TransplantedPoesis2012 (original) (raw)
The Wayfinders: Locating Hawai’ian Subjection
The purpose of this paper is to understand of how power relations have formed between native Hawai’ans and the West. When analyzing power relations a starting point offered by Michel Foucault is that forms of resistance to power can be used as a chemical catalyst to shed light on the nature of any given power relation. To this end, this paper examines the subjection of the Hawaiian people through Western discourse which will be demonstrated through two major events in Hawai’i’s history: the arrival and death of Captain Cook; as well as the U.S. led coup and subsequent annexation, both of which served to crystallize discourses framed around a notion of Western superiority that aided in the subjection of the Hawaiian people. The paper will then analyze the 1970s cultural revolution as the potential chemical catalyst Foucault called for. The cultural revolution was an active attempt to reject Western attacks on the Hawaiian people’s cultural heritage, as such this period illustrates, that the colonial battle in Hawai’i, much like other colonial struggles the battle is in essence a cultural one whereby the oppressor gains power by attacking and delegitimizing native history and culture.
Hawaiʻi/Hawaii: Alterity, Space, and the Economy of Knowledge
2021
The settler imaginary creates Hawaii as a distinct space from Hawaiʻi. Drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Eve Tuck I seek to explore the overlapping of two distinct epistemological territories sharing the same physical location. This thesis begins with a history of the future that interrogates settler desires for Hawaii. It begins with the imagination of captains of industry and military strategists as they constructed a discursive future for Hawaii. It moves forward to the touristic imagination that produced the modern conception of Hawai. Finally, it turns to the imagination of modern popular media through the film Lilo & Stitch. Through its deconstruction of the symbolic order of settler desire this thesis seeks to chart the geography of an imagined space.
Finding “American” Hawai’i: Racial Paradigms and the Hawai’ian Statehood Movement Following the Second World War, 2017
Although a political process, the role of race relations and racial paradigms operating within the Hawai’ian islands dictated the entire process of statehood from the end of World War II to statehood in 1959. For during the first half of the twentieth century the island chain appeared a natural addition to the United States. For continental Americans, the strategic importance of the islands during World War II had proved the Territory’s loyalty. Likewise, wealthy Caucasian plantation owners had usurped control of the islands in the late nineteenth century, sought annexation, and established a Territorial government that appeared to reflect American values and racial ideology. Although appearing complimentary, the racial paradigms within the islands and the continent were incompatible. Slow exposure of Mainland American culture through tourism, the military, construction of labor unions, and relocation brought new ideas of race that challenged the existing racial hierarchy providing the rich Caucasian elite – known as haoles – economic and political control. The transplantation of Mainland culture and ideas of race had eroded the apartheid-like structure of Hawai’ian society by the late 1940s. The International Longshoreman Warehouse Union dockworkers strike in 1949, many of whom were non-Caucasian in ethnicity, exposed to continental Americans the different racial paradigm and demographics within the Territory. Occurring at the same time as Congressional action for statehood and the rise of the Cold War in Europe and Asia, the unrest of the strike questioned the supposed “Americanism” of the islands cemented after World War II. Now appearing unstable and racially discordant with American society, the strike provided the opponents of statehood an opportunity to use racism and fears of communism to stall statehood. Statehood thus became inextricably tied to race, as the ILWU strike became “evidence” of racial disharmony and “un-American” behavior. Here, racial harmony amongst the islands became an unofficial prerequisite for statehood by lawmakers on the Mainland. As admission as a state continued to be a goal by all groups on either side of the Pacific, a variety of factions emerged on the Mainland and the islands in the aftermath of the strike who sought to redefine race relations in the islands in whatever form they deemed “American.” However, only after traditional Hawai’ian society had fully collapsed and the Hawai’ian racial framework had reformed into a model similar to Mainland America’s did Hawai’i achieve statehood.
Bloomsbury Academic, 2022
The air was still, and the high, clear sound wound like a ribbon around the island. It was, I know it, the island, the voice of the island singing … the voice of our island singing. ' 1 So writes Maxine Hong Kingston in Hawai'i One Summer, a collection of personal essays recording the author's life during the summer of 1978. 2 Though the title seems to indicate a short sojourn on the isles, Kingston lived in Honolulu for nearly two decades. In the 'Preface to the Paperback Edition' , written in 1998, she recalls: 'I wrote these essays during the middle of our seventeen-year stay in Hawai'i. ' 3 Ever careful in her diction, Kingston does not call Hawai'i home. Relegating seventeen years to a 'stay' she implies that despite this length of time and being endowed a 'Living Treasure of Hawai'i' in 1980, 4 she was only ever a visitor. Kingston's trepidation around her status on the islands reflects how the literature of Hawai'i operates within a dichotomy of exclusion and inclusion. Questions of who gets to write this literature, where it is written, and what language it is written in, dominate debates that began in the mid-twentieth 4
Making 'Aha: Independent Hawaiian Pasts, Presents & Futures
We use Hawaiian methods of knowledge production to weave together contemporary and historical instances of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) political resistance to U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism. Our departure point is the summer of 2014, when hundreds of Kānaka came forward to assert unbroken Hawaiian sovereignty and reject a U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) proposal to create a pathway for federal recognition of a reorganized Native Hawaiian governing entity. This essay situates testimonies from these hearings within a longer genealogy of Kanaka assertions of "ea" (sovereignty, life, breath) against the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Hawaiʻi that began in 1898 and extends to the present.