A deep and hopeful critique of, and from within, musicology

Academic Practice for the End of the World examines the unique psychological, material, and affective problems facing western academic humanists--and musicologists in particular--when it comes to building political change. The book argues that music scholarship often remains shaped by liberal-idealist values that naturalize capitalism, preventing meaningful engagement with the social injustices many scholars claim to oppose. Drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist analyses as well as interventions from Black and Indigenous Studies, Critical Theory, and Animal Studies, the author asks how western academics might more effectively collaborate in the vast project of building a better world. Through case studies including the Louisville Orchestra's "Concert for Healing" following Breonna Taylor's murder, the U.S. public school system's entanglements with settler-colonialism, and debates around accessibility in contemporary music and academic pedagogy, the book demonstrates how even well-intentioned projects for social justice often serve elite class interests. Combining rigorous critique with an anarchist commitment to turning theory into practice, this work insists that deep critique and a materialist understanding of history can serve as future-oriented forces shaping present political actions. This work thus offers both diagnosis and possibility, in that it is aimed at helping scholars take some of the tools the academy has bestowed, and put them to use against colonial racial capitalism.