In Search of Agonist Time

Abstract In this essay, the author explores the potential that ethnomusicology holds for studying the past’s instrumental narratives, reflecting on their long-standing research about the conflicted city of Jerusalem and the hegemonic spatiotemporal order at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Drawing substantially from the critical insights of Michel Foucault and Chantal Mouffe, and their commentators, the author theorizes genealogy as a means for critique, arguing that its temporal and political agonisms can offer guidance for interrogating the past’s lies and divesting from what they term liberal critique, a failure of imagination outside the present’s spatiotemporal order.