The first full-length study of the musical pasts of Asafo warrior
associations based on the author's "ways of walking" with local
scholars along the Ghanaian littoral. What is Asafo ndwom (music)?
How and when is it performed? What is the state of this warrrior
tradition that once served as the bedrock of the Akan, Ewe, and Ga
societies in Ghana? How does Asafo enact the past and serve as an
archive for the people? In an attempt to answer these questions,
Walking with Asafo in Ghana investigates the musical pasts of
Asafo. The book is an ethnography of walking, organized into eight
chapters. Each chapter ends with a piece of creative writing in the
author's "ethnographic voice," in which she sums up the main ideas.
It is Aduonum's attempt at an anticolonial and decolonialist
African musicology, one that subverts and decenters white racial
framing of research, analysis, and presentation, disrupting how
Euro-American concepts frame our ways of telling and experiencing
ndwom. Aduonum's goal on this trajectory is to tell her story,
create something new, and chart a new path. Through this fluid and
complex book, she repositions African Elders' knowledge as
"epistemologies of decolonization and de-coloniality" and centers
the stories shared by local Fante scholars. The text is polyvocal,
multimodal, multiperspective, performative, reflexive, and
dialogic, informed by the structure of Asafo ndwom, appellations,
proverbs, her mentors' tellings, and "embodied" calling and
responding. It is a performative scholarly discourse, ndwom-based:
a performance. As a celebration of Asafo, those warriors who
insisted their lives matter, the text is meant to be read and
performed. This book is openly available in digital formats thanks
to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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