Event Date
Jessica Bissett Perea, Associate Professor, Native American Studies
Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska
What does it mean to sound (or not sound) Native? Who decides? And how can Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered analyses of Native musicking reframe larger debates of power and representation in twenty-first century American historiography? From hip hop to Christian hymnody and drumsongs to funk and R&B, Jessica Bissett Perea offers relational and radical ways of listening to a vast archive of Inuit presence across a range of genres to register the density (not difference) of Indigenous ways of musicking. Native ways of doing music history engage processes of sound worlding beyond colonial nation-state notions of containment and measurement, and instead amplifies possibilities for more just and equitable futures.