Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings. Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political. Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

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.

Teacher, Scholar, Mother advances a more productive conversation across disciplines on motherhood through its discussion on intersecting axes of power and privilege. This multi- and trans-disciplinary book features mother scholars who bring their theoretical and disciplinary lenses to bear on questions of identity, practice, policy, institutional memory, progress, and the gendered notion of parenting that still pervades the modern academy.