This response situates Stephen Amico’s provocation within the context of an intimate connection between postcolonial thought and the drive towards interdisciplinarity. It examines via three critical moments the deeply intertwined desires to destroy the colony on the one hand and disciplinarity on the other. To this end it analyses the debates around interdisciplinarity between Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Laurent Dubreuil, before turning to the explicit thematization of transdisciplinarity as part of the neoliberalization of the university. Finally, the essay turns to Hélène Cixous’s reflections in “Mon Algériance” to develop another way of thinking about the irreducible dispersal and dissemination of disciplinarity and its imbrication in the (post)colonial.
For Transdisciplinarity
Naomi Waltham-Smith is associate professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. At the intersection of music, sound studies, and recent European philosophy, her work appears in a wide range of journals, including Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, boundary 2, CR: The New Centennial Review,diacritics, and parrhesia. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford University Press, 2017) and her second monograph, The Sound of Biopolitics: Life, Aurality, Deconstruction, is forthcoming with Fordham University Press.
Naomi Waltham-Smith; For Transdisciplinarity. Journal of Musicology 1 January 2020; 37 (1): 51–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2020.37.1.51
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