This panel accomplishes three goals. First, it identifies music as both method and archive that can expose forms of power, mobility, and marginality. To meet that end, it highlights songs as critical forms of expression in the face of displacement and continued struggle. It also draws attention to radio recordings as source bases that reveal popular concerns, aspirations, and anxieties during decolonization. Second, the panel links imperial and post-imperial formations across regions, emphasizing transnational circuits of musicians and technologies. Through comparative study, it reveals music as a field of governance through which colonial regimes regulated education, broadcasting, and public performance in order to discipline subjects and produce imperial modernities. It also offers a comparative analysis of colonial and post-colonial music and sound. Finally, it foregrounds musicmaking, listening, and performance as expressions of agency, raising questions about the significance of musicians embedding discrete references to occupation and resistance through performance choices and textual substitutions. Ultimately, each paper works toward meeting the goals listed above, showcasing to an AHA audience that music, sound, and performance serve as especially generative areas of study for historians.