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

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.