Composing the White Imaginary: Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Anglo-Saxonism, and Confederate Nostalgia in the American Music Department, 1880s-1940s

This dissertation tells the story of how an Anglo-Saxon nationalist fantasy embedded itself within white universities via music departments in the United States from the 1880s-1940s. It considers the institutionalization of music departments and music research in the decades between Reconstruction and World War II in relation to the proliferation of white supremacist discourses such as eugenics, Anglo-Saxonism, and post-Confederate nostalgia within research universities such as the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Vanderbilt University, and Columbia. Examining three institutional scenes – the music appreciation course, the folk music institute, and research on Antebellum hymnody – it argues that music departments helped shape the imaginary register of whiteness. Putting Jacques Lacan’s theories of discourse and fantasy in conversation with an assemblage of Black studies theorists such as Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Alexander Weheliye, it maintains that music departments composed a fantasy of white national subjectivity that could be defined without reference to its historical relation to blackness. These departments aspired to teach white students to listen, appreciate, create, and imagine as white national and musical subjects that could only ever exist as a hallucinations of discourse within universities.