The empire sings

Abstract

This chapter examines the long-standing hymnic tradition of the Victorian era in Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world. It argues that congregational singing from this inheritance is imbued with coloniality—the all-encompassing residual web of colonizing processes, tendencies, and practices. It exposes the British version of coloniality as including a promulgation of “a” superior British culture and identity which is intrinsically intertwined with the imperial and colonial projects of the British Empire. This chapter unmasks the ways in which hymns from the Victorian era preserve, reproduce, and reinscribe ideologies and theologies of empire, in order to expose coloniality in music. Text, music, and context, are examined, including initial insights into hymn singing in Canadian residential schools as one example of a culturally genocidal enactment of coloniality.