Locating Global Music History

Afro Sino musicking¹ redraws the world map to focus on the relationality between minoritarian (in this article, Black and Black diasporic, and Chinese and Chinese diasporic) musics, contrasting with global music history research that features the interconnection of minoritarian and Western musics.² This article considers Afro Sino musicking in the classroom, and expands on its implications for global music history. In China, Afro Sino musicking presents an opportunity for the formation of interethnic solidarity that breaks out of the frames of geopolitical China–US rivalry and Sinocentrism, opening up space instead for sympathetic embrace of other people of color. (The latter term is translated as youse renqun [有色人群], having entered Chinese discourse through Chinese citation of foreign and especially English-language publications.³) Afro Sino musicking takes two forms in this article: 1) real-world musicking comprising Chinese and Chinese diasporic peoples performing Black and Black diasporic (e.g., African American) musics, and Black and Black diasporic peoples performing Chinese and Chinese diasporic musics, as well as the hybrid practice of musicking that includes both Black and Chinese musical elements;⁴ and 2) classroom musicking comprising the performance and listening of Black and Black diasporic musics, in which mainland Chinese students themselves are the “Sino” participants.

Some necessary notes on terminology. Euro denotes Euro North America. For readability, I maintain the convention of referring to Euro–North American art music as “Western art music.” The term Western musics denotes the assemblage of art, pop, folk, jazz and other musics from Euro North America, with the caveat that the referent is musics of white rather than racialized, diasporic musickers, and thus excludes, for instance, African American musics (that are minoritarian rather than Euro). Rather than an essentialist construction, “Chinese/diasporic musics” denotes a range of locally varied “Chinese and Chinese diasporic musics,” and “Black/diasporic musics” similarly consists of multiple, changing “Black and Black diasporic musics” in global circulation.⁵

Practical Aspects of Afro Sino Pedagogy

There is an important sense in which global—including Afro Sino—music-historical knowledge emerges not just from research but from the teaching of courses that become new sites for knowledge production. Hence, the key Afro Sino material with which I anchor this article is my Afro Sino pedagogical practice. I draw from my experiences from 2015 to 2024 when I taught at the Soochow University School of Music, where I incorporated Afro Sino musicking in some courses. Unlike the major independent conservatories in Beijing and Shanghai, the school was established only recently in 2013 with the hiring of a large cohort of mostly Euro North Americans, and some faculty of East Asian and East Asian diasporic descent (including myself, a Chinese Singaporean), who have graduated from doctoral music programs in Euro North America. Students in the undergraduate degree in music performance can major only in Western (art music or symphonic-orchestral) instruments, and to date, there is just one full-time faculty member who specializes in Chinese instruments, even though some master’s students in the music education program pursue studies in dizi, the Chinese flute. Students are, then, immersed in a Eurocentric environment. In this context, writing about my pedagogy of Chinese–Western musical interconnectivity feels too close to a reproduction of the colonial circulations that marked twentieth-century mainland Chinese music history. From the 1800s on, a broad range of Western musics, including Christian hymns, military-band music, US public-school songs (used for music education), and a vast array of eighteenth- to twentieth-century Western art music entered China, while Chinese educators, composers, and performers traveled to Japan, Europe, and North America. I did not see the need for me to personally engage in a global music history focusing on Western musics in China, or on Chinese/diasporic musics in Euro North America, because I was provided with reminders of that specific history on a daily basis, working as I did in a Euro North American–style conservatory in China, where undergraduate performers can major only in Western instruments.⁶ It is because of this context that I was drawn instead to Afro Sino musicking, a choice which reminds us that global music history can be locally written in specific contexts around the world.

Black Diasporic and Chinese Diasporic Peoples Musicking

In my teaching of Afro Sino musicking, I draw in particular on the related research of T. Carlis Roberts and Gao Yunxiang that focuses closely on individual musicians and intellectuals.⁷ Their in-depth case studies serve as the foundation of my pedagogy. I first became interested in Black/diasporic and Chinese/diasporic relationality during the COVID-19 pandemic when there were sensationalized reports of African Americans attacking Chinese Americans, but these were not accompanied by any proven statistical uptick in Black-on-Chinese violence in the US.⁸ It was then that I turned to case studies of Afro Sino musicking such as Fred Ho and Paul Robeson. The minoritarian US as embodied in these figures is not identical with the mainstream US of pop, rock, or the twentieth-century canon from Copland to Cage (although jazz has become institutionalized in US conservatories, there is a distinct contrast between the history of racism endured by jazz musicians compared with the history of privileged white performers and composers of Western art music). Ho and Robeson feature as case studies in a lesson on Afro Sino musicking that I teach in my two-semester sequence called Zhongguo yinyue shi or “Chinese Music History” (which is better conceived as Chinese music histories given the multiplicity of cultures in China; I inherited the course title which was not of my design), as well as in elective courses in “world” and Western art music. Fred Ho (1957–2014) was a Chinese American avant-garde jazz ensemble director, and a writer who belonged to a lineage of thinkers on the subject of Afro Asia,⁹ which is both the title of a book Ho coedited and the name of a tradition of interethnic alliance that extended across the twentieth century from W. E. B. Du Bois to Ho himself.¹⁰ Ho sought to counter the racial pigeonholing of African Americans into “jazz,” as well as, more broadly, into any racially based definition of a musical genre, such as “Asian American jazz,” working instead toward a protean musical hybridity that sounded out his conception of Afro Asian alliance. Liu Liangmo, another figure engaged in Afro Asian activism when he intervened with Chinese businesses that discriminated against African Americans,¹¹ was responsible for teaching African American baritone Paul Robeson the Chinese mass protest song “March of the Volunteers” (which later became the Chinese national anthem). Liu met Robeson in 1940 when the former was in exile from China in the US, having become embroiled in the struggle between the communist and nationalist factions. An activist in the tradition of Black internationalism (that invested in global anti-imperialist efforts), Robeson made a recording of what was titled “Chee Lai!” (the first words of the “March of the Volunteers”) in support of the African American protest movement against the Japanese invasion of China during World War II. “Chinese Music History” (when I taught it) also integrated musics of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora in Asia and elsewhere.

After introducing specific Afro Sino cases, I provide students with a broad overview of the Black and Chinese diasporas that furnished the context for the emergence of Ho’s and Robeson’s activities. A second-generation Chinese American, Ho was a descendent of the population of Chinese people who migrated en masse to the Americas in the nineteenth century due to a combination of push-and-pull factors. In addition to economic hardship and political instability in China, migrants were responding to the Gold Rush and US labor demands. Chinese migrants constituted a labor supply that addressed (what capitalists would have seen as) the shortfall which was a consequence of the abolition of slavery in the 1830s in the British Empire. In the US, the Chinese migrants notably built the transcontinental railroad, but were subject to discriminatory laws (particularly the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act¹²) that limited their numbers as well as the professions (legal, medical, etc.) in which they could work, leading to the familiar sight of Chinese-owned restaurants, laundromats, and convenience stores all across the US. The liminal position of the Chinese migrants, required as labor but resented by locals, is evinced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Chinese violence across the West Coast (seen hauntingly in the pockmarks on a digital map available online¹³). From the mid-1800s, Chinese/diasporic musics traveled the trans-Pacific route that was first created under conditions of capitalist labor but later reflected diverse aspirations as well as changing socioeconomic and geopolitical impingements. Chinese diasporic soundings in the US commenced with the establishment of Chinese opera theaters and troupes in San Francisco and New York City in the 1850s,¹⁴ continuing and changing over a century through to Liu’s exile in the US when he taught Robeson a mainland Chinese protest song, and eventually to Ho’s avant-garde Afro Asian Music Ensemble, which incorporated Chinese instruments (e.g., the double-reed suona).

On the other side of Afro Sino musicking, Black diasporic musics had been reverberating in (what is now) the US ever since the arrival of the first shipment of enslaved Africans in 1619, constituting a core part of the necessary conditions for the later transdiasporic convergence of Liu, Robeson, and Ho. My elective course called “World Music” examines the traversal of Black/diasporic musics, from traditional African and Afro Latin musics; to African American spirituals, jazz, and blues; to African American, Afro European, and African composers of Western art music (I inherited the course title which was not of my design). Black diasporic composers’ biographies in particular are frequently narrated in terms of their genealogies traced to enslaved forebears, including Joseph Bologne (1745–99, Guadeloupe/France), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912, UK), Harry Burleigh (1866–1949, US), Will Marion Cook (1869–1944, US), Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943, US), Undine Smith Moore (1904–89, US), etc. For the topic of Afro Sino musicking, I outline the history of the formation of the musical Black Atlantic, as well as of the Chinese musical diaspora, featuring Ho and Robeson as case studies of Afro Sino convergence. As shown in figure 1, rather than established musical practices (genres), often associated with an ethnic group, complete with characteristic instrumentation, conception, and performance of melody, rhythm, texture, and/or harmony, it happens to be the case that Ho’s and Robeson’s are creative acts—i.e., musicking—that deviate from ethnic pigeonholing.¹⁵ (The intent here is not to impose a hierarchy between nonhybrid and hybrid but to point to Afro Sino convergence.)

Figure 1 Afro Asian minoritarian convergence

Centering Black/Diasporic musics in the Education of Chinese Students

Whereas the content of the Afro Sino topic is Afro Sino musicking “in the world,” my pedagogical framework can be described as Afro Sino musicking in the classroom, with students themselves as the “Sino” participants. In the classroom, a broader, pedagogical Afro Sino musicking takes several forms. One of my former advisees completed a thesis on the performance practice of Bologne’s violin sonatas—to my knowledge, it was the first piece of academic writing on Bologne in China (there are no journal articles or theses on the composer that I could find; all doctoral and master’s theses are published on the Chinese academic database China National Knowledge Infrastructure [CNKI]). Also, in my “World Music” elective, students performed the music of Black/diasporic composers who wrote for Western instruments. To enliven Afro Sino musicking in the classroom, I collaborated in 2023 with Candace Bailey of North Central Carolina University (NCCU), one of the US’s HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). Students in my class chose a piece of music that is important to them personally and gave a brief presentation on it; students in Bailey’s class (in a parallel “world” music course) did the same. My students chose a variety of mainland Chinese musics ranging from traditional Chinese opera and Chinese popular music—including the fusion of the two, to Chinese avant-garde and Romantic-style compositions. Bailey’s students, who were African American, chose Black diasporic musics and musical groups (R&B/soul, the NCCU marching band, a New Orleans brass band) and Western art music (Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre). Both student groups made their choices for a variety of often commonly held reasons, including family enculturation, personal affinity and participation, and exposure to certain musics in their youth. In catalyzing this latest Afro Sino episode in a history that also includes Ho and Robeson, I gave students from both sides of the Pacific the opportunity to recognize the commonality of the nature of their musical bonds, while also opening up a space for talking about differences.

I regard the purview of “global music history” as extending to the comparison of the impact of European coloniality on Black/diasporic and Chinese/diasporic musics individually (as opposed to focusing on only Afro Sino musicking in the world). This can be understood in terms of “transcolonial”¹⁶ studies that traverse across British, French, Spanish, and other imperialisms and their postcolonies, rather than staying within each imperial assemblage.¹⁷ By adopting a transcolonial lens, it can be observed that both the Black and Chinese diasporas emerged under the shaping force of European colonial economic priorities (such as the need for a labor supply), resulting in the global traversal of diasporic musics. It was the historical dominance of European powers that resulted in what Arjun Appadurai called a “bottomless appetite . . . for things Western,”¹⁸ leading to myriad hybridities of Black/diasporic and Western and Chinese/diasporic and Western musics, with the Western musical assemblage encompassing pop, rock, jazz, (mainly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century) Western art music, and avant-gardism. The results can be seen across the work of Michael Jackson (1958–2009), Joseph Bologne, Florence Price (1887–1953), Akin Euba (1935–2020), and Sun Ra (1914–93) in Africa and the Black diaspora; and across Andy Lau (b. 1961), Tan Dun (b. 1957), Taiwanese American rapper Miss Ko (b. 1985), and Xian Xinghai (1905–45, composer of the Yellow River Cantata, on which the more famous piano concerto is based) in China and the Chinese diaspora. Rather than categorizing Western genres and post/tonalities as only being agentially appropriated around the world, I subscribe to a more complicated view of agency as being expressed within colonial structures,¹⁹ and concur with Kofi Agawu’s thesis of “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa”²⁰—which also applies, I would add, in China, and in Black and Chinese diasporas. However, rather than being purely “oppressive,” Western-influenced and other cosmopolitan musical practices, like any other practice, reflect both agency and constrictive structural (colonial) forces.²¹

I do not have data on the long-term impact of my Afro Sino pedagogy. But classroom surveys suggested that there was an immediate impact in terms of centering Black/diasporic musics, which can be understood as appropriating curriculum space officially designated for Western art music or traditional mainland Chinese musics. With regard to the NCCU exchange, a survey of my students showed that a majority of them found the exchange lesson more enjoyable, and learned more from it, than ordinary lessons, and would want to have similar opportunities in the future. A more targeted intervention in the repertory for Western instruments could be observed through my requirement of the student performance of Black/diasporic composers’ music. 73 percent of nineteen students (who responded to the survey, out of a total of twenty-eight students in the course) reported that they achieved a better understanding of the music through performance, and 45 percent said they would consider performing music by Black/diasporic composers in the future (27 percent were certain that they would do so). Perhaps most significantly, students began thinking in the minoritarian terms with which I had framed Afro Sino musicking both in the world at large and in my classroom. Two surveys conducted at the beginning and the end of the course, respectively, showed that students became more convinced of the need to support Black/diasporic musics, and understood more about the effects of racism against Black/diasporic peoples and musics. Notably, the emergence of racial solidarity through the course was observed in the more than twofold increase in the percentage of students (35 percent of twenty respondents at the start of the course, to 79 percent of nineteen respondents at the end) who agreed or strongly agreed that “As people of color, Chinese performers and composers should support Black/diasporic musics.”

Theoretical Aspects of Afro Sino Pedagogy

African and Chinese, and Black and Chinese diasporic musics are threads woven into the colonial fabric of the past five centuries. But the valences of Afro Sino relationality vary according to the site of their convergence. In the US, Chinese/diasporic musics, even those sounded by Chinese Americans, continue to be othered and relatively inaudible within the majority of music higher education classrooms (excepting “world” music courses);²² more audible relative to Chinese/diasporic musics, African American musics are a staple of US curricula while being problematically siloed in related courses, frequently lacking systemic integration. Contrastingly, in China, courses in mainland Chinese musics are mandated in music higher education by the government, but Black/diasporic musics are inaudible except within “world” music courses, if at all. Teaching Black/diasporic musics in China involves consideration of context. Complex factors need to be addressed, including mainland Chinese racism against Black/diasporic peoples;²³ heightened contact between peoples due to the large Chinese economic footprint in Africa driven by the Belt and Road Initiative; and the state-led positioning of traditional mainland Chinese culture including musics as central in nationalist propaganda.

The distinction between US and mainland Chinese pedagogical contexts suggests that the framework of global music history varies across geographies—the form it takes is ultimately dependent on the location in which it is written, including both research and teaching materials (syllabi, lectures). To borrow Ramón Grosfoguel’s term, global music history is shaped by one’s epistemic location,²⁴ which is a discursive rather than physical location. While Grosfoguel uses the term to refer to the discursive sites of colonizer and colonized, I view epistemic locations as a sprawling assemblage encompassing research circles around the world, including (in this article) different mainland Chinese and US contexts with varying degrees of audibility of Black/diasporic and Chinese/diasporic musics. Further, being that I was based in China for an extended period of time, in addition to the fact that I was born in Singapore and am now based in Australia, the viewpoints I express in this article are likely to occupy an interstitial space between Euro, mainland Chinese, Chinese diasporic, and Australasian epistemic locations. As readers will discern below, I adopt an explicitly anti-Sinocentric stance vis-à-vis that of the Chinese state; note that there are other, minoritarian perspectives within China anchored in social groups such as ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities, women, and human rights activists.²⁵ The epistemic location I develop in this article is one which is invested in the decentering of both Chinese state and Eurocentric priorities.²⁶

Global Music History That Is Written in Euro North America

The concept of epistemic location raises the issue of where extant work in global music history is articulated. It is well known that global music history research was vastly accelerated by Reinhard Strohm’s 2012 Balzan Prize project, which involved six mainly Western European universities, only one of which was situated outside Europe, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—which is arguably assimilated to “Euro” academic discourse.²⁷ The resulting edited volume emphasized global interconnectivity between different geographies, but continental Western European and Anglophone (especially UK and US) geographies are involved in several of the chapters, reflecting the impingement of colonial history.²⁸ It is possible to examine the hidden influence of Euro contexts on particular bodies of research on global topics, completed by scholars located in Euro North America, in another example: the vast body of studies of music and modernity that implicitly focus on the agency of non-Euro milieus. Those studies often inadvertently gloss over the immense impact of Western musics on the global soundscape, thereby bracketing the problem of colonialism and allowing for scholars to position themselves in accordance with their counterhegemonic political beliefs, and in a way to identify with their resistive research subjects. For instance, mainland Chinese music history since 1900, during which time Western art music and jazz flooded China, has been examined in terms of middle-class aspiration²⁹ and communist orthodoxy,³⁰ with both invested in symphonic, piano, chamber, and other music for Western instruments by Chinese composers. What I would emphasize here is the bizarre paradox that the repertoire is performed on Western (rather than Chinese) instruments, and follows the conventions of Western Romantic and avant-garde music, but is seldom referred to as “Western” in English-language discourse. This is in part because using the term Western is understood as reproducing Euro colonialism and imperialism, and because of anti-essentialist skepticism over dichotomies (“East” versus “West”). But the end point of that line of argument is that the “colonial” can also not be named because of dichotomy and essentialism (colonizer, colonized). Whatever the cancellation of “Western” achieved, it also succeeded in rendering “Western” as an unmarked term³¹ that became invisibilized and lurks silently in plain sight while everybody pretends not to see the obvious. The significance of this invisibilization could be discerned in my informal discussion with colleagues, some of whom have suggested use of the phrase “European art music,” as if the problem of the canon could be resolved by nominalist activism—i.e., by changing the name.³² All of which is to suggest that studies of music and modernity that examine Western musical influence in palimpsest—and global music history research undertaken in Euro universities, featuring circulations to Euro North America—are not situated in a vacuum. They have largely been situated in Euro North America, a fact paradoxically reflected in some attempts to avoid the “West” itself as a referent within those studies, whereas global peoples everywhere feel the Euro–North American impingement, both historical and contemporary. Against this context, it is notable that “the West” has resurfaced as a term denoting coloniality in works such as Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity.³³

The crux of the matter for my argument is that the frequent avoidance of naming “the West” in Euro–North American discourse is incompatible with the concept of epistemic location—Euro North America is where most card-carrying “global music history” research currently emanates from (as opposed to traditions of nation-based music histories from various corners of the world), as seen in the work of Strohm as well as a younger generation of scholars, including many scholars of color who reside in Euro North America. In spite of variations, Euro North America exists as a culturally and geopolitically coherent “assemblage,” i.e., a multiplicity with both persisting and changing components, just as Black/diasporic and Chinese/diasporic musics are each assemblages. Whatever it is called, writers need a term to name the privileged side in a world of asymmetric geopolitical and economic power—the side that used to control most of the earth, and that is the recipient of a disproportionate slice of world GDP due to its position at the apex of an economic system it imposed on the world. I use “Euro–North American” to refer to the fuzzy location of a formation possessing asymmetrical power, naming a cultural-geographical-geopolitical assemblage with internal diversity as well as coherence. “Euro North America” as assemblage does not imply a flat hierarchy between Euro and non-Euro assemblages. But given the complexity of geopolitical relations, naming “Euro North America” should not be understood as expressing a binary worldview. Many Chinese musickers on Western instruments bear the legacy of Euro cultural imperialism, but it is undeniable that they themselves are living in a context in which mainland Chinese power is exerted both abroad and within the country, including on unwilling minorities. Interstitial authors like myself may occupy an in-between epistemic location that bears impingements from multiple research communities, knowledge systems, and social and geopolitical contexts.

My extended discussion of epistemic location should lead one to recognize that extant global music history has not always articulated its rootedness in Euro-inflected discourses—seen in the popular subject matter that is musical entanglements between Euro North America and other sites—precisely because of its Euro epistemic location; examples include the study of Euro musickers (Russians in China), Euro musical works (Carmen), and Euro soundscapes (“Little Vienna” in wartime Shanghai).³⁴ Note that rather than geography or ethnicity, one’s epistemic location is determined by the range of references one cites, one’s place of publication, and the language one uses, such that scholars of color residing in Euro North America, or even in postcolonies integrated within Euro knowledge production (through the adoption of Euro languages), can have a Euro epistemic location. Global music history is an improvement upon exclusively Western art music history, but it still bears a colonial, perhaps neocolonial imprint, thus resonating with my point about how the context of a scholar’s work seeps into their global music history writing.

Relocating Global Music History from Euro-Inflected Discourses to an Interstitial Space

As seen in the case of Euro-inflected global music history with a Euro epistemic location, global music history is potentially locally inflected depending on where the author is situated, even if that location is interstitial, in between different geographies—for example, I locate my own position as hovering somewhere over the Pacific Ocean between the Asia-Pacific (China, Singapore, Australia) versus the US. Given that writers just like musicians are shaped by their contexts and experiences, the global music history that flows from my pen—as a teacher of Afro Sino musicking who faced a distinct set of contextual contingencies while working in China—is unlikely to be the same as that which is authored by a global music historian who has never lived and worked outside Euro North America for an extended period of time, other than for archival research or fieldwork—indeed, the differentiation of points of articulation may extend even to those with similar experiences but different positionalities as defined by race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. To recall Grosfoguel’s point, epistemic location can differ between colonized and colonizers, and—in my line of thinking—by varied impingements in different geographies. Another way of expressing the heterogeneity of interstitiality is to recognize the possible presence of non-Euro-inflected discourses in Euro North America, as well as of Euro-inflected discourses in China (as seen, with rare exceptions, in my former school of music). This demonstrates that epistemic location is discursive rather than physical—even though geography functions as a convenient metaphor, it is possible in theory for writers to adopt any position wherever they are located, though, as I have argued, one’s social context is frequently a shaping force for their research, such as in this very article.

As with the drawing of connecting lines between nodes of global music history, one has to start and end somewhere, as the writing of Afro Sino music history does not exist nowhere. In my case, I started drawing the lines of Afro Sino interconnection from Chinese/diasporic perspectives and then identifying intersections with Black/diasporic perspectives, but this is not the same as Sinocentrism. Sinocentrism is defined by the centering of Chinese/diasporic priorities, whereas one of my aims in teaching Black/diasporic musics is precisely to decenter “Chinese music” as an ideological state apparatus. Mainland Chinese musics, especially traditional musics, have been constructed in China as compulsory expressions of both nationalism and revolutionary communism, with a specific body of musics recognized as ideologically correct (certain composers such as Jiang Wenye [a.k.a. Koh Bunya; 1910–83] have been castigated for their supposed “antirevolutionary” positions in post-1949 mainland Chinese music history).³⁵ Within the current climate of the China–US geopolitical rivalry, there is a government-led movement to center all things mainland Chinese, resulting in, for example, bans on the celebration of Christmas among college students in certain institutions.³⁶ Black/diasporic musics break out of this limited worldview that is familiar in mainland Chinese discourse. In introducing the Black diasporic musics of the descendants of slaves, I intervene in the Chinese geopolitical orientation, departing from purely resisting the US “other” toward a sympathetic approach to other people of color, thereby opening up the potential for interethnic solidarity. I teach Black/diasporic musics, including the traversal to different continents that gave rise to a plethora of sounds, including Afro Sino musicking, traditional musics and Christian hymns of Africa, spirituals and work songs and jazz, and the Western art music of Afro French composer Joseph Bologne, African American composer Florence Price, and Nigerian composer Akin Euba (a repertoire which African American choral conductor Marques L. A. Garrett has called the “nonidiomatic”³⁷ music of Black composers).³⁸ For mainland Chinese students, Black/diasporic musics occasion a nonpugilistic opening up to another people that too has suffered, but has resisted and ultimately resounded globally even under European coloniality, deviating from the nationalist-communist script at least insofar as there is sympathetic consideration of an “other.” My narrative of Afro Sino musicking begins with the “Sino” part, but it ideally ends in a place that is relatively less proximal to mainland Chinese discourse, with in-depth study of a variety of Black/diasporic musics.

Aside from decentering mainland Chinese discourse by redirecting its focus away from superpower struggles with the US, Black/diasporic musics also decenter the “global.” In China, the default point of reference for anything “foreign” is Euro North America—as in waiyu (“foreign language”), which conventionally means the English language, or waiguo yinyue (“foreign countries’ music”), which conventionally means Western art music. For example, one of the doctoral specializations at the Shanghai Conservatory is research in waiguo zuoqujia yu zuopin—literally, “foreign countries’ composers and works,” but referencing Western art music. In my experience teaching in a school of music for several years, the persistence of cultural imperialism in mainland Chinese music higher education is typically explained away with “modernization,” without recognizing that modernization is itself a colonial, teleological ideology that is premised on traditional “Chinese music” being backward, such that the adoption of Western sounds is then received as forward thinking.³⁹ Decentering Euro North America in mainland Chinese discussions of the “global” as connoting Euro North America will facilitate inclusion of other peoples, as in Afro Sino musicking.

The fact that the “foreign” (in China) is equivalent to Euro North America and Western art music ties back to my point about how the writing of global music history can be articulated as a local activity. For mainland China, Black/diasporic musics present an alternative version of the nonlocal or global, which is particularly important in a context where European eras are now being extrapolated onto the world stage with concepts such as the global Renaissance⁴⁰ and global Baroque,⁴¹ without extensive historiographic debate (e.g., do these terms give the impression of subsuming the globe under European historiography, and are there other terms which may be more appropriate?). Insofar as Black/diasporic musics decenter canonic Western art music, they have the function of countering European coloniality, which, as is well recognized, persists in different forms around the world, whether as cultural imperialism,⁴² or settler colonialism.⁴³ (Countering European coloniality does not necessarily imply the construction of China as exclusively its victim, as it is also possible to simultaneously emphasize minoritarian voices within China that have been marginalized under Sinocentrism.)

Black/diasporic musics decenter both Chinese/diasporic musics and Western musics, and this decentering is location specific and context dependent (even in the case of composers like Joseph Bologne, who was assimilated into Euro culture, a contemporary critical lens will acknowledge how he was in important ways excluded from it, such as when opera singers blocked his candidacy for music director of the Paris Opera on the basis of his race). Keeping in mind Grosfoguel’s argument about the variability of epistemic location, there is simply no global music history from nowhere, and it is necessary to articulate how global music history writing that emanates mostly from Euro North America is shaped by its context—as seen in the aforementioned prominence of studies connecting Euro with other geographies; even if multiple discourses are present across various research communities, analysis reveals comparative commonalities and differences within and across them. Such differences exist and are helpful in methodological analysis and reflection, evincing the contextual contingency of research and thus avoiding the assumption of universalist neutrality. The aim is not to foster nor avoid antagonism, but to concede to epistemic difference where it is present, including in cases where such difference arises from the legacy of Euro colonialism, a subject that some writers appear to be unable to broach comfortably notwithstanding the recent rise of decolonial theory.

Aside from global music history, the term global musicology has also entered circulation and requires discussion. In contrast with global music historians of Euro North America, the majority of music researchers in China continue to be engaged in either Western art music or traditional Chinese music, rather than with an interconnected “global” history. This blunt fact points to the difference between global music history and global musicology. While the former term has been regarded as one of the paradigmatic practices of the latter,⁴⁴ the alternate conception of global musicology is one that “embrac[es] the musicology of every tribe, tongue and nation.”⁴⁵ The musicologies of many tongues and nations frequently adopt precisely the nation as a music-historical framework rather than global interconnectivity, which is as of yet mainly a discourse in Euro languages, especially English.⁴⁶ There is the risk here of featuring a mainly Anglophone discourse over actual global musicological practices.

Since global musicology is in one conception the sum of all musicologies around the world, it would necessarily include global music history. But rather than a prescriptive definition that centers global music history, a descriptive definition of global musicology would take note of the entirety of what is being practiced, within which differences of tendencies in research emphasis (mainland Chinese music history in China, global music history in Euro North America) and epistemic location would be made clear. This definition of global musicology does not preclude appropriate critique of, for example, propagandistic, nationalist-inflected research—as opposed to antinationalist but locally anchored music research that this article is attempting to emulate. What a descriptive notion of “global musicology” achieves is the preservation of a conceptual space for examining actual global practices.

If we are to frame the stakes of global musicology using the terms of the present article, it becomes evident not only that the writing of global music history has a location but that it is itself a reflection of the dynamics of the variegated practices of global musicology.⁴⁷ I have argued that global music history varies according to location, seen in that Afro Sino musicking may not carry the same resonance of decentering nationalist-communist constructions of mainland Chinese musics if the same history were conceived from, say, the US. Differences in the epistemic location of enunciation (where I put my pen to paper) is the mark of global musicology, not the (Afro, Sino) locations enunciated within global music history. (Similarly, differences arise because of the different epistemic locations where researchers put their pens to paper to write about Western, Chinese, or other musics, in studies that are not categorized as global music history.) The locations enunciated in this article are Black/Black diasporic and Chinese/Chinese diasporic, but the epistemic location of enunciation is interstitial, and my very choice of Afro Sino musicking—as opposed to Black-and-Euro assemblages, or Chinese-and-Euro assemblages—is shaped by mainland Chinese contingencies.

To recapitulate and draw conclusions from the foregoing, I have argued that Afro Sino musicking offers an alternative to global music history rooted in Euro-inflected discourses. My writing of Afro Sino music history was shaped by my (former) context of communist-approved nationalist mainland Chinese musics that I aimed to decenter through the teaching of Black/diasporic musics (and through the inclusion of the music of women and ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities in China, as well as Chinese diasporic musics, in “Chinese Music History” courses). Through Afro Sino musicking, I also denaturalize the aforementioned conventional association of the term foreign music in Chinese (waiguo yinyue) with “Western art music,” by pointing to the minoritarian global as embodied in Black/diasporic musics. In both kinds of decentering (of mainland Chinese and Western art musics), I occupy an interstitial epistemic location that belongs to neither side, exhibiting how global music history is written from specific locations, even if that location is interstitial. This variability of location in the writing of global music history is the mark of global musicology as the collective of the musicology of all “tribes, tongues, and nations.” Building on critiques of, for example, global music history’s resonance with global capitalism,⁴⁸ there could be more examination of how global music history either leads back to Euro North America (engaged with those geographies as one nodal point, with the other nodal point being elsewhere), or avoids it in discourse (as in studies of modernity that replace the term “the West”).

Afro Sino musicking is one avenue for exploring how nodal lines that begin in Chinese/diasporic musics can have alternative destinations other than colonial Euro North America. Resources for the writing of these other kinds of global music histories vary. In my case, I took heed of and was inspired by creative Afro Sino musicking. Writers elsewhere may take their lead from Indigenous and other minority histories of transculturation.⁴⁹ In turning to lesser-known musics and geographies, researchers and teachers would be fulfilling what I believe to be the core mission of global musicology in general and global music history in particular, which is to bracket Western musics while recognizing one’s usually less-than-innocent imbrication in systems of social, geopolitical, and/or academic-discursive power—for the mainland Chinese, this means negotiating both Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism. With this in mind, it might be said that in addition to resisting Euro colonialism, sympathetically opening space for others is equally important regardless of one’s positionality, even if—or perhaps especially if—one is a person of color.

1. Christopher Small, “Why Doesn’t the Whole World Love Chamber Music?” American Music 19, no. 3 (2001): 340–59, https://doi.org/10.2307/3052477.↗
2. See, for example, Michael Saffle and Hon-Lun Yang, eds., China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception (University of Michigan Press, 2017).↗
3. For students, the term people of color enables the perception of a similarity of positionality between Chinese and Chinese diasporic and Black and Black diasporic peoples. See below on the how the marginality of peoples plays out differently in music education in China versus the US.↗
4. Sinophone may be taken to mean both “Chinese speaking,” including Chinese and Chinese diasporic peoples, and a more specific diasporic meaning. For the diasporic definition of “Sinophone” (that also includes minorities in China), see Shu-mei Shih, “The Concept of the Sinophone,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 709–18, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2011.126.3.709. The narrower diasporic definition of “Sinophone” applies in this article to Chinese American or exiled Chinese music makers in the US (who I will introduce shortly), but my teaching recounted here took place in China. The broader meaning of Sinophone as “speaker of Sinitic languages” from Standard Chinese to Cantonese is intended in this article.↗
5. See, for example, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2014).↗
6. This may not be the case at other schools of music.↗
7. On Fred Ho, see T. Carlis Roberts, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2016), 122–52. On Paul Robeson, see Gao Yunxiang, Arise, Africa! Roar, China! Black and Chinese Citizens in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).↗
8. Jerusalem Demsas and Rachel Ramirez, “The History of Tensions—and Solidarity—Between Black and Asian American Communities, Explained,” Vox, March 16, 2021, https://www.vox.com/22321234/Black-asian-american-tensions-solidarity-history.↗
9. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2008).↗
10. See Gao, Arise, Africa!↗
11. Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Temple University Press, 1992), 122–23.↗
12. See John Soennichsen, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Greenwood Press, 2011).↗
13. “Mapping Anti-Chinese Violence,” The Tacoma Method, accessed September 23, 2023, https://www.tacomamethod.com/mapping-antichinese-violence.↗
14. See, for example, Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond (University of Illinois Press, 2025).↗
15. Because of space limitations, I am unable to easily show other sites of transdiasporic convergence, such as Chinese musickers in Africa, African musickers in China, or the Chinese performance of African American and other Black/diasporic musics or the African performance of Chinese music. Perhaps a 3D mind map would be able to do so.↗
16. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2005), 11.↗
17. For an accessible take on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of assemblage, see Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (University of Edinburgh Press, 2016). See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).↗
18. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 3, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2-2-1.↗
19. On the interpenetration of agency and structure, see Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (University of California Press, 1984).↗
20. Kofi Agawu, “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa,” in Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Duke University Press, 2016), 334–54.↗
21. See Gavin S. K. Lee, “From Difference to Ambiguity: Undoing Antiracist Fallacies in US Music Studies,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 78, no. 3: 757–94, https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2025.78.3.757.↗
22. This was recently articulated in Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Anti-Asian Hate: It’s Time to Stop Playing ‘Chinatown, My Chinatown,’” Musicology Now, September 1, 2022, https://musicologynow.org/anti-asian-hate/.↗
23. Binxin Zhang, “Africans in China, Western/White Supremacy and the Ambivalence of Chinese Racial Identity,” China Quarterly 260 (2024): 932–47, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741024000286. ↗
24. Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 213.↗
25. Many “minorities” in fact constitute sizable proportions of the population of the provinces in which they mainly reside, and some were originally province-level majorities. See Chien-peng Chung, “Evaluating Xinjiang and Tibet as ‘Internal Colonies’ of China: Evidence from Official Data,” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2018): 118–39.↗
26. I write as someone who has lived as part of the majority in Singapore (where I grew up), part of the minority in the US and UK, and as a kind of “internal outsider” in China where I am “not Chinese enough.” My insistence on interstitiality is borne of that experience. An interstitial epistemic location can counter both Sino and Eurocentrisms.↗
27. The other participating universities were Oxford University, King’s College London, Universität Zürich, Universität Wien, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.↗
28. There is by now a large bibliography on global music history, but the first major publication is Reinhard Strohm, ed., Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project (Routledge, 2018). A separate volume, also edited by Strohm, avoids the return to the West: Reinhard Strohm, ed., The Music Road: Coherence and Diversity in Music from the Mediterranean to India (Oxford University Press, 2019).↗
29. Richard Curt Kraus, Piano and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle Over Western Music (Oxford University Press, 1989).↗
30. Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001), 18.↗
31. On markedness, see Edwin L. Battistella, Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language (SUNY Press, 1990).↗
32. The case of “unhoused” to replace “homeless” demonstrates the conundrums of nominalist activism. Whose conditions are being improved––the material conditions of the unhoused, or the sociodiscursive status of the person using the word “unhoused”? While the reality is more complicated than the simplified options presented here (the sociodiscursive impact of words cannot be predicted in advance of their widespread usage), it is important to recognize that benefits accrue to both the enunciator and the enunciated in statements claiming ethical validity.↗
33. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke University Press, 2011).↗
34. See, for example, Saffle and Yang, China and the West; Naomi Matsumoto, “The Other Reversed? Japan’s Assimilation of Carmen, 1885 to 1945,” in Carmen Abroad: Bizet’s Opera on the Global Stage, ed. Richard Langham Smith and Clair Rowden (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 284–303; Yvonne Liao, “‘Die gute Unterhaltungsmusik’: Landscape, Refugee Cafés, and Sounds of “Little Vienna” in Wartime Shanghai,” Musical Quarterly 98, no. 4 (2015): 350–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdw004; Hon-Lun Helan Yang, Simo Mikkonen, and John Winzenburg, eds., Networking the Russian Diaspora: Russian Musicians and Musical Activities in Interwar Shanghai (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020); and Jin-Ah Kim, “‘European Music’ Outside Europe? Musical Entangling and Intercrossing in the Case of Korea’s Modern History,” in Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project, ed. Reinhard Strohm (Routledge, 2018), 177–97.↗
35. For more on Jiang, see David Der-wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis (Columbia University Press, 2015), ch. 5.↗
36. Personal communication from a former student in 2024.↗
37. Marques L. A. Garrett, “Beyond Elijah Rock: The Non-Idiomatic Choral Music of Black Composers,” accessed September 23, 2023, https://www.mlagmusic.com/research/beyond-elijah-rock.↗
38. Music research has examined the significant Black diasporic community in Guangzhou, formed in response to increasing China–Africa trade. See Su Zheng et al., “Exploring Music in China’s New African Diaspora––An Innovative U.S.-China Team Research Project,” April 18, 2013, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2253654.↗
39. On the coloniality of modernity, see Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 168–78. On the ossified ideological discourse of modernization in Chinese historiography (in China), see Huaiyin Li, Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), 33.↗
40. See, for example, Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 1.↗
41. See, for example, Wendy Heller, “Towards a Global Baroque: Resources,” companion website to Wendy Heller, Music in the Baroque (W. W. Norton, 2013), accessed September 23, 2023, https://wendyhellerbaroquemusic.com/welcome/towards-a-global-baroque-resources/.↗
42. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, 1993).↗
43. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.↗
44. See Daniel K. L. Chua, “Global Musicology: A Keynote Without a Key,” Acta musicologica 94, no. 1 (2022): 114; and Sanela Nikolić, “Five Claims for Global Musicology,” Acta musicologica 93, no. 2 (2021): 220.↗
45. Daniel K. L. Chua, “Global Musicology,” New Sound 50, no. 2 (2017): 13, https://doi.org/10.5937/NEWSO1750012C.↗
46. There are some Spanish-language contributions from Latin America, for example Javier Marín López et al., eds., Musicología global, musicología local (Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2013).↗
47. See Amanda Hsieh and Vera Wolkowicz, eds., Global Musicology: Music Histories from Elsewhere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).↗
48. Tamara Levitz, “Why I Don’t Teach Global Music History,” this Journal 13, no. 1 (2023): 118–137, https://jmp.amsmusicology.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Levitz_411-Article-Text-2504-1-10-20231102.pdf.↗
49. See, for example, Jessica Bissett Perea, “Introducing [Our] Peoples, Places, and Projects: Indigelogical Ways of Doing Global Music History Homework,” in “Forum––Centering Discomfort in Global Music History,” convened by Hedy Law, Journal of Musicology 40, no. 3 (2023): 255–67. Minoritarian, including Indigenous, epistemic locations complicate majority ones.↗