Representation
Academics’ overly pedantic methods often lead researchers to overwrite and misconstrue the priorities of the communities we investigate, resulting in misleading and misrepresenting studies. For example, the typical authorial voices we prioritize subsume research collaborators’ perspectives, limit our capacity to represent them appropriately, and make our work inaccessible to readers. These and other trends arise from colonial approaches, which have finite applicability. Representation in ethnomusicology is a critical issue because studying and translating culture is a process tied to the relations of power that exist between two parties. Philip Ciantar observes that even amid the processes of collaboration and translation, one is always tethered to and shaped by these power relations as they appear both between and within different societies and subcultures.
1Ciantar 2013, 30. As Beverley Diamond shows by citing missionary accounts of indigenous music in North America, colonial and assimilationist frameworks only serve to obscure and misrepresent interpersonal interactions rather than illuminate them.
2Diamond 2013, 158–159. In a related fashion, Kofi Agawu draws our attention to how Western ethnomusicological discourse overemphasizes certain functions of music-making when documenting the role of music in African society. This results in generalizations that are incomplete at best and entirely misleading at worst.
3Agawu 2016, 36.With these points in mind,
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda joins other projects attempting to dismantle colonial practices, particularly those projects that suggest ways through which our research methods and approaches could undergo a deliberate decolonial shift. Following Elizabeth Mackinlay, I embrace “a refusal to get caught up in the desire to document, deconstruct, and ‘disseminate’ in academic servitude to coloniality.”
4Mackinlay 2012, 16. Furthermore, I build on Liz Przybylski’s suggestion to listen “deeply,” “widely,” and “personally,”
5Przybylski 2012, 14. as well as Sara Hong-Yeung Pun’s proposal to conduct research “
with” indigenous communities “rather than
about them.”
6Pun 2012, 11.Accordingly, I reject a prescriptive approach to analysis, instead taking cues from participants in my research and remaining sensitive to their priorities in the book’s interpretive process. With a focus on song, combining both cultural and sonic experience, this work emphasizes the intellectual value of listening and seeks to avoid using the Western hegemonic mode of listening. Dylan Robinson identifies this as “hungry listening,” a mindset that prioritizes acquiring sonic information over absorbing tangible spiritual truth.
7Robinson 2020, 38. Reckoning with these notions, this book’s approach, methodology, and content encourages a dynamic, multivalent, and growing engagement with meaning. My analysis and methods prioritize and take cues from my collaborations
with research collaborators rather than my authorial hand. That is, I represent their stories and analyses, such as lyrical interpretations, on their own terms and downplay appealing to the aesthetic preferences of academia. As such, rather than positioning research collaborators as subjects of study, I foreground their voices and perspectives in the meaning-making process. By decentering my authorial voice, I seek to underscore direct dialogue between my research community and the readership of this work.
As a project based on the type of decolonial thought described,
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda acknowledges that knowledge production in a global context is asymmetrical. In global history, this concept has been conflated by settlers to mean that particular cultures that manifest distinct physical embodiments of power dynamics and thus social functions and mores are essentially irreconcilable because of these differences. This mistaken concept laid the foundation for European colonialism in Africa. Building on work that challenges this concept,
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda attempts to diverge from the hegemonic discourses of Western culture and neoliberalism. As Nic Cheeseman and others have written, these discourses tend to sustain the inaccurate notion that Africa’s history since the 1960s has been a story solely of conflict.
8Cheeseman et al. 2015, 96. Imani Sanga stresses that resisting this generalized identity is necessary for African nations to participate fully in the global sphere and that this aspiration is a prerequisite for beginning the work of balancing the uneven distribution of power between the Global North and the Global South.
9Sanga 2008, 80.Interpreting Court Song in Uganda celebrates, delineates, and preserves the distinct culture of Buganda as it is documented and expressed through the beauty, complexity, and uniqueness of the kingdom’s court songs. In this exploration, the project seeks to transcend the limited identity that has been imposed on Africa by the West via hegemonic discourse. Inspired by Bode Omojola’s examination of songs that evoked the motivations, hopes, and frustrations of subalterns that drove the various independence movements of African nations,
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda advocates for cultural pride, freedom, and reimagining as keystones in both the creation of ethnomusicological works and in the representation of the cultures they document.
10Omojola 2009, 291. As Judith Lynne Hanna and William John Hanna indicate, numerous anti-colonial independence movements in the twentieth century illustrated that cultural liberation was necessary to achieve political liberation.
11Hanna and Hanna 1968, 42. Broadly speaking, my research methodology adopts an approach that addresses the colonial dynamics that striate ethnomusicology as a field. Even though I address the historical repression of indigenous voices and perspectives and challenge conventional research practices that promote mechanisms for historically violent systems of power, I am equally aware of the fact that colonial approaches remain a systemic issue that must be addressed on a larger scale than any single study can undertake.