Listen but Don't Ask Question

Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific

Kevin Fellezs

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781478006718
  9781478005995
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478007418
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Use of Hawaiian and Japanese Terms
• Introduction: Mapping the Polycultural TransPacific
• 1. Getting the “Right Hawaiian Feeling"
• 2. Taking Kuleana
• 3. The Aloha Affect
• 4. Sounding Out the Second Hawaiian Renaissance
• 5. ‘Ohana and the Longing to Belong
• 6. Pono, A Balancing Act
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index