Cross-Cultural and Anti-Colonial/Imperial Research: ICMPC-ESCOM 2021 Workshop

This paper is a written account of the ICMPC-ESCOM 2021 workshop “Cross-Cultural and Decolonized Research,” and an opportunity to dig deeper into some of the topics that were discussed over the course of organizing and presenting the workshop. The paper is divided into four sections: 1) why we organized the workshop, and our reflections on it; 2) a summary and critique of two previous papers (Jacoby & Margulis et al., 2020; Savage, Jacoby, Margulis et al., forthcoming) with recommendations about cross-cultural work in music science; 3) a summary of the responses to five questions we posed to experts in cross-cultural and anti-colonial/imperial research, prefaced by a discussion of how we chose who we wanted to approach; and 4) our reflections on future steps music science can take to engage cross-cultural and anti-colonial/imperial research ethically.

Do we need to decolonise bereavement studies?

At this re-launch of the journal Bereavement, we explore the question, ‘Do we need to decolonise bereavement studies?’ We do not offer definitive answers, but rather seek to open up conversations. We briefly explore some of the main debates and explanations of what ‘decolonising’ means. In its broader understandings, this entails questions about the nature of the knowledge that underpins claims to ‘expertise’, since knowledge inevitably reflects the socio-historic position and biography of those who produce it. This raises uncomfortable issues about the ‘universality’ of that knowledge, and how to understand what is shared between human beings, including how to understand experiences of pain and suffering. In addressing the nature of, ‘bereavement studies’, we first consider complexities of language and translation, before observing the heavy domination of the ‘psy’ disciplines in affluent minority worlds, oriented towards individualised, medicalised and interventionist perspectives. We indicate work that seeks to challenge these limitations, including the decolonising of psychiatry itself. We argue the need for such decolonising work to go beyond cross-cultural work originating in affluent minority worlds, beyond interdisciplinarity, and beyond crucial work on equality, diversity and inclusivity. Bereavement, as a field of study and a set of practices, needs to take account of the legacies of complex colonial histories of exploitation and harm that continue to shape the world in general, and in particular, the aftermath of death in the continuing lives of the living. We conclude with some implications for ‘bereavement’ practice, from a UK perspective.

L’arte contemporanea e il “civic engagement”

This essay explores the value of the artist’s action and the power that his work exercises in the socio-political history of his country. It talks about Picasso and his Guernica, offering a reading of the work following the thread of Antonio Banfi’s aesthetics through the critical look of Dino Formaggio. The scene opens with the parisian Expo of 1937. The article is then integrated with aesthetic, moral and civil contents that guide the reader to understand the concept of morality, crisis and life of the art for Banfi and the connection with Picasso's cultural work, starting from his writings against Franco’s atrocities up to Guernica. An authentic reading of the work is inserted that wants to support the moral shock determined by Guernica: a real denunciation of the misery and corruption of the government, inciting the people to fight. Finally, in order to show how current the artists’ interest in social, political and international problems is, the essay ends by presenting the work of two particularly committed contemporary artists: the Italian Paola Ravasio and the Syrian Tammam Azzam.

"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year

The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.