Erin Johnson-Williams – författare

Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality examines how the hymn, historically and today, has reinforced, negotiated, and resisted constructions of race. It brings together diverse perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, anthropology, performance studies, history, and postcolonial scholarship to show how the hymn has perpetuated, generated, and challenged racial identities.The global range of contributors cover a variety of historical and geographical contexts, with case studies from China and Brazil to Suriname and South Africa. They explore the hymn as a product of imperialism and settler colonialism and as a vehicle for sonic oppression and/or resistance, within and beyond congregational settings. The volume contends that the lived tradition of hymn-singing, with its connections to centuries of global Christian mission, is a particularly apt lens for examining both local and global negotiations of race, power, and identity. It will be relevant for scholars interested in religion, music, race, and postcolonialism.

Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality examines how the hymn, historically and today, has reinforced, negotiated, and resisted constructions of race. It brings together diverse perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, anthropology, performance studies, history, and postcolonial scholarship to show how the hymn has perpetuated, generated, and challenged racial identities.The global range of contributors cover a variety of historical and geographical contexts, with case studies from China and Brazil to Suriname and South Africa. They explore the hymn as a product of imperialism and settler colonialism and as a vehicle for sonic oppression and/or resistance, within and beyond congregational settings. The volume contends that the lived tradition of hymn-singing, with its connections to centuries of global Christian mission, is a particularly apt lens for examining both local and global negotiations of race, power, and identity. It will be relevant for scholars interested in religion, music, race, and postcolonialism.

Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams lead a cast of renowned scholars to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the mechanisms of power that have shaped the nineteenth-century archive, to ask: What is a nineteenth-century archive, broadly defined?This landmark collection of essays will broach critical and topical questions about how the complex discourses of power involved in constructions of the nineteenth-century archive have impacted, and continue to impact, constructions of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond academic confines. The essays, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, grapple with urgent problems of how to deal with potentially sensitive nineteenth-century archival items, both within academic scholarship and in present-day public-facing institutions, which often reflect erotic, colonial and imperial, racist, sexist, violent, or elitist ideologies.Each contribution grapples with these questions from a range of perspectives: Musicology, Classics, English, History, Visual Culture, and Museums and Archives. The result is far-reaching historical excavation of archival experiences.