A violent accumulation of (dis)identifications : the impact of white affectivity on the practices of six brown composers

Abstract

This PhD explores how white affectivity impacts the creative practices of brown composers. The project consists of a portfolio of compositions, five narrative portraits of brown composers, and a written dissertation. The project is firstly concerned with documenting how the compositional process may be forcing us to (dis)identify—a term used by Jose Esteban Muñoz to describe how a minority subject navigates majoritarian space. I use these affective mechanisms as locating-devices to examine western European classical music (WECM) composition’s desire for whiteness, noting how WECM carefully manages the conditions of minoritarianism as a constitutive norm. This research uses an emerging sociogenic methodology I have developed that combines analytical knowledge (theory), practice (music composition), experiential knowledge (auto-ethnography and biography), and communal knowledge (interviews). Sociogeny focuses the research on the moment a minoritarian subject recognizes how the white, colonial, hegemony pressures them to see themselves through its dominant lens—i.e. double-consciousness. The narrative portraits help to contextualize and decenter my own experiences as a lead participant-researcher. Through autoethnography and biographical accounts, I connect our experiences to broader political and social concerns connected to our identifications in composition. These personal accounts are mediated through theories from political Latin identity, disability as method, Black feminist thought, and queer performativity and phenomenology, enhancing the subtleties in our understanding of diaspora, double-consciousness, and white affectivity in composition. Disability as method is further explored both in the compositional process and in the writing. The reader should be aware that I embraced my Autistic and ADHD flow-state—letting my neurodivergence define the quality of the writing and presentation of the scores. This means that my writing and scores are a direct reflection of the assimilative artifacts of British and American grammar rather than evidence of a struggle for perfection. I argue that brown composers, within the current Western, white, hegemony, may experience a type of epistemic self-harm causing a forced distancing between our Selves and our identifications through assimilation logics via white affective mechanisms. Nevertheless, when a composer employs a creative practice guided by liberatory logics, one may avoid epistemic self-harm that is sometimes caused by composition—or at least gain the agency and awareness of the self-harm and its effects, giving the composer a choice to engage and implement self-care strategies. Initially, I considered an embargo for two reasons. First, to protect the identities of the participants who chose to remain anonymous; second, to protect attendees at the two meetings appended. However, I worked with the RCS data protection team to ensure compliance on both counts. What remained was the pivotal issue of the readership, their lived experience and relationship to white supremacy. Having reflected on this, rather than achieving this through an embargo I would like to pass the responsibility on to the reader regarding the BIPOC-only sections of the thesis. Accordingly, I invite non-BIPOC readers (as well as BIPOC readers who live in whiteness) to enter into the world of epistemic self-harm vicariously if they choose to do so but not to appropriate our lived experience. Everyone has access to my full thesis but I respectfully ask readers to contact me at my email (diazsounds@gmail.com) for further discussion about the various ways to read the thesis.