Popular Music and Society

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Decolonizing the Ear: Introduction to “Popular

Music and the Postcolonial”

Oliver Lovesey

To cite this article: Oliver Lovesey (2017) Decolonizing the Ear: Introduction to “Popular Music and
the Postcolonial”, Popular Music and Society, 40:1, 1-4, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2016.1230695

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2016.1230695

Published online: 11 Oct 2016.

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Popular Music and Society, 2017
VOL. 40, NO. 1, 1–4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2016.1230695

Decolonizing the Ear: Introduction to “Popular Music and the

Postcolonial”
Oliver Lovesey

This special issue of Popular Music and Society examines the often overlooked relation-
ship of popular music and the postcolonial. The explosion of popular music in the 1950s
and ’60s, in line with developments in sound technology and exchanges across the Black
Atlantic, took place in an era of decolonization. Popular music sometimes had a direct
role in fostering anti-colonial cultural resistance and organizational communication, as
well as decolonizing hearts and minds and ears. Popular music also in some cases would
be used to define the parameters of the postcolony or to protest its neocolonial mimicry.
While a number of postcolonial theorists, such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and C. L. R.
James, had a developed interest in music and/or popular culture, postcolonial studies has
often ignored popular culture and particularly popular music, along with its often noted
deafness to the material realities of colonial oppression. Postcolonial studies—however
persistently self-critical and even narcissistic in its approaches—has focused on literature,
and yet more narrowly on late 20th-century Anglophone postmodern novels and a large
handful of counter-canonical classics.1
Distinguishing postcolonial popular music studies from the insights of ethnomusicol-
ogy or world music studies or other disciplinary silos is largely a question of isolating the
socio-economic and political contexts of production and reception, though there is inev-
itably much overlap and hopefully cross-fertilization. Popular music considered within a
postcolonial frame of reference advances at least notionally a decolonizing political agenda.
It less obviously belongs to a disinterested process of salvage or archival ethnography though
it may look critically at the parasitic nourishment of contemporary musical expression
from a repository of cultural artifacts from the global south. Postcolonial necrophilia,
the preservation of non-Western cultural archives to inspire and sustain present-day and
future Western musical production,2 is a practice with deep roots in 19th-century exoti-
cism. Postcolonial popular music studies also is distanced from the cultural globalization of
world music, itself originating as a marketing category and reproducing a synthetic brand
of hybridized homogenization.3
Postcolonial popular music studies seeks to examine all uses of popular music for an
understanding of the historical and ongoing process of decolonization, recognizing that
flag raising in the postcolony alone does not consign the colonial legacy to the past.4 In the
21st century, postcolonial studies has become multifaceted, global, and plural, and “post-
colonialisms” encompass the recent experience of metropolitan centers in Europe with the
flows of migrants and refugees,5 as well as often-ignored colonial paradigms operating both

CONTACT Oliver Lovesey oliver.lovesey@ubc.ca

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 O. Lovesey

inside and outside the European matrix. The articles in this special issue reflect this devel-
opment with analyses of internal colonization within Europe and the ambivalent experience
of postcolonial Korea. Postcolonial popular music studies challenges the spatiotemporal
boundaries of the postcolonial, and its notional hyphen, which like the colonial itself, is not
bracketed in the past. Moreover, there is an inevitable and welcome expansion of analyses
to embrace cultural studies, performance studies, and world history as well as the inter- and
multidisciplinary.
There are different modes of resistance in postcolonial popular music, broadly conceived,
some of which are explored in the essays in this special issue. The music considered here,
moreover, was performed and circulated in a wide range of different modes from recordings
and radio play, to festivals, pubs and nightclubs, theatres, rural gathering places, and the
zone of cyberspace. In some cases, songs connect with an indigenous tradition of popular
resistance, or reconfigure seemingly banal songs to circulate new messages, virtually craft-
ing a new language of resistance in the process. Some bear witness to and memorialize
acts of injustice or terror and celebrate survival. Others inspire, organize, and re-energize
resistance, calling for collective unity and activism while also voicing demands for redress.
The articles in this special collection set out to uncover some of the diverse dimensions
of the intersection of popular music and the postcolonial. In the first cluster, they explore
various aspects of the role of popular music in African decolonization and the stance of
Edward Said, often considered the founder of postcolonial studies, on popular music. In
the context of a consideration of the phenomenology of musical appreciation in terms of a
re-engagement with the past, David Pier’s “Song for a King’s Exile: Royalism and Popular
Music in Postcolonial Uganda” considers the contemporary, political uses made of the leg-
acy of royal music in Uganda, looking in detail at Dan Mugula’s “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo
Buganda.” Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ’s “Popular Songs and Resistance: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Maitu
Njugĩra” examines the musical resistance encoded in an as-yet-unpublished work of musical
theatre by renowned Kenyan-American artist and postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,
whose transformational novel Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (Devil on the Cross) is also referenced
later in the collection in Williams’s study of Akala’s The Thieves Banquet.
Anja Brunner’s “Popular Music and the Young Postcolonial State of Cameroon, 1960–80”
examines official state intervention in the crafting of popular music as a method of fash-
ioning the identity of postcolonial Cameroon. Edward Said’s little-known interventions on
popular music are the subject of Wouter Capitain’s “Edward Said on Popular Music” that
forms a bridge to a consideration of contemporary European postcolonialisms. Capitain
argues that Said’s justification of an apparent lack of interest in contemporary popular music,
despite his recognition of its cultural significance and his own troubled, recurring memory
of an early encounter, conflicts with assertions in his theoretical and political work.
European postcolonialisms are the subject of the next cluster of papers, ending with
an expansion beyond the remit of European internal colonialism to a consideration of
postcolonial Korea. Virginie Magnat’s “Occitan Music Revitalization as Radical Cultural
Activism: From Postcolonial Regionalism to Altermondialisation” explores the survival of
the music and other cultural expressions of the Occitan region, an example of resistance to
what might be termed a type of musicological ethnic cleansing. In the context of a critique
of the inadequacy of the “postcolonial” as a category for defining contemporary Ireland,
Stephen R. Millar’s “Irish Republican Music and (Post)colonial Schizophrenia” analyses the
work of cultural resistance to internal colonialism within Greater Britain, examining the
 Popular Music and Society 3

case of Tommy Skelly’s “Go On Home British Soldiers.” In light of Paul Gilroy’s extensive
uncovering of Black Britain, Justin A. Williams’s “Rapping Postcoloniality: Akala’s ‘The
Thieves Banquet’ and Neocolonial Critique” examines the work of hip-hop artist Akala and
particularly his “The Thieves Banquet,” a work of parody and pastiche, inspired by Ngũgĩ’s
work as mentioned above, and its interrogation of the omnipresence of the imperial past
in Britain’s vibrant but troubled postcolonial present.
Seung-Ah Lee’s “Decolonizing Korean Popular Music: The ‘Japanese Color’ Dispute
over Trot” completes the present collection’s opening of some of the possibilities of the
intersection of popular music and the postcolonial. Lee explores South Korea’s fraught
love-hate relationship with Japanese culture, including Japanese popular music, and its
struggle to achieve meaningful decolonization after its occupation by Japan from 1910 to
1945. Musicological interpretations and counter-interpretations of the nature and origin
of songs like “Camellia Lady”—whether it bears traces of Japanese music or announces a
distinctly authentic Korean music or a uniquely Asian hybrid—became the focus of state
intervention amid campaigns to eliminate the lingering residue of imperial spiritual pol-
lution. This interpretative struggle indicates, as do a number of the papers in this special
issue, one of the parameters of postcolonial popular music studies and the ways in which
popular song can become a unifying or a discordant and contested site in the postcolony.

Notes
1. 
Lamentations about the state of postcolonial studies have become almost a required rhetorical
gesture in critical writing on the postcolonial. Neil Lazarus, however, in The Postcolonial
Unconscious, has been particularly lacerating in his assessments of the field’s misdirections
(22–36). Patrick Williams similarly asks why postcolonial studies’ persistent concern for
its own re-routing, particularly in response to the challenges of globalization, is necessary
(86–97). In his recent Forget English!, Aamir Mufti examines the hegemony of Anglophone
English novels even in the contemporary renewal of interest in “world literature.”
2. 
Ngũgĩ considers the Irish Renaissance in light of Matthew Arnold’s view of Celtism as “a
depository of spiritual power from which the Saxons could draw” (53, 42–57).
3. 
See, for example, Timothy D. Taylor’s discussion in “Thirty Years of World Music” on “the
rise of the ‘world music’ category” (192).
Derek Gregory offers a timely reminder of this reality in The Colonial Present.
4. 
5. 
Ato Quayson addresses this expansion of the terms of reference for the postcolonial in a
century of migrations (12).

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor
Oliver Lovesey is an associate professor at UBC Okanagan, Canada, and the author of essays on
popular music in Popular Music, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and Popular Music and Society. He has
written a number of books on Postcolonial and also Victorian Studies, including most recently The
Postcolonial Intellectual: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Context (Routledge 2016).
4 O. Lovesey

Works Cited
Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Print.
Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2016. Print.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. New York, NY: Basic/Civitas
Books, 2009. Print.
Quayson, Ato. “Introduction: Postcolonial Literature in a Changing Historical Frame.” The Cambridge
History of Postcolonial Literature. 2 vols. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 1:
1–29. Print.
Taylor, Timothy D. “Thirty Years of World Music.” JWPM: Journal of World Popular Music 1.2 (2014):
192–200.
Williams, Patrick. “‘Outlines of a Better World’: Rerouting Postcolonialism.” Rerouting the Postcolonial:
New Diections for the New Millennium. Ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson
Welsh. London: Routledge, 2010. 86–97. Print.