ABSTRACT
’Native Tongue’ is a powerful four minutes of music video that entices its audience to lose themselves in the pleasures of its sound. It won Best Music Video at the First Nations Music Awards in 2018 and Song of the Year at the National Indigenous Music Awards in 2019. Mojo Juju explains that she wrote the song hoping to speak to ‘other people of colour’ and, more specifically, ‘queer people of colour’. The video reaches a much broader audience as well, across the Australian independent music scene. Writing from a position of privilege as a straight, white cisgendered female academic, I explore how the video engages such an audience in a critique of the structures that sustain privilege. I argue that the embodied experience of enjoying ‘Native Tongue’ is laden with critical legal philosophy. On one level, it offers to grant empathic access to an experience of the criminalizing and carceral marginalization of Western colonial law, which fragments the legal subjecthood of non-conforming bodies. On another level, it challenges those privileged parts of its audience while also threatening to shatter the internal coherence of Western legal subjecthood. Ultimately, it performs a continuation of Indigenous sovereignty never ceded. Each layer of critique is enabled by a rhythmic hum undulating constantly behind Juju’s soulful lyrics and Joelistic’s glitchy sound production. Empathy is facilitated by a signifiance in which the audience loses themselves. This carries throughout the possible alienation of the video’s challenge to privilege by buoying the audience upon its soothing sound cloud. The signifiance also naturalizes, and thus authorizes, Indigenous sovereignty by entangling its representation with the sensual pleasures of a truly awesome audio-visual text.
