Musical Commemorations and Contestations in Postcolonial Contexts
Organization: Public Humanities
Public Humanities is an international open-access, cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life.
The journal invites submissions for the upcoming issue, Musical Commemorations and Contestations in Postcolonial Contexts, which will be guest edited by Bart Paul Vanspauwen, Ana-María Alarcón-Jiménez, and Livia Jiménez Sedano.
Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2027
Description
This special issue examines how sonic and kinetic practices—music and dance—are mobilised, contested, and governed within postcolonial commemorative and institutional contexts. It centres communities whose musical and choreographic traditions are routinely staged, suppressed, or appropriated by state institutions and heritage bureaucracies, bringing scholarship on chronically under-represented practices into a single, freely accessible comparative framework across language spheres and colonial legacies.
The collection asks how music and dance function within—or in dialogue with—transnational institutions designed to consolidate language-based cultural systems, focusing on commemorative occasions and the sonic contestations they generate. From a hegemonic perspective, such commemorations produce collective memories that reproduce post-imperial geographies. From a critical perspective, they enact a persistent coloniality in which colonial-era categories endure in commemorative form.
Submissions will be assessed on their engagement with one or more of the following:
Musical and dance performance at official commemorative events
Indigenous or colonial remembrance through music and dance
Postcolonial justice and reparation via musical expression
Tensions between state-sponsored and grassroots practices
The instrumentalisation of intangible cultural heritage
Decolonial approaches to commemoration
The strongest submissions will offer a comparative or theoretically grounded account of how official institutions mediate culture through sound and movement, and what alternative practices emerge in response.
Two original concepts anchor the issue:
Sonic and kinetic governance: states' use of music and dance to construct authorised collective memory.
Sonic and kinetic resistance: communities' use of the same media to contest that governance.
The issue welcomes a diversity of perspectives and especially encourages submissions from early career researchers. It carries an explicit social mission aligned with international agendas on cultural heritage, inclusive societies, and accountable institutions, giving it purchase beyond academic audiences alone.
Submission Guidelines
Articles should be no more than 7,000 words, excluding the abstract, footnotes, and bibliography.
Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities: see How to Write for Public Humanities.
Authors should consult the journal's Author Instructions prior to submission.
All authors must declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission (see the journal's Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information).
Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style.
Accepted articles will be published digitally as open access in the journal.
Contacts
The editor is happy to discuss potential articles:
Bart Paul Vanspauwen bvanspauwen@fcsh.unl.pt
Questions regarding peer review can be sent to: publichumanities@cambridge.org
Submit an Article
All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system.
Learn more at cambridge.org/pub
Bart Paul Vanspauwen