Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education

“Deeply thoughtful, richly crafted, this book untangles the racial privileging and aesthetic hierarchy in music education. It explores diaspora as a paradigm shift for understanding multiculturalism as an indeterminate, unfinished project, rather than a final emancipation. Gustafson demonstrates eloquently that the colonial logic of comparison based on the stubborn categories of race, nation, and ethnicity needs to be fundamentally challenged in music education. A major breakthrough, this book should be read again and again by students, educators, and researchers in music and multicultural education.”
—Jinting Wu, Assistant Professor of Educational Culture, Policy and Society, Graduate School of Education, The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

“Documenting the racial politics informing multicultural music education as it has been widely conceptualized and practiced, this book offers a fresh and potentially more equitable way to think about people, music, and music making. This timely and thoughtful book is a must-read for all music teachers and researchers.”
—Julia Eklund Koza, Professor Emeritus, Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the School of Music, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

This book challenges simplified claims of racial, national, and ethnic belonging in music education by presenting diaspora as a new paradigm for teaching music, departing from the standard multicultural guides and offering the idea of unfinished identities for musical creations. While multiculturalism—the term most commonly used in music education—had promised a theoretical framework that puts classical, folk, and popular music around the world on equal footing, it has perpetuated the values of Western aesthetics and their singular historical development. Breaking away from this standard, the book illuminates a diasporic web of music’s historical pathways, avoiding the fragmentation of music by categories of presumed origins whether racial, ethnic, or national.

Ruth Iana Gustafson is an independent scholar of music education. She has taught numerous education courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She is the author of Race and Curriculum: Music in Childhood Education (2009), as well as many journal articles on the history of music education in the United States.