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Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions.

Article Excerpt
Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. By Kofi Agawu. New York; London: Routledge, 2003. [xxvii, 266 p. ISBN 0-415-94389-2. $85 (hbk.); ISBN 0-415-94390-6. $23.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, bibliography, index.

This is a strikingly original book, promising to shed new light both on music from across the African continent, and on the history of Africanist musical discourse. Upsetting apple carts of convention and dispassionate prose, this book, while sure to elicit controversy from virtually all corners of contemporary American musical scholarship, should be required reading not only for African music specialists, but ethnomusicologists of all sorts, popular music scholars, music theorists, and historical musicologists with an interest in the politics of representation. While the principal audience will likely be music scholars in the United States and Europe, Agawu's approach to the issues involved in studying African music, his cogent explanation of musical practices, and critical acumen, make this book valuable to a broadly interdisciplinary audience including Africanists generally, anthropologists, and scholars of postcolonial theory. Throughout the book Agawu focuses on the importance of a deep engagement with African musical sound and musical texts as an end in itself and as a corrective to various exoticizing tropes in the study of African music. The book divides roughly into three large sections: an introduction to the subject, including a meditation on the...

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