In Defense of African Harmony

For the music scholar Kofi Agawu, it is impossible to consider cultural phenomena apart from their discursive historical conditions. But the critique that drives his oeuvre is not merely cultural in nature, but productive and political: at its base, we find flashing glimpses of imaginative systems, embedded in music itself, that gesture toward fundamental aspects of African musicality. Without dismissing the collective contributions of an expanding field of engagement, African music remains all-too-often asymmetrically abbreviated by the default methodological leanings of its many representations. In his response to this widespread limitation, Agawu winds the ethical and the aesthetic tightly together: the incisive quest for essences, the immersion in the music itself (its rhythms and harmonies), the light but remorseless logic of his critique of the will to difference, the scaling of minute cultural details to systemic global forces, and so on. These are the textual traces of a scrupulous music-analytic ear that reckons at once with an archive of thought entangled in a vexing history of loss. And yet, even as it genuinely confronts the violence of the past, this is a politics of resilience and hope—a sense that African music was "there in the beginning" as much as it may hold the "key to humanity's musical future"—and hence a politics that places the agency of the imagination front and center (Agawu, 2016, p. 334).

Reading The African Imagination in Music alongside his earlier book Representing African Music (Agawu, 2003) prompts what is perhaps a central question about Agawu: What do the operations of the imagination offer that enable the scholar to take ideas into reaches where engagement with critique alone fails him? The radicalism of this apparently commonsensical turn becomes clear on considering the scope and authority of the historical archive—vast imaginings that gripped Europeans in the age of colonialism—and its capacious stability in the postcolonial era. It is these "predecessor texts," which one is obliged, paradoxically, both to validate and de-validate, that largely circumscribe the contours of knowledge production today (Agawu, 2016, p. 23). In addition, the institutionalized locus for the study of African music (including in many parts of Africa) within "African Studies" and "Ethnomusicology" traduces a variety of default perspectives that contain African cultural practice within a zone of excluded cultural conformity. Writing against this institutional inertia, Agawu insists on the specificity of the African imagination.

Of course, any project that sets out to index African music's "specifiable essence," its "deep level expressive coherence," "unyielding core," etc. is qualified by the tendency toward an epistemology of difference ("Africa must be different!") and its attendant identity politics (pp. 15, 17, 334). As scholars like Gayatri Spivak (1988) and Slavoj Žižek (2019) have observed elsewhere, the idea that minorities and non-Western subjects are granted the unique fullness of an ethnic identity (not afforded the deconstructed Western metropolitan subject) is in fact a paradoxical exercise in guarding a claim to ethnicity-free universality. Agawu, therefore, casts a wide net, tracking across an immeasurably complex terrain of largely precolonial African repertories—"the backbone of Africa's musical thinking"—to outline a kind of expressive coherence that productively inflects our grasp of Africa's "true" (if not "unique") cultural contribution to global history and culture (p. 19). With breathtaking contextual literacy and erudition, the author gestures toward music's non-reducible "organizational attitudes and propensities" that might constitute what V. Y. Mudimbe (1988) calls "the idea of Africa" (6, 2).

In a 1953 lecture entitled "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," Jorges Luis Borges (2010) noted that the word "camel" does not appear in the Qur'an. From this he drew a lesson, asserting that "we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color" (Borges, 2010, p. 272). While Agawu amply acknowledges certain characteristic African locutions in music, his analytic language, likewise, resists the regionalist color that all-too-readily marches in...