Representing African Music

Authors

Kofi Agawu, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 1992

Abstract

Of all the currents of change that have swept the humanities during the last half-century, the most far-reaching revolve around language. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism, among other language-based disciplines, have developed what is often presented as a largely unprecedented self-consciousness about representation. The message to scholars in nonlanguage-based disciplines is clear: to be taken seriously, one can no longer view language as a transparent window to an objective reality but must confront the foundational political and ideological baggage of the medium itself, as well as its constant slippage in the hands of the producer.

Comments

This article was originally published in Critical Inquiry, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343783

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).