Africanist ethnomusicology has long engaged questions of identity and the musical individual, yet it rarely theorizes personhood beyond the living or through African cosmological frameworks. In this presentation, I consider what it means to conceptualize the musical individual when identity exceeds the boundaries of life, and how one might account for the presence of the dead. Drawing on African cosmological and ontological perspectives that foreground relations between the living and the departed, I argue that the musical individual is relational and temporally expansive. Central to my argument is the concept of “spectral personhood,” which moves beyond liberal notions of individuality. I use this concept to capture the enduring agency of African and Black diasporic musical figures whose presence persists beyond death and continues to shape global Black life, and to examine how these figures are summoned as collaborators in contemporary political and musical contexts. By foregrounding spectral personhood and its socio-cultural implications, this paper expands ongoing discussions of agency, presence, temporality, and visibility within ethnomusicology.

Ghana has recently seen an upsurge in musical sustainability efforts, including the revitalization of palmwine music and UNESCOS' recognition of highlife music as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork and community engagement, this paper interrogates the identity politics embedded in these projects. I ask: Are these initiatives sustaining Ghanaian music as a dynamic, evolving practice, or being ossified within a limiting identity framework? What does contestation over palmwine and highlife music's identity mean for labeling the music as endangered and for sustainability efforts? I interrogate these questions to show that the fear of losing something undefined drives cultural sustainability concerns. I argue that musical sustainability is entangled with identity politics—questions of authenticity, authority, and who profits from cultural heritage. These frameworks overlook non-human relations and obscure the music-nature relationship, limiting music's capacity to address ecological crises. The paper argues for a musical sustainability that moves beyond anthropocentric logics of identity and authenticity, establishing an ethical framework rooted in a shared history and future among humans and non-humans alike.

While often conceived in banter, in this paper, I take the above question seriously in examining contemporary cultural politics between Ghana and Nigeria. I confront notions of ownership, identity, influence, and capital in Afrobeats’ cultural production within the recent decade. I trace Ghana’s and Nigeria’s shared music history within the context of economic and labor relations by juxtaposing two major events: first, a group of Nigerian musicians’ anxieties about the popularity of Ghanaian highlife musicians in Nigeria in the 1960s; then, the 2023 Play Ghana initiative, interpreted by Afrobeats fans as a covert jab at the predominance of Nigerian artists in Ghana’s entertainment spaces. I question the legitimacies and inconsistencies in the arguments produced on both sides, examining recent presence of transnational corporations, UNESCO’s cultural heritage declarations, and aesthetic transfer as factors complicating regional cultural politics. Finally, I ask where Ghana is situated in these exchanges as it negotiates its place in global popular music and its contemporary musical identity in highlife, and in Afrobeats as a shared cultural product.

In March 2025, a group of young musicians led by Emmanuel Fiifi Quaye, popularly known as “Fiifi Flawless,” staged a concert dubbed Religioso. It follows a series of concerts that brought together different music cultures, including Ghanaian art music, popular music, Western art music, traditional drumming, and dance theater. Together, Religioso epitomizes a coalescence of disparate musical cultures, gesturing towards a reimagination of African sonic identity that, in conventional practice, would be organized on separate stages and in different contexts. Religioso exemplifies how artists reimagine themselves in response to changing socio-economic conditions within the Accra metropolis. I draw on interviews with Fiifi, video analysis of Religioso’s use of repertoire and staging, and my experiences as a conductor and performer in earlier versions of this concert in 2024, held at the Ghana National Theater and the University of Education (Winneba). Amidst economic uncertainty, I investigate how Fiifi redefines this sonic landscape. I demonstrate how musicians’ agency as social actors in music-making also resists decolonial tropes of identity creation. I argue that, through a showcase of affinities with different music cultures, Religioso redefines African identity as a sonic morphology situated in power, subjectivity, and self-actualization.