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Disorienting Race: Humanizing the Musical Savage and the Rise of British Ethnomusicology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Bennett Zon
Bennett Zon
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Extract

Although definitions of orientalism and racism seldom achieve consensus, the significance of their interplay is universally acknowledged amongst theorists of non-Western cultures. Tony Ballantyne, in his recent Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, describes their relationship in terms of mutuality, and Ziauddin Sardar, in Orientalism, describes them as ‘circles within circles’. Edward Said, of course, deals with their relationship exhaustively in Orientalism, and describes them as inextricably linked. Writing of the nineteenth century, he suggests that ‘Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West most easily associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality.’

Type
Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , June 2006 , pp. 25 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

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