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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