Today, decoloniality (and its cognate “decolonisation”) is often reduced to a post-colonial desire for the pre-colonial: for culture, language, and ways of knowing untainted by the colonial rulers’ influence. Although I do not fully subscribe to Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s characterisation of this desire to decolonise “anything and everything” as a craze that does not deliver much1, I am nonetheless hesitant to invoke it in my own work. As a music historian, especially of the Philippines in its transition period from a Spanish to a United States colony in the early twentieth century, examples abound of how colonialism erased autochthonous cultures, a reality that consistently provokes anger and indignation in how I think and write about history. But does colonialism explain everything? Is it such a totalising force that there is nothing else but to incessantly call out its constitutive power in our retelling of the past?

For Filipino scholars, coloniality is a given and not something that one needs to be made aware of as if the colonial empire had been hidden. To make sense of music during the colonial period (and in the post-colony) is to behold beautiful hybrids not always for its uniqueness of sound but for its remarkable adaptability to tell the messy, complex, and ordinary struggles of Filipinos. The Philippine zarzuela (sarsuwela in the Tagalog language), for example, means many things for its creators, practitioners, and audiences, both past and present. There are works in various regional languages that are explicitly nationalist and anti-colonial, others are less concerned about the coloniser-colonised relationship than with addressing the plight of the poor and the working class. As a representational form, the sarsuwela stage was also not immune to the exoticist tendencies of European repertoire in its fantastical othering of minority cultures in the service of constructing a national identity. To read sarsuwelas uncritically only for its subversive and anticolonial significance is to again impose the expectation of colonial difference onto Filipino imagination and creativity.

While the historian in me takes the irrevocability of coloniality as material fact, there are notable archival and creative projects that hold the potential for decolonial redress or, at least, aspire for better futures. The Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives2, for example, is committed to cultural repatriation and accessible and community-driven heritage curation. Theatre scholar and playwright Nicanor Tiongson’s sarsuwela adaptations and reimagining of historical revolutionary figures remind contemporary audiences of present-day injustices as much as the tragedies of the past. We may never fully escape the spectre of the colonial, but we continue to wrestle with the question of how decoloniality might look like in practice.