Native Music Today Symposium: Dr. Jessica Bissett-Perea and Lauren Amsterdam (Friday Sept. 21, 4PM)

In association with "Native Sounds North and South" concert on Sept. 22 (Saturday), The Center for Ethnomusicology presents a symposium:

Indigenous Music Today: Inuit Cosmopolitanism and Native American Hip-Hop with Dr. Jessica Bissett-Perea and Lauren Amsterdam

Friday Sept. 21
2-4:30PM
701C Dodge Hall  (Center for Ethnomusicology)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Reception to Follow


Jessica Bissett-Perea, PhD
(Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Music, Univ. of California, Berkeley, PhD in Musicology, UCLA, 2011)

“Sounding Traditions of Inuit Cosmopolitanism in ‘Flying Wild Alaska’”
This paper explores circuits of Inuit cosmopolitanism as represented through the soundscapes and imagery of the Discovery Channel’s documentary-style reality television series “Flying Wild Alaska,” (2011-2012). When compared to its counterparts (e.g. “Deadliest Catch,” “Ice Road Truckers,” and “Gold Rush: Alaska”), “Flying Wild Alaska” is notable for portraying the diversity and mobility of Alaska Native and Inuit cultures, in part through the show’s use of contemporary Inuit music as a backdrop to portrayals of modern life in the arctic. From professionalized traditional drumsongs to funk- and jazz-influenced “Inuit World Music,” my musicocultural analysis will illuminate the longer history of Inuit cosmopolitanism throughout the circumpolar region and make audible the literal and figurative histories of Native migration between rural and urban spaces.
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Lauren J. Amsterdam
(MA, African-American Studies, Columbia University)

"All the Eagles and the Ravens in the House Say Yeah! (Ab)Original Hip Hop Artists and Styles of Heritage"

Young people across Native North America and the First Nations are making beats, spitting rhymes, telling stories, and taking direct action to build the future now. Hip hop artists are reppin’ a radicalized (ab)original heritage that is “everywhere,” but most of all, in hip hop, challenging the limitations of poverty, invisibility, and social dislocation. Confronting the symptoms of invasion—racism, poverty, police violence, inter-generational trauma, and “haters”—artists profoundly demonstrate that the materiality of hip hop is a way of not dying, and of moving past the necessity of surviving to a fuller, thriving political and cultural life. While artists are indeed inheriting loss, they choose to move with loss, not past it, being playful and political with real and imagined memories. Rather than mourn who they would or could have been if the past was different, artists orient themselves towards the potentiality of the future through self-love and communal care, shedding the settler nation's inculcation of shame and alienation.

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Discussants: AKU-MATU (Allison Warden), Prof. John-Carlos Perea.

COMING UP OCT. 13: MASTER OF HAWAI'IAN SLACK KEY GUITAR CYRIL PAHINUI, 7PM IN DAVIS AUDITORIUM, SAT 10/13/12