Special Issue - After Pulse: Reflections on Music Scholarship in the Wake of the 2016 Orlando Nightclub Massacre

There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, 

^{when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.}

^{- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me}

One month before the massacre at Pulse, I was at a panel on religion at the IX Jornada Cubana Contra la Homofobia y la Transfobia in Havana.[1] I didn’t know what to expect from the event, and I wasn’t prepared for the moving presentation of Reverend Carmen Margarita Sánchez de León of the Metropolitan Community Churches.

The weekend after the Pulse Nightclub massacre, Moon Baby hosted a drag show at the Blue Moon Bar in Pittsburgh, with proceeds to benefit victims. This did not seem out of the ordinary, as the same bar had hosted another benefit show for Pulse victims earlier in the week, hosted by a different performer, and my queer contacts in other cities were posting links to donation sites and invitations to their own local bars’ benefit shows.

I had forgotten my intention to write a piece for this special issue, even though my partner and I had workshopped our submission extensively while driving home from Oregon. We had taken a weekend trip to clear our minds and visit another lesbian couple. Upon return, we had to get back to our careers; we had more "serious" publications to work on.

1.

Facebook is such a strange medium through which to encounter tragedy and horror. Already formatted for minimal engagement, a blast of moving image and occasionally sound as one scrolls through the happenings of last night.

In addition to the entries that were contributed in response to our call for submissions, this collection includes three cross-publications from a special issue of SEM Student News. The Student News issue, which features editorials on decolonizing ethnomusicology, likewise includes two contributions from our volume. We are proud to collaborate with SEM Student News in this regard and grateful for their involvement in our project.

^“Decolonization which sets out to change the order of the world is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder.”

Whether in our own graduate seminars or in classes that we teach to others, how strongly do we press ourselves to comprehend life experiences that are profoundly different from our own and to be inclusive of their resulting perspectives on music?[1]

The word “decolonization” brings to mind histories of empire and domination.[1] It simultaneously raises the need to challenge narratives that have emerged from these hierarchies imposed on sections of humanity, segments of geographies, and forms and ways of knowledge and knowing.