This panel explores how music can resist state mechanisms of repression and attempts to delimit colonial memory. The panel creates a transhistorical and transnational dialogue, moving from the French, Dutch, and Anglophone colonial efforts to suppress Caribbean sounds and musics in the 18 th and 19 th centuries to contemporary French rappers’ resistance to the musical genre’s penalization and performances of dissonant memories of the colonial past. Across these contexts, the presentations locate repression in colonial legal injunctions against “musicking,” the modern, postcolonial French state’s routinized legal cases against rappers, as well as in institutionalized memory politics. Each presentation analyzes the various sonic, lyrical, and visual strategies that musical artists deploy to persist and resist against such mechanisms of repression.