Listen but Don't Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific

Performed on an acoustic steel-string guitar with open tunings and a finger-picking technique, Hawaiian slack key guitar music emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Though performed on a non-Hawaiian instrument, it is widely considered to be an authentic Hawaiian tradition grounded in Hawaiian aesthetics and cultural values. In Listen But Don't Ask Question Kevin Fellezs listens to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and non-Hawaiian slack key guitarists in Hawai'i, California, and Japan, attentive to the ways in which notions of Kanaka Maoli belonging and authenticity are negotiated and articulated in all three locations. In Hawai'i, slack key guitar functions as a sign of Kanaka Maoli cultural renewal, resilience, and resistance in the face of appropriation and occupation, while in Japan it nurtures a merged Japanese-Hawaiian artistic and cultural sensibility. For diasporic Hawaiians in California, it provides a way to claim Hawaiian identity. By demonstrating how slack key guitar is a site for the articulation of Hawaiian values, Fellezs illuminates how slack key guitarists are reconfiguring notions of Hawaiian belonging, aesthetics, and politics throughout the transPacific.

Author: Kevin Fellezs
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 12/06/2019
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.01lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9781478006718
ISBN10: 1478006714
BISAC Categories:
- Music | Ethnomusicology
- Music | Musical Instruments | Guitar
- History | United States | State & Local | West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT

About the Author
Kevin Fellezs is Associate Professor in the Music and African American and African Diaspora Studies departments at Columbia University and author of Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion, also published by Duke University Press.