On Race, Value, and the Need to Reimagine Ethnomusicology for the Future

Abstract

AbstractThis article contributes to literature on value in ethnomusicology by shifting the discourse to issues of racism. Drawing from several years of fieldwork in London's carnival arts scene, I develop an approach called “value from below,” which illustrates how racial oppression often directly affects how members of BIPOC communities assign value, meaning, and significance to particular things, spaces, places, and actions. I then extend this approach to consider the impacts of systemic racism on BIPOC scholars in ethnomusicology, arguing that the growing call for the making of an antiracist and decolonized ethnomusicology is indicative of the continued struggle over value in the field and the larger world.