White Subjectivities, the Arts, and Power in Colonial Canada: Classical Music as White Property

Abstract

The author presents a genealogy of gendered and raced relations of power in the development of classical music institutions in colonial Canada, noting how institutions come to be established, symbolically and materially, as White property within a patriarchal, White supremacist framework. The author focuses on the roles of White bourgeois women in proliferating classical music institutions, noting how gendered identities constrain their possibilities, while raced and classed identities allow them to attain status as exalted members of the nation. The genealogy illustrates a persistent relationship between exalted White identities, notions of “the arts” as signifiers of “civilizational superiority,” and their uses to rationalize material entitlement and its corollaries: dispossession, domination, and exploitation. Political and pedagogical implications of the analysis close the chapter.