ABSTRACT
This chapter brings the cosmopolitanism, colonial documents and postcolonial readings together, the dual agency of the actor and historian is rendered even more explicit. That is to say, the idea of a foreign cosmopolitanism helps not only to bring to light the stance-taking of the treaty port’s senior administrators, but also to calibrate an alternative knowledge around historical stance-taking. The foregoing analysis reveals an element of stance-taking within a symbolically colonial institution, complementing as well as complicating such narratives as Shanghai Modern, which have tended to engage with questions of cultural identity rather than with the actual circumstances encountered by individuals and their shifting outlooks. The agency of the historian proves an especially important intervention, with the effect of recalibrating knowledge as a matter of historical representation. The epistemic modality of a foreign cosmopolitanism facilitates, then, not only another conception but also another epistemology of colonial music history.
