Books in the Refiguring American Music series

Drawing on his ethnographic research at powwow grounds and in recording studios, Christopher A. Scales examines the ways that powwow drum groups have utilized recording technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the unique aesthetic principles of recorded powwow music, and the relationships between drum groups and the Native music labels and recording studios.

Audible Empire's contributors rethink the mechanisms of empire, showing how musical practice has been important to its spread around the globe. The volume's fifteen interdisciplinary essays cover large swaths of genre, time, politics, and geography to put forth music as a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation.