Critical Review 5

In “Representing African Music”, Kofi Agawu critiques attempts at postcolonial representation of African music.  He warns that “the [greatest] danger lies in denying that politics plays a role in the construction of knowledge about African music.”  Ethnographies tend to homogenize this music as though it is a single, coherent entity.  Studies also tend to treat the music as incomprehensible, mysterious, and requiring new methods of annotation.  This research has always focused on rhythm, exalting the African rhythmic sensibility and its connection to the dancing and traditions of the “primitive native.”  In doing so, scholars such as Koetting are forced to “undercomplicate” Western rhythm.   And by treating African music-cultures as foreign treasures to be uncovered, ethnographers rob the music of any claim to universality or commonality with Western music and do the music a disservice by considering it unworthy of critique.  Furthermore, they fail to empower Africans to consider their own music from a critical and ethnomusicological perspective.

Agawu writes “A postcolonial transcription, then, is not one that imprisons itself in an ostensibly ‘African’ field of discourse but one that insists on playing in the premier league, on the master’s ground, and in the North.”  Is it only possible to pay African musics their due respect by bringing them into the Western conversation?  Or is it better to let them exist separately and attempt to understand them on their own terms?