4 interventions against art music Exoticism
Colin Tucker (2024)
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Statement:
The assertion that a person, people, Land, or other entity “is” Exotic constitutes a uniquely pernicious power move. This move disavows the active process through which the targeted human or nonhuman entity comes to be Exoticized, while also enshrining the end result of that process as self-evident. Writing about the Orientalist mode of Exoticization, Palestinian intellectual Edward Saïd writes that “figures of speech associated with the Orient… are all declarative and self-evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal, they convey an impression of repetition and strength… for all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is.” As a result, Orientalism and other kinds of Exoticizations fix racializing binaries between those written as Western/white and those inscribed as Exotic, naturalizing a white supremacist ontology. At the same time, the act of Exoticizing also enacts an ontological cut between Exoticizer and Exoticized, rendering the former invisible while rendering the latter hypervisible; in particular, this move makes it difficult to name and hold accountable the Exoticizer, as well as to map and dismantle the process of Exoticization.
The present piece offers protocols for intervention around art music’s Exoticizations in concert music, opera, ballet, and/or incidental music for theatre. These protocols offer ways to mark and refuse the above power dynamics in Exoticizing works, through redactions of Exoticizing content and annotations (in a broad sense) of the position of the perpetrating Exoticizer. As I am read as white and aim to avoid unwittingly re-enacting racializing relations, I deliberately limit the scope of this piece to the practices of white perpetrators of Exoticization.
During the 2023-2024 attacks on Palestine by Israel and its Western allies, most well-funded and “prestigious” art music institutions have refrained from criticizing the attacks. These institutions have also refrained from even considering the active role that centuries of Euro-American art music Exoticism has played in rationalizing the attacks. These pieces are a response to this situation.
The title alludes to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s publication Framer Framed, whose critical analysis of the production of racializing Otherness formed an important starting point for the present project.
Null Point 