UC Riverside

This dissertation examines the making of diasporic Indigeneity through island reggae music by Pacific Islander Americans in Southern California music scenes. Island reggae music draws inspiration from Black expressive culture to articulate Indigeneity and tells the imbrication of colonialism that the diasporic Pacific Islanders have endured in Oceanian ancestral lands and North American homes. As diasporic Pacific Islanders are politically marginalized due to the imposition of continental stereotypes upon Pacific islands and Indigenous people in the continental U.S. (Arvin and Teves 2018), they have developed new sound and musical styles to recontextualize and reclaim their diasporic Indigeneity within the Black-White racial norm at their continental home. The research analyzes the new sound and musical style of Southern California island reggae and renders an ethnographic account to answer the following theoretical inquiries: This dissertation asks: How has performing island reggae music enabled diasporic Pacific Islanders in Southern California to recontextualize, reclaim, and redefine their Indigeneity for identity negotiation within the U.S.-based Black-White racial dichotomy? By addressing this question, I argue that diasporic Pacific Islanders—through their practices of Indigeneity in reggae music—present an identity that reflects the Southern Californian context of race, ethnicity, gender, and class that still stems from an Indigenous worldview. My theoretical framework consults literature on Black, Indigenous studies, and decolonial island studies. This dissertation frames the island reggae music of the diasporic Pacific Islander as the materialization of the “Black shoal” metaphor conceptualized by King (2019) and highlights the Black-Indigenous reciprocity. I argue that diasporic Pacific Islanders redefine the boundary between Blackness and Indigeneity through reggae music and performance, which critically incorporates their lives in the U.S. with their heritage in Oceania; they ultimately unsettle the presumed racial norms and continental domination across the Pacific. Two newly coined terms, “continental islandness” and “island making,” capture both the quality and the process of expressing diasporic Indigeneity through island reggae music and performance from a community-based theoretical perspective. These concepts explain how diasporic Islanders use reggae as a form of storytelling to articulate their identities as Islanders and to sustain Indigeneity in response to life on the continent. In doing so, they illuminate the continuity—and transformation—of Pacific Islander Indigeneity in diaspora, where cultural expression actively unsettles continental hegemony and colonial structures. While diasporic Pacific Islanders have long been underrepresented across multiple research fields, this dissertation foregrounds their contributions within ethnomusicological studies of popular music.