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The White Noise of Music Education: Unsounding the Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty in the Australian Curriculum

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The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education

Abstract

In this chapter, I seek to “unsound” the white noise of music education curriculum in Australia by positioning it within a historical and contemporary colonial matrix to consider the ways in which the “possessive logic” of “patriarchal white sovereignty” (after Moreton-Robinson, Borderl e-journal 3:1–9, 2004; Griffith Law Rev 20(3):641–658, 2011) is deployed musically in the realm of Australian music education and curriculum. I consider the ways that Indigenous Australian musical epistemologies and ontologies are at once constituted within, projected into, possessed by, and thereby racially heard in Australian music education, specifically through the white-settler-colonial imaginaries of anthropology and ethnomusicology, and further explore current decolonial moves by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander thinkers and educators to unsettle the possessive logic of current Australian music education curriculum.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This definition was retrieved from the Merriam Webster dictionary online, 18 January 2017, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20noise

  2. 2.

    Yanyuwa refers to the group of Aboriginal people who are the sovereign Indigenous owners of country associated with Burrulula in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria and the Sir Edward Pellew Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia.

  3. 3.

    There are two groups of Indigenous peoples in Australia. The term “Aboriginal” refers to those Indigenous groups whose country is the mainland of Australia and “Torres Strait Islander” refers to the sovereign owners of the Torres Straits Islands, which sit between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

    Elizabeth Mackinlay

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  1. Elizabeth Mackinlay
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Art, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Amelia M. Kraehe

  2. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

  3. School of Visual Arts, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    B. Stephen Carpenter II

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Mackinlay, E. (2018). The White Noise of Music Education: Unsounding the Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty in the Australian Curriculum. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_31

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