2017/04/01 by Andrew Mark · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Music History and Culture #African studies and sociopolitical issues #Diverse Musicological Studies
paper · doi:10.3138/topia.37.157
openalex publication_date 2017/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Ethnomusicological institutions transform traditional Zimbabwean musics into what is practiced in North America and understood by thousands as “Shona music.” This process produces a false narrative within North America of endangered and scarce traditional Zimbabwean musical practices, and these ends serve neocolonial imaginings of the need and right for white stewardship over and charity towards traditional Zimbabwean music(ians). Such a history strikingly reflects dominant and reductive North American settler conceptions of the wilderness, national parks and Indigenous peoples as ecologically vulnerable and in need of protection. Though this process has also fostered a worthy musical bond between Africans and North Americans, it has come at the expense of unfettered economic, artistic and political agency for Zimbabwean musicians and instrument builders who transact their traditional musics internationally. Working towards an anti-oppressive, ethnographic, ecocritical and ecomusicological approach to interpreting the phenomenon of North American Zimbabwean music, this article addresses the proposal that North America could be an archive for scarce authentic traditional Zimbabwean musics.