Abstract
Building off of Erin Suzuki’s incisive Ocean Passages that considers “what it means to articulate an embodied local identity in the hope of reconnecting the desire for local belonging to the project of Indigenous resurgence” (129), this paper mediates on the possibilities and limits of attempting to connect “local” Hawaiʻi identity to Kānaka Maoli through rejecting the neoliberal promise of belonging through settler colonial capitalist subjectivity. I question how and if “local”/settler/non-Indigenous Hawaiʻi narratives have the capacity for decolonial solidarities to imagine beyond the confines of multicultural settler colonial nationalism through analyzing recent Hawaiʻi fiction by Joseph Han, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Jasmine ʻIolani Hakes, and Kawai Strong Washburn. As such, this paper takes up the question of the contemporary aesthetics of “local” Hawaiʻi novels through examining transpacific kinship, global nuclearism, Indigeneity and belonging. I suggest that perhaps the global intimacies embedded in nuclearism, anti-militarism, and (anti)-tourism offer possibilities for expanding the often limited and exceptional focus on Hawaiʻi as a site and subject for Kānaka Maoli and immigrant Asian relations. Even further, the failures of belonging and ambivalent intimate kinship might actually excavate a constellation of transpacific decolonial affinities that centers, as Suzuki calls for, Indigenous resurgence.
Presenters
Leanne DayAssociate Professor, English, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, Hawaii, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Oceanic Journeys: Multicultural Approaches in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Settler Colonialism, Race, Hawaii
