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.

Craig Russell's book makes important contributions to the study of European music as it was brought to, implemented in, and shaped by the mission communities of Alta California. This field of inquiry by its nature questions received notions of musical historiography, especially as it pertains to the relationship of documentary and ethnographic evidence. Documents are sparse at best for much of this music, and those that survive represent the musical traditions of the Spanish colonizers. In disciplinary terms, this translates into an interrogation of the relationship between musicology and ethnomusicology. The authors, each representing one of these two fields, present a dialogue between the text under review and other existing work on California mission music and on the ethics and epistemology of postcolonial musicology. Further questions are duly raised about how Russell handles the great complexity of the mission situation, as regards colonial power relations, the applicability (or lack thereof) of Eurocentric historicity, and the delicate matter of representing the viewpoint of the California Indians involved in musical negotiations of culture under the mission system.