The concept of decolonization has been important to geographies from various parts of Asia to the Americas. This themed issue is the first collection to bring key decolonial writings of authors from Asia (Kuan-Hsing Chen 2010, Shzr Ee Tan 2021; Alfian Sa’at et. al. 2021), as well as from other geographies, to counter coloniality as found in music and East Asia. Examining really-existing forms of cultural, epistemic, exploitation, settler, and internal coloniality, we demonstrate the necessity of grounding analysis in the historical particularities and discourses of specific geographies—in this themed issue, East Asia. With a broad range of disciplinary and geographic expertise, the editors, of whom two are based in East Asia (Lee has migrated since completing this project), curated the articles from a symposium they organized in 2022, involving the Society of Ethnomusicology’s East Asia-related study groups as well as the American Musicological Society’s Global East Asian Music Research study group.

“Music and East Asia” in this themed issue is not solely about music, musical ideologies, and peoples in East Asia, but a global assemblage of musics, ideologies, knowledges, and peoples that are connected to East Asia. There are two main areas of inquiry. (1) Exploitation and cultural colonization that is linked to the following—Euro-North American imperialism and the influx of Western musics (hymns, military band music, pop, rock, etc.) into East Asia in part via Japan, Japanese colonization in East Asia in the interwar years, and Chinese imperialism over millennia. (2) Minoritization that is linked to settler and internal colonization (e.g. Xinjiang), as well as diasporic marginalization; the key factors here are (i) the asymmetrical relation between majority Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ethnic groups and musics, versus minority and Indigenous musics and peoples in each of the East Asian countries, as well as (ii) East Asian diasporic peoples and musics around the world that have minority status. A result of this layering of webs of power is that Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are both minoritarian in relation to Euro-North America, and majoritarian in relation to minorities in East Asian countries. In addition, China has an imperial relation with—and/or holds imperial ambitions towards—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and other Chinese communities in South East Asia and elsewhere.

The editors bring varied life experiences, positionalities, and theoretical perspectives to this themed issue. Being a Singaporean-born thinker, Gavin Lee draws on his experience as an insider and outsider to China. Having lived in China for 9 years, he is cognizant of dominant discourses of Chinese nationalism and Sinocentrism, but his life experience in Singapore placed him at enough of a distance from China’s immediate geopolitical influence to be able to also appreciate the historical and continuous impact of European colonialism in the country. Teaching both Chinese and Western music in the censored, ideologically saturated discursive environment of China, Lee has had extensive contact with both Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism that intersect in the country. On one hand, Chinese nationalism is combined with an increasing disregard for minority rights, with Uyghur incarceration in Xinjiang adding to an already extensive list of human rights violations. On the other hand, European cultural imperialism is evident across cultural life, including music. Any attempt to counter coloniality has to account for multiple musics and multiple power differentials. 

Hee-sun Kim, born and raised in South Korea but academically trained in both Korean gugak studies and Western ethnomusicology, has long navigated the space between cultural intimacy and critical distance. Her early education immersed her in the aesthetics and philosophy of traditional Korean music, which she first approached with reverence as a national legacy. Yet her subsequent training abroad, particularly in U.S.-based ethnomusicology and Singapore-based inter-Asian cultural studies, exposed her to the epistemic frameworks through which “tradition” itself is constructed, performed, and politicized. Moving between these disciplinary and geographic contexts has sharpened her awareness of the layered histories of colonialism, Cold War ideology, and internalized hierarchy that continue to shape Korean musical modernity. It is through this lived experience—of being situated within the South Korean cultural field while simultaneously encountering external lenses of critique—that she came to recognize the urgency of engaging decolonial and postcolonial perspectives in Korean music scholarship. Rather than adopting a fixed insider or outsider stance, she works from the frictional space between them, where intellectual discomfort becomes a productive ground for rethinking inherited categories of identity, modernity, and tradition.

Kunio Hara was born in the newly independent nation of Papua New Guinea to Japanese parents where he spent the first eleven years of his life. Subsequently, he and his family moved to Japan and then to post-Communist Poland where he completed his primary and secondary education. While he attended local schools in Papua New Guinea and Japan, he attended an American school in Poland. The divergent cultural and social environments as well as contrasting educational curricula have made him sensitive to the multiple and at times contradicting ways in which people understand and interpret history and the world surrounding them. His music education began in public school in Papua New Guinea and also privately through a couple of ex-pat Japanese individuals who happened to teach piano. His exposure to Western music continued in Japan through school music programs and in Poland through private lessons and concerts. He traveled to the United States to pursue a degree in music performance (clarinet) but subsequently changed his focus to musicology. One of his research interests deals with the very issue of Japanese people’s engagement with the musical traditions from the West since the mid-nineteenth century, which was part of the nation’s program to resist Western colonization through modernization and Westernization. Not only has this process impacted Hara’s musical upbringing, which began far removed from Japan, but it has also shaped the musical lives of many others in the region because of its entanglement with Japan’s own path to colonize its East Asian neighbors. He is currently situated in the United States where he teaches music history at a university in the American South, a locale where contested memories and histories vie for attention.

The concept of decolonization

The central purpose of this themed issue is to (1) articulate what Abu-Lughod (1990) calls a “diagnostic of [colonial] power,” and (2) use that diagnostic to counter coloniality in music and East Asia. “Coloniality” is defined, following Mignolo (2011) and Quijano (2007), as ideologies and practices that pertain both during colonization (period of governance by a foreign power) and after independence (because of the persistence of cultural colonization or economic and military coercion). Accordingly, “decoloniality” comprises not only decolonization movements in lower-income countries that led to independence (Mignolo 2011:53), but a broader resistance against the coloniality that persists beyond the cessation of colonial governance:

Toward the end of the Cold War, decolonization mutated into decoloniality (without, of course, losing its historical meaning), to highlight “decolonization of knowledge” and to cast Eurocentrism as an epistemic rather than a geographical issue. The conditions have changed. Colonizers were no longer occupying countries […] The focus was on epistemology rather than on taking the state. The focus became the decolonization of knowledge rather than of expelling the colonizer from the territory, and delinking from the colonial matrix of power […] At this point decoloniality became synonymous with being epistemically disobedient (Mignolo 2011:53–4).

Both decoloniality and decolonization are used in the following discussion to denote the goal of decolonial efforts, since the distinction between them is adopted by only some writers.

Bearing in mind that Tuck and Yang (2012) define decolonization in relation to settler colonization, this introduction uses the term “countercolonial” to indicate the dismantling of the entire range of colonialities referenced above, while outlining the complexities of “decolonial” as it is used in select articles in this issue. There are three analytics that must always be applied in tandem in any discussion of countercoloniality and decolonial projects: (i) historical and geographic context, (ii) modality of coloniality, and (iii) knowledge production.

Noting the watering down of “decolonial” to denote virtually anything counterhegemonic, Tuck & Yang’s publication “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012) has become one of the important touchstones in recent decolonial music studies. The authors criticize civil, human rights, and social justice projects described as “decolonial,” signaling the awareness and inclusion of Indigenous peoples, but failing to actually discuss Indigenous peoples or North American settler colonialism (Tuck & Yang 2012:2–3). Crucially, the authors differentiate decolonial from “anticolonial,” as the project of resisting colonialism, and “postcolonial,” as the positionality of successfully acquiring resources from the former colonial metropole, with the paradoxical end result of reinforcing colonialism, for the postcolonials end up as settlers on Indigenous lands. Tuck and Yang argue that “forwarding a thesis on decolonization without regard to unsettling/deoccupying land” distracts from the basic fact of settler occupation (18–19).

In contrast with Tuck and Yang, Latin American theorization of decoloniality has tended to center on epistemic projects. Drawing on a broad range of global thinkers from Aníbal Quijano (Peru) to Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Indigenous New Zealander),1 but mainly using Latin America as a frame of reference, Walter Mignolo’s influential argument is that decoloniality is an epistemic project that involves countering the legacy of colonialism on Latin American production of knowledge (Mignolo 2011). Indigenous decolonial writers such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Bolivia), while critiquing their global-North counterparts who may fail to acknowledge the origins of their theory in the global South, also emphasize the importance of epistemology in centering Indigenous knowledge (Cusicanqui 2012), the ecological dimensions of which is increasingly recognized (Thornton & Bhagwat 2021). Variations of the epistemic conception of decoloniality have proven to be the dominant understanding of decolonization, as observed in the ICTMD Decolonial Dialogues of 2021 and 2024. The Dialogues’ emphases on collaborating with diasporic (e.g., Hispanic U.S.), global (e.g., Afro-Latin), and Indigenous musicians and researchers (e.g., panel 1)2 reflect a conception of decolonization as a methodological project, congruent with Mignolo’s definition.

Without attempting to arrive at a single definition of “decolonial,” it is possible to observe the impingements of context on authors. Tuck & Yang’s article is focused on the recentering of Indigenous peoples in contemporary North American decolonial discourse. Its definitions of (settler) colonialism and decolonization (“unsettling” land) are justifiably made in accordance with their priorities. In contrast, the ICTMD (International Council for Traditional Music and Dance) Dialogues have a larger purview reflecting the composition of the society’s members. While Indigenous peoples are present in many of the panels, there is a broad recognition of settler as well as non-settler or exploitation colonialisms (predominant in African and Asian countries), and Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous diasporic peoples (e.g., enslaved Africans and Asians). Difference in geography is linked to differences of historical period and modality of colonialism, for post-World-War independence movements that successfully removed colonial governance (decolonized) have transformed into epistemic projects that aim to counter the colonial legacy in knowledge (e.g., by building pan-African platforms for musicians and community members to interact without the mediation of Euro-American anthropologists; 2021 Dialogues panel 2).3

In East and Southeast Asian contexts, decolonial discussions have encompassed Chinese (Shih 2012) and Japanese (Chen 2010) as well as Euro-American colonialisms, further complexifying what decolonization would encompass. Notably, the efforts of influential East Asian decolonial thinkers are epistemic in nature. Shu-mei Shih’s “Sinophone” framework includes cultural production by Chinese communities outside mainland China as well as PRC minorities’ Putonghua works (Shih 2013:11).4 The Sinophone (that encompasses Taiwan and Hong Kong) is an epistemic intervention intended to counter the dominance of China in the discipline of Chinese literature, which has unfortunately been appropriated by the CCP for nationalist purposes. Like Shih, Kuan-Hsing Chen’s decolonial intervention is also epistemic, critiquing Japanese historical discourse that fails to account for the suffering caused by imperial Japan in World War II (Chen 2010:205). Japanese de-militarization and democratization took place under U.S. administration in 1945 until 1952, but does not equate to decolonization of its largely unaddressed imperial past.

Recognizing Japanese and “Sinocolonialism” (to borrow Lee’s term for China’s coloniality in his article in this issue), writers have been cautious in approaching Euro-American colonialism. Shih considers China’s discourse of Eurocolonial oppression to be a distraction from Sinocolonialism (Shih 2011:709). Chen maintains a more ambiguous approach to Euro-American colonialism in the form of U.S. imperial presence in East Asia since the Cold War. On the one hand, recognizing U.S. presence in East Asia since 1945, drawing much of the region into Cold War polarities, Chen argues that “Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Okinawa have become semicolonies of the United States” (Chen 2010:181). On the other hand, Chen’s “inter-Asia” framework (Chen 2010:212) that is intended to promote reflection on, for example, Japanese colonization of Taiwan, would seem to exclude attempts to deal with the Euro-American colonial legacy. In Southeast Asia, decolonial efforts include protests against the celebration of the 2019 bicentennial of the British colonization of Singapore. Writers intervened culturally and epistemically, with a local play production inspiring a book volume containing historical readings and new scholarship (Sa’at et. al. 2021).

Decolonial theory challenges the global persistence of coloniality—the enduring logics, hierarchies, and epistemologies of European modernity that continue to structure knowledge, aesthetics, and power long after formal colonial rule has ended (Mignolo & Walsh 2018; Quijano 2000). From this perspective, Korea presents a particularly instructive site of inquiry. Its experience of colonization was not only external—under Japanese imperial rule—but was followed by a form of dual postcolonial subjugation: U.S. military governance in the South and Soviet occupation in the North. These overlapping imperial entanglements, compounded by the division of the peninsula after the Korean War (1950–1953), have produced multilayered colonial residues that persist within and beyond the nation-state. Crucially, South Korea’s modern nation-building process, while framed as a project of postcolonial recovery, has itself operated through ethnonationalist consolidation and cultural homogenization—hallmarks of internal coloniality. As such, the state’s cultural and musical institutions have often privileged a singular narrative of Korean identity, marginalizing the voices of diasporic, migrant, and ethnically diverse communities—including Chinese Hwagyo, Joseonjok (ethnic Koreans from China), and multicultural families, and bukhanitaljumin (North Korean defectors). Abroad, diasporic Koreans navigate asymmetrical relations not only with host societies but also with the divided Korean states themselves, revealing Korea’s ambivalent position as both subaltern in the global order and hegemonic within East Asia. Approaching Korean music through a decolonial lens thus requires moving beyond the binary of Korea and the West. As Chen (2010) argues, decolonization in Asia must entail not only a critique of Western imperial epistemologies but also a decentering of the nation-state and a recognition of regional entanglements and internal hierarchies. Following this approach, Korean music must be understood in relation to multiple axes of power—colonial, postcolonial, and intra-Asian—through which aesthetic norms, cultural institutions, and identities are produced and contested. In this way, Korean music becomes a field through which the tensions of decolonial practice and postcolonial power may be confronted, questioned, and reimagined.

Of the writings mentioned above, Tuck & Yang 2012 is the most influential attempt to delimit what “decolonial” encompasses, specifically as pertaining to deoccupying land in North America. Beyond the North American context, writers have addressed both settler and non-settler (exploitation) colonialism, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous—but enslaved or otherwise oppressed—peoples. This themed issue takes into consideration the multiplicity of meanings for “decolonial,” and respects Tuck and Yang’s distinction between “de-,” “anti-,” and postcolonial, but does not follow their avowedly North American framework entirely, for that would be ahistorical and decontextualized for a themed issue focusing on East Asia. The editors of this themed issue have chosen “countercolonial” to denote a broad range of efforts aimed at resisting coloniality, including decolonial projects.

There are two broad, interrelated meanings of decolonization specifically which can be discerned in this issue, pertaining to (i) persisting settler colonization and Indigenous peoples, and (ii) historic non-settler or exploitation colonization and persisting epistemic issues. On the one hand, in invoking decolonization, writers in this themed issue recognize continuing settler and internal colonization not just in the Americas but also in China, where in addition to Xinjiang and Tibet, there exist minorities with limited autonomy who are indigenous to usually mountainous or rural areas and are distinct from, if partially assimilated to, the Han Chinese. On the other hand, writers also propose ways of reducing colonial impact in the form of Euro-American epistemic frameworks, including musicology as well as ethnomusicology. Epistemology is of course not irrelevant to Indigenous peoples, as reflected in the interview with Uyghur ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, and artist Mukaddas Mijit, who discusses the narrow cultural and epistemic representation of Uyghurs in both China and Euro-America. Another example of the intersection of the two decolonial paradigms can be observed with (settler) Sino- and (non-settler) cultural Eurocolonialism in China, which impact PRC minorities simultaneously (see the case of Nuoso composer Zhang Zhao in Lee’s article in this issue). Both decolonial and countercolonial are terms employed in the articles of this issue, with the choice shaped in part by the geographic locations (including settler colonies) and corresponding discursive contexts of the authors. While minority groups indigenous to East Asia are subject to settler and internal colonialism, an exclusive focus on minorities may be disrupted by the historic and/or continuing prominence of Chinese and Japanese state-level imperialism exerted no less violently on other countries and territories.5 East Asian-based writers use either countercolonial or decolonial (e.g., Chen) to describe a broad range of attempts at resisting colonialism. North American-based writers may prefer to avoid “decolonial” except when discussing Indigenous peoples.

Overview of contributions

The articles in this themed issue outline various forms of cultural and epistemic coloniality, which may in some cases follow from settler and internal colonization, and examine the means of countering coloniality through (i) musical and sociocultural practices, (ii) pedagogy, and (iii) research, conceptual reframing, and epistemology. The first group of articles examines music in contexts of settler and internal colonization in China, under which Indigenous peoples have been constructed as “minorities” even though they comprise majorities within their own regions. Settler and internal colonization are linked, as governance over regions or provinces with large Indigenous populations of non-Han Chinese peoples (e.g. Uyghurs, Tibetans, the Yi people) may be accompanied by mass in-bound Chinese migration. Articles detail minorities’ stereotyping as well as their silencing in academia, with countercolonial approaches encompassing practices of cultural sustainability, pedagogy that names the coloniality exerted by China and Japan, as well as recognition of academic censorship in China.

A second group of articles counters Euro-American epistemology, including as exerted through the Euro-American conservatory system as implemented in East Asia (from which figures like Lang Lang and Seiji Ozawa emerged). Countercolonial approaches for the conservatory comprise amplifying musical works created by marginalized traditional East Asian performers, rethinking composer-performer categories with Euro-American genealogies (that privilege conservatory-trained composers), and returning to traditional music apprenticeships outside conservatories. Two final articles examine the means of countering epistemic colonization, including recognizing the shaping power of Euro-America on East Asian knowledge systems, and the epistemic divergence from Euro-America prompted by East Asian contingencies. In this themed issue, authors crucially operationalize the knowledge of coloniality into specific countercolonial strategies in practices, pedagogy, and research, as the recognition of coloniality is a necessary but not sufficient condition to merit the term countercolonial—which does not extend to any study of global geographies by virtue of its subject matter. As the first collection on countering coloniality in music and East Asia, this themed issue will be a landmark in music studies.

The first article is an interview with Uyghur ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, and artist Mukaddas Mijit. She critiques how Chinese and Euro-American institutions and scholars perpetuate distorted or Euro/Sinocentric views, portraying Uyghurs in essentialized ways. While dance holds deep cultural significance in Uyghur social and spiritual life, such as at weddings or meshreps (a gathering including poetry, music, dance and conversation), it has been reduced to folkloric stereotypes in China. In Euro-America, the Uyghurs are seen primarily as an oppressed minority, excluding the “richness of Uyghur culture and the individuality of its members.”

Anna Morcom writes as a scholar and teacher of Tibetan music, exploring the challenges of decolonial efforts against China’s context of settler and internal colonialism, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang. While Chinese history portrays victimhood from Western imperialism, it overlooks its own colonial projects, such as the Qing Empire’s conquests and the PRC’s forcible annexations. Decolonization is hindered by China’s high colonialism, suppression of Indigenous and critical research, and racial biases even among pro-Tibet voices. Morcom emphasizes teaching and researching minority musics, foregrounding Indigenous scholars, and adopting a global, decentered approach to the analysis of colonialism, advocating for solidarity across differences.

Lijian Qian’s article explores decolonial efforts among ethnic minorities in Yunnan, China, such as the Miao people, who face assimilation into the Han majority. Due to fears of state persecution, discussions about Han dominance are often avoided. Therefore, decolonization is observed less in discourse than in practices including fostering Indigenous perspectives, self-determination, and cultural sustainability. The study highlights three NGO programs that support Indigenous musical culture and ecological knowledge, helping communities build stewardship, resilience, and adaptive management skills. However, NGOs can also impose their own values, override local voices, and reshape traditions, risking cultural distortion.

Garrett Groesbeck’s article critiques the persisting colonial priorities in Japanese conservatory education, which is rooted in Euro-American traditions introduced during Japan’s Meiji-era modernization efforts. It highlights the marginalization of premodern Japanese music genres (such as zither koto music) in music curricula, contrasting with their influence on global composers like Tōru Takemitsu. The disjuncture between conservatory-trained “composers” and “performer-composers” (non-conservatory-trained specialists in Japanese instruments who compose) reveals extractive knowledge production in composer training. The author proposes decolonizing Japanese music education by elevating performer-composers, fostering deeper engagement with Japanese instruments’ historical canons, and reorienting composition toward collaborative, community-focused practices to sustain traditional Japanese music in contemporary society.

Hee-sun Kim’s article proposes a countercolonial approach to Korean musicology, examining Japanese colonization, U.S. military administration, and the Cold War. Early research from the 1980s has focused on pro-Japanese music and institutions during the Japanese colonial period, later shifting to anti-Japanese music. This body of work questioned the binary of “authentic Korean” versus Western music that has informed Korean musicology, revealing the complexity of Korean modernity. More recently, studies have explored the Cold War’s impact, uncovering U.S. hegemony and pro-U.S. activities in South Korea, further decentering the binary.

Gavin Lee’s article examines the intersection of Eurocolonialism and Sinocolonialism in musical practices, analyzing “dual” colonialisms in, for example, minority Nuoso composer Zhang Zhao’s syncretic works (Euro-American sounding music in which minority modes are misrecognized as “Chinese”), and Ye Songrong’s proposal of a Chinese hermeneutics of Western art music (a Europhilic project that has been appropriated by CCP scholars). Through autoethnography, Lee theorizes decolonial listening while bearing dual colonialisms in mind, drawing on his ambiguous positioning on both sides of power asymmetries in the course of his global life experiences in four countries. The article uses the concept of performativity to foster decoloniality, challenging static notions of language, music, and identity.

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