Thank you for the very indepth article on African music, from a historical standpoint.
It confronts deep ethical questions about artistic representation, cultural ownership, and the moral responsibilities of creators. At its core is a question central to aesthetics and postcolonial ethics: Can art divorced from context be ethically neutral?!
The appropriation of African musical ideas — especially by figures like Saint-Saëns or Cage — raises issues of epistemic injustice, a concept articulated by philosophers like Sylvia Wynter, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, et-al. Musical exoticism often ignored the knowledge systems, historical specificity, and symbolic weight of the traditions they borrowed from, reducing them to ornamental features in a Western sonic vocabulary. The result is a form of aesthetic erasure, where the identity of the original culture is both invoked and silenced.
Interestingly it manifests in forms in which cultures seen as “other” are often objectified or instrumentalized to develop the identity of the dominant one. The musical Other becomes a tool in the self-fashioning of Eurocentrism.
