UC Santa Barbara

Reggae is ubiquitous and normalized in Hawai‘i and consists of a major portion of the live music and recordings produced there. Despite this, very few scholars have written about the scene. Such a gap in scholarship can partially be attributed to the fact that reggae in Hawai‘i is not overtly traditional or political; those are the two lenses through which Indigenous culture is typically viewed in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and even Indigenous studies. However, reggae in Hawai‘i is both traditional and political below the surface, frustrating colonial binaries and representing Indigenous people in the complexity of their lived realities. Through in-person and virtual ethnographic research, archival research, and analysis of musical recordings, I consider the ways in which identity operates in reggae in Hawai‘i. I argue that although Native Hawaiian music and worldviews are implicit—that is, often obscured or not acknowledged—they are the basis of engagement with identity in reggae in Hawai‘i. At the same time, the categories of Local and global build on top of and yet are interrelated with the Native Hawaiian. This study joins a growing body of work on Hawaiian music and Indigenous popular music that centers the messiness of everyday Indigenous life while privileging Indigenous agency and worldviews.