Forum-Centering Discomfort in Global Music History

This forum presents a conversation among seven scholars who explore the theme of discomfort in the emergent field of global music history. Prompted by Yvonne Liao and Olivia Bloechl, co-founders of the American Musicology Society's Global Music History Study Group in 2019, these contributions address ideas of globality by decentering knowledge production and productively engage different ways to resist hegemonic pasts, narratives, and processes entrenched at home, whatever and wherever home may be. This forum thus confronts home-based challenges that resist or obstruct the implementation of this decentering principle: What does it mean to locate a “home” and to identify various “discomforts” in the global musical and sonic spheres? How does the thinking of “home” relative to “discomfort” help to theorize the concepts of agency, locality, temporality, community, regionalism, and nationality? All seven articles share one structural feature-an extensive self-introduction in the spirit of Jessica Bissett Perea's call for “intertribal visiting protocols” developed by critical Indigenous studies. This grounds each contribution by exposing the contingency of arguments and allows for a weaving of themes of space, boundary, and interconnection across articles. The forum's topics range from world-making to relationality, from cripping musical taste to making Siamese music legible to colonial ears, and from listening for political taboos to problematizing “Latin American” music and theorizing intimacy through the notion of “scale” itself. Writing with candor, all contributors bring global music history into uncomfortable terrains.