This book reads representations of Western music in literary texts
to reveal the ways in which artifacts of imperial culture function
within contemporary world literature. Bushnell argues that Western
music's conventions for performance, composition, and listening,
established during the colonial period, persist in postcolonial
thought and practice. Music from the Baroque, Classical, and
Romantic periods (Bach through Brahms) coincides with the rise of
colonialism, and Western music contains imperial attitudes and
values embedded within its conventions, standards, and rules. The
book focuses on the culture of classical music as reflected in the
worlds of characters and texts and contends that its effects
outlast the historical significance of the real composers, pieces,
styles, and forms. Through examples by authors such as McEwan,
Vikram Seth, Bernard MacLaverty, Chang-rae Lee, and J.M. Coetzee,
the book demonstrates how Western music enters narrative as both
acts of history and as structures of analogy that suggest subject
positions, human relations, and political activity that, in turn,
describes a postcolonial condition. The uses to which Western music
is put in each literary text reveals how European art music of the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries is read and misread by
postcolonial generations, exposing mostly hidden cultural
structures that influence our contemporary understandings of social
relations and hierarchies, norms for resolution and for assigning
significance, and standards of propriety. The book presents
strategies for thinking anew about the persistence of cultural
imperialism, reading Western music simultaneously as representative
of imperial, cultural dominance and as suggestive of resistant
structures, forms, and practices that challenge the imperial
hegemony.
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