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

- Blurb -

Played 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 played on a non-Hawaiian instrument and influenced by Mexican cowboy culture, it is widely considered to be a truly Hawaiian tradition grounded in Hawaiian aesthetics and cultural values. In Listen but Don't Ask Question Kevin Fellezs examines Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and non-Hawaiian slack key guitar in Hawai`i, California, and Japan, tracing how notions of belonging and authenticity become contested depending on who plays the music and where. 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 becomes the means through which to create 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-ness, Fellezs illuminates how slack key guitarists are reconfiguring notions of Hawaiian belonging throughout the transpacific.