Who Hears Here? On Black Music, Pasts & Present, by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., both synthesizes and attests to a decades-long intellectual project that has set the foundation for a long overdue epistemic shift in music studies today. If through our stories and citational practices we announce our intellectual histories,1 then Ramsey's query—“Who hears here?”—is both a challenge and a call for scholars to engage Black music studies from richly complex racial positionalities and to acknowledge the political concerns that motivate our research. Ramsey models the measured frankness of an expert historian, the analytical acumen of a seasoned cultural critic, and the sensitivity of an active musician emplaced within multiple community theaters. He thereby emboldens scholars within and beyond Black music studies to share their stories and to participate in a citational practice that radically redresses the colonial legacy embedded within the epistemology of North Atlantic “music studies.”
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