonial situation is more complicated than simply considering indigeneity and physical land, simply because of the varying ways that the looming presence of the settler (or perhaps the ‘post-settler’) society makes itself felt. That said, I still prefer the term ‘decoloniality’ over ‘decolonization’ to allow the latter to refer to issues of land repatriation*.

Of course, an intellectually sound appraisal of decolonization must first recognize that this body of scholarship is fundamentally generated by postcolonial, largely global South societies. The philosophies of these postcolonial scholars draw attention to the most harmful or most intensely felt causes and effects of colonization, to which settler societies should earnestly respond. At the same time, though, conversations about how decolonial work is done must consider exactly how settler nations exercise(d) coloniality on foreign nations, and how these colonial tools still persist within the settler nation and are thus still a threat.

For historically settler countries like Britain that now want to enter into this discourse, the parameters of engagement are different to a country like the US, where Tuck and Yang are based. In particular, with Britain in its melancholy ‘lost empire’ period, colonializing powers have turned inward and are being exercised on the nation’s own inhabitants, and even its own citizens. Interestingly, these powers now manifest more as a power of exclusion and expulsion, rather than of annexation. Political manipulation through propaganda, denial of vital opportunities, siphoning of material and human-life resources to serve elite interests, the forceful movement and sequestering of people by social categories, and wilful indoctrination are all key elements of colonializing a foreign society. In the UK today, the same groups aforementioned (people with disabilities, underrepresented ethnicities, people from low-income backgrounds) are often the targets of these quintessentially colonializing tactics. For my purposes, this point extends to Britain’s education system, with the fee structures of tertiary education being of specific concern. This, for me, is what makes the decolonial conversation relevant even within a historically imperial country like Britain, but this is also the nexus which causes confusion between decolonization and diversity.

This nexus relates to another edge of the decolonial spectrum, which is a more casual understanding of ‘decolonization’, what someone might encounter in general public discourse. These are two opposing poles to this casual use. The conservative position (i.e. those in favour of essentially maintaining HME institutions as they are) adopts a stance of protecting the great Western masters of the canon (i.e. the corpus of music which represents musical scholarship) from being thrown out in favour of music they see as inferior. The liberal counterpoint to this stance is usually that no one is trying to throw anyone out; we simply want the curriculum to include more voices relevant to more experiences. For Tuck and Yang, both poles are equally inaccurate, and I am not sure I agree with these stances as ‘decolonization’ either.

Decolonization is not about ‘no more old, White men’ as some people casually describe it; such a move would not benefit students nor accurately reflect the impact of these individuals in this country. Instead, decolonization is about how it behoves us to interrogate the mythos surrounding these figures and how these stories and associations have been used to control or manipulate people’s behaviours and thought processes, in this case in an academic context. This has been the historical use of the canon and its curricula in former British colonies, with Macaulayism being a particularly salient example. The model of Western education implicitly equates the academic canon with greatness. It is a meritocratic conception where it is assumed that the greatest works and thinkers will naturally endure and enter the canon, and the rest will eventually fall away as inferior or even potentially dangerous. Even if one is convinced the process is meritocratic in some way, I do not believe it possible to deny the subjectivity of defining and constraining a canon, processes which fly in the face of any claims to objective greatness.

Furthermore, while the trajectory from canonization to greatness is laid bare, at least somewhat obscured is that this claim to greatness is not limited to a specific context; it is universal. Such a claim erects a defence against the need to look beyond the canon. It attempts to reason that the absence of particular musics from our canon of is not a product of a natural, understandable ignorance which should be rectified, but rather the expected outcome of the universally meritocratic canon at work.

On top of this, greatness is not an individual feat; it is a product and a triumph of the nation, further complicating the colonializing impact of canonization. In the conservative position, any attempt to broaden the canon beyond its largely Anglocentric and Eurocentric focus is an inherent attack on both the masters and the greatness of the nation. I see it rather differently. There must come a point where one recognizes the negative impact the British Empire has had on its former colonies, its people, and their cultures. Colonization was often violent, physically and emotionally, and Britain’s empire was incredibly expansive. Both the education systems used in this country and the systems used for the colonial project (like Macaulayism) draw upon the same canon, and this is not a meaningless coincidence. It is because of what the canon meant to Britain and for its colonial project. It is important now to recognize the cultures that have been impacted; to (re)familiarize ourselves with these cultures; and to be influenced by this relevant history, remodelling our pedagogy to this end.

Remember, though, that decolonization is also not just about ‘more voices, more experiences’, as this is what is meant by ‘diversity’. In other words, decolonization is not a synonym for diversity, nor for difference. Trying to address issues of colonialization through diversity work alone feels like a by-product of neoliberal economic thinking rather than a concerted effort to address structural issues about the Academy (universities, conservatoires, etc.) and how it functions as a cultural agent. In his book chapter ‘The Possessive Investment in Classical Music’ (2019), Loren Kajikawa (also writing from the US) explains that ‘universities have attempted to become more diverse and inclusive through initiatives designed to broaden their curricula and attract underrepresented students to campus,’ but that simultaneously ‘they have left largely untouched the institutional structures that privilege the music of white European and American males.’ Diversity ends up weaponized to attract students to a programme concerned primarily with celebrating the greatness of its canon, not with whatever music originally resonated with the student, and charging them thousands of pounds for the privilege. This is reminiscent of some of Tuck and Yang’s concerns about how diversity work can actually undermine meaningful decolonial progress. Students are not paying for a general survey of music, as the degree or programme name might imply. Their exploration is not without boundaries and restrictions, typically because of faculty research expertise within an eminence model. In this model, if there is no ‘eminent’ person to teach a topic, the avenues for a student to intuitively explore a topic on an extended, two- to four-year basis are rare to nonexistent, at least at the undergraduate level**.

The main thrust in considering the issue of diversity versus decolonization is to highlight the colonializing framework of how knowledge is transferred and made legitimate within our academic spaces. The implicit, non-accidental associations between canonization and personal–nationalistic greatness, between UK curricula and colonial-era curricula, have implications for how students value music and involve themselves within the practice. This is compounded by the top-down, eminence model of HME, where teachers may unwittingly play a role in indoctrinating their students or manipulating them to abandon valuable, intuitive forms of knowledge. Some of this intuition could have been valuable in starting a career as a twenty-first-century musician, a radically different landscape to even just forty years ago.

Once more, racial diversity in institutional spaces is important, especially in education. That said, even though the colonial project was often predicated on a racial superiority of the settler over the colonized population, this does not mean decolonial work always takes place along racial lines, nor does it need to be primarily framed as such. Decolonization in UK higher education institutions (HEIs) cannot simply be about having a number of diverse (usually meaning BAME) students completing the programme, nor even about achieving higher enrolment numbers of underrepresented students. Careful consideration must be paid to how HEIs subtly use indoctrination, propaganda, denial of opportunities, the coercive siphoning of resources, etc. as the covert framework of the institution, like a deference to canonization, which directly translates to curriculum and programme design. Decolonial programmes must be designed to encourage free and critical thinking, to facilitate intuitive opportunities, and to reject coercive or neoliberal economic practices which harm underrepresented students by weaponizing diversity. This is about a fundamental, baseline shift in how the Academy as an institution approaches knowledge production and dissemination, the value we place on bodies of knowledge, and how knowledges interact with one another. Decolonization is not a racial question as such, and it is time to move beyond this way of misunderstanding it.

*I do still use ‘decolonization’ occasionally throughout this because this term is in common use to describe the topic of this post in the UK. I do recognize the technical imprecision, but I think the context makes the meaning clear.

**A concentration like composition may allow for longer study on intuitive projects, but as a highly subjective discipline, the eminence model can produce an even more volatile colonializing context.