Easy Listening Empire: Exotica, Race, and U.S. Imperialism in Hawai‘i

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

The role of popular music in sustaining U.S. imperial expansion and asserting global hegemony during the dawn of the “American Century” has long been established by historians like Penny Von Eschen and Ingrid Monson. From jazz ambassadors like Louis Armstrong touring Africa and Asia to build cordial relations with decolonizing nation-states to U.S. efforts to airdrop phonographs “behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtain,” American music was once imagined as a secret weapon in the highly contested ideological battle of the Cold War. As one Voice of America broadcaster put it, the Cold War was won with “blue jeans and jazz.”

This panel, however, turns to an overlooked form of popular music that played an equally critical role in sustaining the affective economies of U.S. Empire, particularly for American listeners. Midcentury “Exotica” – a genre of ersatz world music that evoked and often fabricated the musical styles of Hawai‘i, the Pacific, Latin America, Africa and Asia – had gained popularity from the 1950s onwards, conjuring, what one critic called, “an imperial paradise liberated from colonial intervention.” From LPs like Les Baxter’s The Ritual of the Savage (1951) to stage performances in Henry Kaiser’s “Hawaiian Village” in Waikiki, Exotica helped to produce a new kind of American listener for whom the faraway lands of the “Third World” or, indeed, the US colonies of Hawai’i and Puerto Rico, became palatable sites of fantasy and leisure.

We examine Exotica music, media, performance, and even architecture as a way to explore the role that these aesthetics played in the development of U.S. empire. How did the genre’s artists who were dressed in the garb of exoticism negotiate, complicate, and at times resist this funhouse of representation? How did the new immersive technologies of stereophonic sound produce and prepare Americans for a new phase of imperial expansion? How did exotica shape and reflect gendered and racialized discourses that legitimated a view of Hawaiʻi as a modern and harmonious racial melting pot? Drawing on the conference theme of “Late Stage American Empire,” this panel hits the rewind button to an earlier phase, drawing lessons on the ways that media technologies, music, and entertainment play in both consolidating as well as resisting imperialism.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Sounding 'Racial Aloha' in the Tourist Spaces of Postwar Waikiki - Jennifer Messelink

• Archipelagic Listening: Hawai‘i-Puerto Rican Connections in Augie Colón’s Exotica - Jade Conlee

• Hawai‘i in Stereo: Cinerama, Stereophonic Sound, and Hawaiian Statehood - Manan Desai, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Chair

• Vernadette Gonzalez, UC Berkeley

Biographical Information

Vernadette Gonzalez is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Her interdisciplinary humanities-based research broadly examines cultures of imperialism, with a focus on the United States and its colonial territories and interventions in Asia and the Pacific. A central thematic in her work is how race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality intersect and operate, sometimes together and sometimes in opposition, in the cultural terrains of empire. Her first book, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (2013), considers the convergences of modern military and touristic ideologies, cultures, and technologies of tourism and militarism.

Manan Desai is an associate professor in the Department of American Culture and the Program in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature & Transnational Refraction (2020), published by Temple University Press as part of the Asian American History and Culture Series. His essays have been published in Comparative Literature, the Journal of Popular Culture, and the recent volume of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930-1965. He has served on the Board of Directors for the South Asian American Digital Archive (saada.org). He is currently working on a book project entitled Imperial Vinyl that explores the development of the mid-century genre of ersatz "world music" known as Exotica.

Jennifer Messelink is a sessional lecturer at the University of Victoria’s School of Music. She recently completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Studies at Yale University. In 2023 she earned a PhD in Musicology from McGill University. She is currently working on her first book manuscript titled Quiet Resonance: Race, Gender, and Mood Music in Mid-century America which focuses on entanglements of race, gender, and sound technologies in the emergence of postwar instrumental mood and background music. Her publications include a keyword in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, an article in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and a book review in the Journal of Jazz Studies.

Jade Conlee is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music Department at the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in Music Studies from Yale University in 2024. Her current book project, Hawai‘i Exotica: Sonic Cartographies Through U.S. Empire studies how mid-twentieth century background musicians and listeners used music to depict the feel of tropical space, and in doing so, forged and contested the spatial imaginaries of U.S. colonialism in the Pacific. Jade is also co-editor of the edited volume Music Theory, Race, and Colonialism: Terminology and Critical Methods, under contract with the University of Michigan Press’ “Music and Social Justice” series. Trained as a pianist specializing in contemporary classical music, Conlee holds a M.M. in Piano Performance from the University at Buffalo and a B.M. in Piano Performance from New York University. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and Yale University’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.