The Musicolonial Politics of the Category of Man: The Case of Suriname

This article examines the history of Suriname, a South American country that was a Dutch colony for three centuries, from the perspective of the colonial administration of sound. This period witnessed the construction of a particular understanding of the human in European colonial cosmology-the prescriptive category of Man, ideologically elevated above its animalized, gendered, and racialized others. Music and sound played pivotal roles in these processes. Accordingly, I show how the exploitation of people of African descent in Suriname was manifested in three sound-oriented colonizing tactics, all supported by various discursive reorganizations of the human-nonhuman boundary advancing the capitalist-colonial enterprise planted in the region: (1) an early modern silencing of the enslaved (ca. 1650-1770); (2) a post-Enlightenment sounding of them as part of their preparation for the abolition of slavery (ca. 1770-1900); and (3) an extractive synthesizing of non-European sonic traits persisting in the colonial dominion (ca. 1900-now). In sum, the article exposes a sonic lineage for the contemporary understanding of the category of the human to present a case of musicoloniality, a term I use to label diverse manners of sound management intended to enforce colonists' authority and exploitative conditions of production from the 1600s to the present. Such a historical perspective urges us to extrapolate important questions about the posthuman and nonhuman theories that have gained traction in recent musicological scholarship.