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Notes on a Postcolonial Musicology: Kofi Agawu and the Critique of Cultural Difference [Agawu, Kofi. 2003. Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York and London: Routledge, 304 pp.]
Kofi Agawu's new book Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queues, Positions stands in a consciously awkward relationship to traditional ethnographic writing on music. Ethnomusicological discourse is characterized by a carefully plotted regimen of priorities, which tends to conduct inquiry away from Western-style music analysis towards anthropological models. The strength of ethnomusicology is its sensitivity to cultural differences across the globe (demonstrated by the insistence on fieldwork, the methodological priority placed on musical 'contexts,' and so on). Thus, ethnomusicological premises serve as a persistent reminder of the limited historical and geographical scope of certain naturalized forms of thinking about Western music (primarily in the West). The concrete practice of ethnomusicology largely debunks the habituated Western notion of music's aesthetic autonomy no less than its analytic support system. And yet, to borrow a thought from J. M. Coetzee, the strength of ethnomusicology is practically definitional (much like saying the strength of the chess player is chess), which, for a variety of its own reasons, it tries to instill at the center of all inquiry into non-Western music. Non-anthropological thought about non-Western music, for example, is rarely published in the pages of most ethnomusicological journals.
It can be useful to define the ethnomusicological project in terms of a founding prohibition, thereby problematizing its aspiration to better access non-Western reality than alternative projects. This position is problematic on practical grounds; it ensures that the most efficient way for non-Western music studies to gain academic acknowledgement would be to join ethnomusicological ranks. As a result, work on African music driven by purely musical considerations or work driven by strategies to alleviate current political predicaments (instead of the customary epistemological commitment to describing remote contexts) is rare. Work driven by an unpopular cause is rarer still.1
Representing African Music is one of these rare and valuable interventions. Drawing on the work of various postcolonial writers, yet in a distinctive and unique voice, Agawu launches a devastating critique of Western scholarship on African music. At times frankly informative, at times darkly ironie, and at times passionately earnest, Representing African Music reads like...