How Music Became a Race Science: French Musicologists and the ‘Arab-Berber’ Racial Model in Interwar North Africa

In the interwar period (1919-1939), French colonial officials heavily relied upon an “Arab-Berber” racial model in their North African colonies, using it to shape policy and strategy and subdue “unruly” populations. Around this time, an increasing number of French musicologists, borrowing the language of physical anthropology, began arguing for their field’s utility as a “race science” that could be deployed to decisively address the colonial “Berber question.” In this talk, I argue that, in surprising ways, music – often understood as an apolitical aesthetic form – was rather intensely political; and that interwar French musicologists intentionally made a case for musicology as a race science with colonial North Africa as their laboratory.