Politically correct musicology ‘perpetuates a culture of apartheid’

Pierpaolo Polzonetti, the professor who provoked a musicology war by writing about teaching in prisons, has contacted Slipped Disc to clarify his position.

He writes:

I am grateful for the support I received on slippedisc.com. I am also concerned that this debate, on this site, has turned into a critique of musicology. The accusations against my blog are in part related to how we write and how we read. It is a risky enterprise and it is easy to make rhetorical mistakes, as I did. What is disturbing, in a few cases of people who attacked me most vehemently, is that we see clear signs of a degeneration of PC language practices affecting every discipline in the humanities and social sciences. The risk of deploying PC language irresponsibly is to devise a new technology of power through the control of heavily policed language. It appears to combat institutionalized racism, but it perpetuates a culture of apartheid by forcing incommunicability. The people called me a racist silenced the voice of my African American student.

Read on here.