In this essay, I explore the ways in which kī hō‘alu (Hawaiian slack key guitarists) articulated Native Hawaiian aspirations for self-determination and reterritorialization during the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. I argue that Hawaiian music speaks to a liberatory politics that is embedded within an aesthetic of nahenahe (soft, sweet, melodious). Nahenahe invests slack key guitarists with the mana (power, authority) to invoke a Native Hawaiian perspective that empowers and sustains Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) efforts for self-determination and political autonomy. The connections between music and political activism were highlighted and strengthened throughout the period. Indeed, although numerous political groups organized throughout the period, providing the modern foundations to the struggles for sovereignty today, at the forefront of it all were the musicians.

San Miguel de Allende, a city of 171,857 located in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, most often appears in media outlets in laudatory publicity, advertising this urban space as perfect for voluntary “lifestyle” immigration and tourism both foreign and national. This article addresses the social tensions, fissures, and paradoxes that emerge from specific auralities of San Miguel's temporary residents. Their romanticized reception of traditional Indigenous danza performances contrasts sharply with the perceived noise of hip-hop in the town's historic center. As more and more residents hailing from outside San Miguel search for their own versions of “small town Mexico,” the racialized experiences of young sanmiguelenses are invisibilized in the overwhelmingly positive reception of Indigenous danzas. The championing of mestizaje as the sole visage for Mexican modernity leaves a convenient space for transnational racism located at the nexus of racialized economic privilege and colonial imagination. In this purportedly post-racial ideological context, how can the analysis of settler-colonizer aurality uncover the racialized structures that undergird the nation-state's management of cultural tourism?

This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression of what Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui terms a ch'ixi cultural form, one that juxtaposes seeming opposites into a changed third. I look to earlier moments of Aymara and Quechua cultural production, specifically colonial New World Baroque art, to consider Aymara hip hop as another instance of ch'ixi cosmopolitanism. In examining the lyrical, musical, and visual elements of Nación Rap's performance, I argue that their music intervenes in local ideologies of race and Indigeneity. By reformulating what is understood as Aymara, by situating the Aymara language as poetically equivalent to the colonial lingua franca of Spanish, English, and French, and by wearing Aymara clothing and hairstyles in the performance of an urban musical genre with proximity to Blackness, these artists challenge dominant racial logics of their society.

In the winter of 1772–1773, Joseph Johnson (Mohegan/Brothertown) copied musical notation into eight books for Christian Native Americans in Farmington, Connecticut, a town established by English settler colonists on the land known as Tunxis Sepus. Johnson did so because, as he wrote in his diary, “The indians are all desireous of haveing Gamuts.” Johnson's “gamuts” have not survived, but their erstwhile existence reveals hymnody's important role within the Native community in Farmington as well as cross-culturally with the English settler colonists. In order to reconstruct the missing music books and assess their sociocultural significance, this article proposes a surrogate bibliography, gathering a constellation of sources among which Johnson's books would have circulated and gained meaning for Native American Christians and English colonists (including other printed and manuscript music, wampum, and legal documents pertaining to land transfer). By bringing together this multi-modal network of materials, this essay seeks to redress the material and epistemological effects of a colonialist archive. On one level, this is a case study that focuses on a short period of time in order to document the impact on sacred music of conversion, literacy, shifting intercultural relations, and a drive to preserve sovereignty. On another, this article presents a methodological intervention for dealing with lost materials and colonialist archives without recourse to discourses of recovery or discovery, the latter of which is considered through the framework of what I term “archival orientalism.”

In this article, I explore the ways territorial authority or sovereignty emerges from within a particular mode of Indigenous creativity—the creation and performance of Hopi taatawi (traditional songs)—despite the appropriation of Hopi traditional lands by the American settler-state. Hopi territories within Öngtupqa (Grand Canyon) are just a sample of the many places where Indigenous authority, as expressed through sound-based performances, continues to resonate despite the imposition of settler-colonial structures that have either silenced Indigenous performances of authority or severed these places from Indigenous territories. Drawing on the work of Hopi composers and intellectuals, I explore how Hopi musical composition and performance are deeply intertwined with Hopi political philosophy and governance, resulting in a form of sovereignty that is inherently sonic rather than strictly literary or textual in nature. Recognizing that this interconnection between territorial authority and sound production is common across many Indigenous communities, I propose listening to contemporary Indigenous creativity not just as an aesthetic form but as a source of sonic sovereignty.