James Revell Carr. Hawaiian Music in Motion

The previous decade has witnessed a surge of exceptional work in Hawaiian history, prompting ever-greater numbers of U.S. historians and American Studies scholars to take note. From Noenoe K. Silva’s 2004 exegesis of Hawaiian-language documents in Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism to Adria L. Imada’s Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (2012), this body of scholarship features, among other attributes, some of the best recent explorations of the relationship between colonialism and expressive culture. Ethnomusicologist James Revell Carr contributes to this conversation in his dynamic study of how nineteenth-century Hawaiian mariners and seafaring foreigners crafted a fascinating web of musical entanglements not only within the Hawaiian Kingdom, but throughout the globe. Although Captain James Cook was killed by Kānaka (Hawaiians) at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawai‘i in 1779, European and soon, American mariners began visiting the Hawaiian Kingdom with increasing frequency. Recognizing the local sandalwood and bêche-de-mer (a variety of sea cucumber) as highly sought after trade goods in China, the kingdom soon integrated more deeply into these networks of commercial Pacific trade—fueled by mariners who might spend years at sea while accumulating a flux of cargo for the exchange of new goods at every port. When in port these sailors, whalers, and merchants often exercised little social restraint. As a consequence, they generated upheavals within the Hawaiian populous as well as the ire of recently arrived New England missionaries, whose order of the day evolved from harvesting souls to prohibiting hula performances and, by extension, criminalizing those Hawaiians unwilling to labor in the fields of their denominations’ fast-growing sugar plantations.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Genealogy · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History