About

Amy Stillman is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, earned in 1991. Her academic fields include Ethnomusicology, Pacific Islands performance traditions, and dance ethnology. Stillman has served as a former director of AC Asian/Pacific Islander American (A/PIA) Studies and is a faculty member in the Department of American Culture, Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies, and Native American Studies. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Professor Stillman is notable for her research areas which encompass diaspora studies, historiography of performance, popular culture, and American musics. She is a two-time Grammy award winner for Best Hawaiian Music Album, in which she contributed as co-producer, lyricist, and accompanist. She teaches courses on Hawaiian music and dance, with a specific focus on hula, and has a background in Native American Studies. Her work combines academic research with practical engagement in music and performance traditions.

Research topics

• History
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Visual arts
• Physics
• Art
• Gender studies
• Law
• Anthropology
• Ethnology

Selected publications

• Multiple Literacies in Hawaiian Sheet Music

  University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Visual arts
  • Art
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• Beyond the Coloniality of Authenticity

  American Quarterly · 2021 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Beyond the Coloniality of Authenticity Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman (bio) The notion of authenticity implies the existence of its opposite, the fake, and this dichotomous construct is at the heart of what makes authenticity problematic. —Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (1997) I begin with a story about my initial encounter with the concept of authenticity, during my undergraduate studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in the 1970s. In Hawai‘i, youth and young adults had begun to question the socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement of indigenous Hawaiian people in our ancestral homeland, and to repudiate the waves of Americanization following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and especially following admission to statehood in 1959. An awakening of consciousness brought to light the suppression of Hawaiian language and cultural practices and laid bare the dispossession of land and livelihood razed by the unrelenting march of capitalist political economies during decades of settler colonial government. These energies coalesced into a movement that became known as “the Hawaiian Renaissance.” Both my part-Hawaiian parents were born after Hawai‘i was annexed to the United States. They lived through the Great Depression and World War II—decades in which they had Hawaiian language punished out of them, and “lazy” and “dumb” became common epithets applied to people of Hawaiian ancestry. Educators generally held no expectations for educational, economic, or social achievements by Hawaiian children,1 and those attitudes carried through to my own generation. The cultural renaissance empowered us to assert pride and claim dignity in our Hawaiian ancestry and heritage. We engaged in reclaiming and revitalizing Hawaiian language and cultural practices not taught in our formal K–12 schooling, and we sought to deepen our knowledge of ancestral heritage beyond the living memory of elders. It was in this atmosphere that my peers and I matriculated into the University of Hawai‘i. And it was here that I encountered a dis-ease. Our professors were credentialed academics (translation: not Hawaiian). The readings they [End Page 161] assigned portrayed some version of an “ancient” society long gone, “salvage ethnography” on a culture on the brink of (then) dying out, or ethnographic studies of abject communities. The message was clear: our present-day life experiences were unlike the society and culture we were being taught in the classroom. “We” did not match the lifeways of our ancestors. The gap between our contemporary modernity and the vanished culture we studied condemned us to lessons about our lived inauthenticity. I sat in those classrooms processing repeatedly that, by the metrics of my professors and their colleagues, I was not an authentic Hawaiian, and neither were my parents. (At least my grandparents were native speakers of Hawaiian language.) It got worse. In our rush to reclaim what was left of “ancient” culture—particularly in the domains of Hawaiian music and hula performance—a hierarchy of value had coalesced into a vicious cultural politics. Knowledge and access to older pre-twentieth-century styles of hula collectively called “hula kahiko” (ancient hula) enjoyed elevated prestige over the popular entertainment fare understood as “hula ‘auana” (modern hula). We were ensnared in a double paradox. On the one hand, because we were reviving “ancient” traditions, that gap of discontinuous practice between demise and revival was held against us in scholarly discourses over “evolved” and “invented” traditions. On the other hand, we had internalized the hierarchy of value that led many at the time to repudiate “modern” Hawaiian traditions that had sustained our parents. It is a testament to the successful epistemological indoctrination and enduring nature of coloniality when Indigenous people weaponize concepts like authenticity and tradition for use against each other, in quests for prestige and power. My experience related above is echoed widely by and among Indigenous friends and colleagues, as well as in ethnographic and empirical scholarship. Such a profoundly toxic sense of invalidation and erasure sparked my determination to contribute to dismantling these narratives of disempowerment. I chose to pursue academic credentials; I sought to face those upholding the long-entrenched Eurocentric regimes of intellectual traditions within academe, and to say and write, “we are who we are, and...

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 8. Re-Membering the History of the Hawaiian Hula

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2017-12-31 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hawai’i (Hawaii)

  Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World · 2016-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Population: 1,200,000 (2000) Located at a latitude of between 19 and 22 degrees north, Hawai‘i consists physically of an archipelago of high volcanic islands and coral atolls spanning some 200 miles (322 km). The islands were first settled by Polynesian seafarers from t

  PublisherDOI

• Of What Use Are Published Hawaiian Songbooks?

  Perfect Beat · 2015-10-07 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article looks at the role of published songbooks in the preservation and promotion of Hawaiian music.

  PublisherDOI

• Hula

  Oxford Music Online · 2013-10-16

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pan-Pacific pop

  Oxford Music Online · 2009-09-09

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (review)

  Journal of American Folklore · 2009-01-18

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Legendary Hawai’I and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism

  Journal of American Folklore · 2009-01-01 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This DOI is not currently attached to any metadata records. DOIs can’t actually ever be deleted (they’re persistent), but sometimes our members create DOIs in error. We do have a process to approximate deletion which we follow only in rare cases where the DOI has been genuinely created in error, and most crucially, if the DOI has never been published anywhere online or in print and never otherwise distributed to or communicated with anyone (authors, readers, reviewers, etc.

  PublisherDOI

• The Hawaiian<i>hula</i>and legacies of institutionalization

  Comparative American Studies An International Journal · 2007-06-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Using the Hawaiian hula tradition as a case study, this article explores archival institutionalization of knowledge and contents necessary for performance. The fact that the performance skills of hula remained in continuous practice is what allowed a successful revival in the late 20th century of poetic repertoire that had become entombed in archival sources by the end of the 19th century. I consider the role of archives as a form of memory, particularly in the context of colonized peoples, and advocate for performers to determine how the archived repertoire would be staged again in ways that address contemporary rather than past circumstances.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Don McDiarmid

  2 shared

• Barbara B. Smith

  Cook County Sheriff's Office

  1 shared

• Neil Abercrombie

  1 shared

• C. K. Prahalad

  1 shared

• Kalani Meinecke

  1 shared

• Adrienne L. Kaeppler

  1 shared

• Steven Cornelius

  1 shared

• Pascal Nabet-Meyer

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Two-time Grammy award for Best Hawaiian Music Album