Decolonial Affordances

This article considers the affordances of utilizing practical applications of music, sound, and orality, as alternatives to the dominant visual-centric, text-based forms of communication in Religious Studies pedagogical settings. The premise of this article is that sound and musicking can be explored in terms of their potential to dismantle academic, discursive, visual-centric, and linguistic forms – some of which are so ossified in a particular collectivity or conversation that we can no longer “say somethin’” as the bass player Charles Mingus puts it in the context of jazz. This approach attempts to revise the colonial structures upon which much of higher education was built by modifying and destabilizing the foundation through which concepts in Religious Studies are introduced and processed.