Ph.D. - American Studies

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/588

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SCENES OF PEDAGOGY: ART AND THE POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Lee, Boeun Billie; Kosasa, Karen K.; American Studies
This dissertation examines the “promises” of art and pedagogy in enacting institutional critique and possibility. This project also grows out of collective conversations within and beyond the field of art and design in the recent turn towards social equity and inclusion and responds to national reckonings on race and identitarian politics in the post-Obama era. Primarily through ethnographic research in several art and design colleges across the United States, Scenes of Pedagogy: Art and the Politics of Possibility tracks activities in the unmaking and remaking of hegemonic institutional spaces of learning. In the last decade, students across campuses in the United States and elsewhere have demanded racial, social, and climate equity, bringing institutions of higher learning to crisis under heightened media scrutiny. I examine how artists, art educators, and art schools have participated in this movement and the broader implications of such activism in a field that has historically been depoliticized and traditionalist in its adherence to Euroamerican canons and epistemes.
Kuʻu Home ʻO Keaukaha: He Lei Moʻolelo No Ka ʻĀina Aloha (My Home, Keaukaha: A Lei Of Stories For Beloved Lands)
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Kapuni-Reynolds, Halena K.; McDougall, Brandy N.; American Studies
Keaukaha is a land and sea area located in Hilo, Hawaiʻi in the ahupuaʻa of Waiākea. Famed for its brackish waters, rocky coastline, and abundance of natural resources, it is home to numerous wahi pana (legendary, storied places) whose stories shed light on the Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) ancestors who once made their livelihoods there. In 1924, Keaukaha became the home of the first Hawaiian Home Land community established on the Island of Hawaiʻi under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920 (HHCA). The HHCA is a U.S. federal law passed in 1921 that established the Hawaiian Homes Commission and set aside over 200,000 acres of land for the purpose of rehabilitating “native Hawaiians” with 50% or more Hawaiian blood by returning them to a leasehold land base. The first Keaukaha homesteaders, comprised of long-time residents of the area and newcomers, founded an “improvement club” that organized and advocated for the community’s needs—a legacy that is carried on today by numerous community organizers a century later. This dissertation offers the first book-length archival study of Keaukaha with emphasis on the 19th and early 20th centuries. It builds on the works of other Indigenous and Hawaiian studies scholars by relying on Hawaiian language and English language primary source materials to create a decolonial story of place before and soon after the establishment of the Keaukaha Hawaiian Home Land community. By retheorizing huli kanaka (the Hawaiian term for anthropology) as a critical ʻŌiwi social and aesthetic theory, and by utilizing a “lei kui” (a type of lei where flowers are pierced and strung together) methodology, I thread together ʻŌiwi and non-ʻŌiwi historiographical methods to reveal stories of Keaukaha’s past. This work intervenes in the academic literature on Hawaiian Home Lands by centering a single community’s efforts to create and maintain ‘Ōiwi community in the face of displacement and dispossession during Hawaiʻi’s Territorial Era (1900-1959). Although the stories traced in this dissertation are marked by loss and struggle, it also recounts practices of ʻŌiwi joy and a refusal to be replaced by settler-colonial processes. A key example illustrated throughout this dissertation is the practice of huakaʻi hele (sightseeing tours) to visit relatives, friends, and wahi pana. Through this project, I practice and theorize decoloniality, as theorized by Global South scholars, by actively working to remember and theorize from the ʻāina aloha and ʻŌiwi community that raised and educated me.
Politics of Expression: The Contemporary Native Hawaiian Visual Arts Movement
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Wray, Taylor Elaine; Kahanu, Noelle M.K.Y; Kosasa, Karen K.; American Studies
Politics of Expression: The Contemporary Native Hawaiian Visual Arts Movement sheds light on Indigenous self-expression through contemporary art in Hawaiʻi. It explores how Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) visual artists have shaped and responded to the socio-cultural landscape over the past five decades, revealing the inherently political nature of their creative endeavors. Spanning fifty years, this history highlights the dynamic and vibrant evolution of the Kānaka Maoli visual arts movement, which unfolds in three distinct waves: The Kūpuna (elders, grandparent generation) from 1973-1993, the Mākua (teacher and parent generation) from 1994- 2004, and the Moʻopuna (student generation, two generations later) from 2005-2023.This dissertation spotlights notable artists, seminal exhibitions, innovative arts programming, and the institutions and organizations that have either supported or hindered this movement. It also brings to the forefront the numerous achievements and challenges Native Hawaiian artists have faced over the years, including racism, discrimination, and cultural appropriation. Despite formidable obstacles such as the absence of infrastructure and the lack of recognition, Kānaka Maoli visual artists have successfully advanced the movement and cultivated a thriving arts scene in Hawaiʻi. They continue to employ visual art to transmit mana (authority, power, spirit) in their dedicated pursuit of ea (life, sovereignty, breath, and independence). Their artwork stands as aesthetic evidence of Kānaka Maoli claims for sovereign independence, while this manuscript serves as a testament to their aloha ʻāina (love of the land), often regarded as a political act in occupied Hawaiʻi.
Hawaiʻi in Japanese Tourist Imaginary: Wedding, Hula, and Power Spot
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Oga, Eriko; Yoshihara, Mari; American Studies
Hawaiʻi has been one of the most popular overseas destinations for Japanese tourists since the liberalization of foreign travel in Japan in 1964. This dissertation aims to explore how Japanese people have imagined and performed “Hawaiʻi” in their own terms. Additionally, the purpose of this project is to analyze the role of gender in constructing different modes of Japanese imaginations of Hawaiʻi such as akogare (dreaming) and iyashi (healing) toward the islands. The working of gender in tourist imaginations is analyzed through case studies on tourism whose main subjects are women: Japanese wedding tourism to Hawai‘i, hula tourism in Fukushima, Japan, and Japanese power spot tourism to Hawai‘i. The data for this project was collected in Japan and Hawaiʻi through archival research on Japanese tourist media such as guidebooks and magazines, interviews with a wide range of people from staff in the tourist industry to local residents of Hawaiʻi, and participant observations of performances for tourists. Japanese people have understood Hawaiʻi from their perspectives and performed it for their own purposes rather than passively importing images of Hawaiʻi from Hawaiʻi or the United States. These imaginations have changed over time according to the socio-political conditions in Japan, Hawaiʻi, and the United States including Japan’s changing gender norms. Social expectations on women and the change in women’s social status in Japan have particularly affected Japanese women’s tourist desires. At the same time, the Japanese tourist industry has been imbricated with neocolonialism in Hawaiʻi by consuming Hawaiian places, people, and culture outside Native Hawaiian contexts. These findings indicate the need for the continuing effort of the Japanese tourist industry to negotiate with local and Native Hawaiian communities and of Japanese tourists to be more aware of their tourist gazes on Hawaiʻi.
FROM SITE OF INTERNMENT TO SITES OF CONSCIENCE: REPRESENTING HONOULIULI’S PRISONERS OF WAR AND CIVILIAN INTERNMENT CAMP
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Sakaguchi, Jo Ann Tatsumi; Kosasa, Karen K.; American Studies
Honouliuli was the largest and longest operating prisoners of war and civilian internment camp on the island of O‘ahu. During its active use from March 1943 to January 1946, Honouliuli housed over 4,000 Japanese, Korean, Okinawan, Filipino, and Italian Prisoners of War and over 300 Japanese, Okinawan, German, and Italian American and resident alien civilian internees. My research will focus on the institutional challenges of representing those confined at Honouliuli. By examining the research of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i, the National Park Service, the University of Hawai‘i at West O‘ahu, and my own studies, I will show how efforts to document and interpret the internment experiences have resulted in particular approaches to commemorating and preserving the site. By using these previous works and my own studies, I would like to offer alternative narratives and perspectives that may change the view of Honouliuli from a “Site of Internment” (primarily associated with the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese resident aliens) to multiple “Sites of Conscience” (the internment of several ethnic American citizens, detainment of foreign nationals and remembrance of other violations of human rights). By highlighting these collective efforts, I would like to alter our understanding and raise our consciousness of the diverse experiences of American citizens of several ethnic groups, resident aliens, and foreign nationals who were interned or detained at Honouliuli, and help link their stories of internment to a prior history of Hawaiian and settler activities at the site, and to related contemporary issues of detention, immigration, xenophobia, and settler colonialism and decolonization.
CONTRADICTIONS OF AMERICAN EMPIRE: POWER AND RESISTANCE IN TURN-OF-THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Fukunishi, Keiko; Eagle, Jonna; American Studies
Through examining cinematic and photographic representations of the United States and its racial Others during a period of imperial expansionism, I argue that these images appear as a powerful celebration of racial ideologies under American empire, and yet, when the details within these images are studied closely and placed within cultural and historical contexts, these same images can be seen as an even more powerful criticism against and contradiction of the empire itself. While existing scholarship commonly agrees that visual representations of America and its racial Others at the turn of the twentieth century functioned as powerful ideological tools to disseminate an imperialist agenda for public consumption, critical attention to the visual techniques used to shape these ideological messages is severely limited. Through analyzing representations of the Spanish American War in early films, as well as racial representations of Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, this dissertation exposes and explores the various filmmaking and photographic techniques used to smooth over these moments of contradiction and curate the racial meanings under expansionist ideologies. I also argue that the use of these filming and photographic techniques highlights and makes visible the constructed-ness of and the incongruities within imperial ideologies. Studying these moments of contradiction allows us to critically situate the logic employed by imperial ideologies and also to unpack the aspects of racial history that are concealed within the logic and narratives used to justify American expansionism.
(Under)Mining Empire: Towards Dangerously (Re)membering Diasporic Surigaonon Stories of Lands, Rocks, and People That Move
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Achacoso, Katherine; Gonzalez, Vernadette; American Studies
“(Under)Mining Empire: Towards Dangerously (Re)membering Diasporic Surigaonon Stories of Lands, Rocks, and People That Move” is an anti-colonial project that maps the environmental, political, and cultural implications of the expansion of North American mining on my ancestral homelands in Surigao. From 1908 until the present day, Surigao has been a key site for the extraction of copper, gold, and nickel ore across the nineteen islands of the Surigaonon archipelago. This dissertation, which draws from archipelagic theory (Roberts/McDougall/Goffe/Glissant) to map the multiple scales in which extraction saturates and is resisted, aims to historicize how shifting notions of race, capital, value, life/non-life, and extraction in Turtle Island in the late nineteenth century led towards the expansion of settler extractivism in Surigao. A place that was first perceived as a “geological frontier” that could support emerging American/Philippine settlement projects in Mindanao (1908-1939) and was later transformed into an extractive economy that could be used to support late liberal Philippine/Canadian partnerships (1946-Present) built on enduring logics of dispossession. Against these worldending logics that are predicated on enduring geographies of colonial ruin, this dissertation turns towards the estorya/punahon (stories/folkloric stories) of (diasporic) Surigaonon women who witnessed the development of North American mining to consider how Surigaonon historicized the violent impact of extraction in their everyday lives and how they negotiated these conditions by (re)imagining alternative forms of ecology, collective care, and survival/survivance. As North American mining increasingly became visibly unsustainable, working class Surigaonon women who were historically excluded from working in mining industries drew from their inter-generational forms of ancestral ecological knowledge and community relations to provide alternative economies and forms of self-sustainability to survive recurring ecological crises. This dissertation aims to foreground these stories to highlight the insurgent possibilities of these everyday forms of Surigaonon ecological knowledge that insist on life, relationality, and connection amidst ongoing forms of slow violence (Nixon) and erasure. I argue that these everyday acts of creativity and imagining otherwise offer an important corpus of anti-colonial knowledge that are critical in historicizing our contemporary crises but also in (re)imagining our collective futures beyond enduring histories of environmental destruction.
African American Literature and African American Studies in China, 1933–1977: Contacts, Translation, and Literary Internationalism
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Li, Guoqian; Yoshihara, Mari; American Studies
This dissertation explores the introduction and translation of African American literature and African American studies in China from 1933 to 1977. It will show that Chinese intellectuals’ interest in Black America was driven by their contact with Black American artists, writers, and activists such as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois in the international conferences, ranging from Comintern Congresses in the late 1920s and World Peace Conferences in the 1940s to Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences in the late 1950s and 1960s. The trajectory of Chinese intellectuals’ exploration of Black American activism through literature reflects China’s foreign relations with the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Third World. On the one hand, the study of African American literature and activism in China, from the publication of Black Literature by Yang Changxi to Yang Shengmao’s Black American Liberation Movement: A Brief History, was shaped by the political imperatives from the 1930s to 1970s, which were imbued with nationalist sentiments, Cold War tensions, anti-imperialism, and decolonization movements. On the other hand, Chinese intellectuals’ study of African American literature and culture reflected the rise of the Black American liberation movement within the United States and the rise of black internationalism and the global resistance movement against capitalist imperialism. The dissertation traces how Chinese intellectuals from Republican China to Communist China engaged in these movements and how their study, although imprinted with nationalist ideologies, comprises a part of the broader history of Afro-Asian solidarity and global liberation.
Entwined Imperial Networks: Reading Cold War Afterlives in Contemporary Asian American and Asian Representations
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Chang, Yana Ya-chu; Yoshihara, Mari; American Studies
This dissertation examines the afterlives of US Cold War military interventions in post-WWII North America and Asia by analyzing representations of war memories and transpacific and inter-Asian migrations in contemporary Asian American/Canadian and Asian cultural texts. Through examining how the selected literary texts, films, and creative nonfictions connect US wars in Asia with US anti-black racism at home, militarization and nuclearization in the Pacific, settler colonial violence, and postwar Asian state violence as entwined networks of complicity by the US, Asian states, and less recognizable Western imperial ally Canada, I argue that by reimagining US wars in Asia in relation to postwar violence in varied sites, the cultural texts complicate a US-centric understanding of the Cold War and Asian America. Adopting inter-Asian and transpacific frames, this dissertation on the one hand reframes the Cold War in relation to post-WWII violence in Asia and the Pacific, and, on the other hand, provides an alternative way of reading Asian American/Canadian and Asian cultural texts as mutual historical resources. The first three chapters analyze how Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998), Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War (2016) and DMZ Colony (2020), Lee Issac Chung’s Minari (2020), and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) interweave Korean War memories with Korean migration to the US and less recognizable atrocity committed by US-backed South Korean regimes within South Korea as well as in Jeju island and Vietnam. By examining how the texts depict US War in Korea in relational contexts of Japanese colonialism, South Korean state violence and subimperialism, and contemporary South Korea’s capitalist development, I argue that such relationalities elucidate historical atrocity doubly forgotten by both the US and South Korean nationalist narratives of the Korean War. The following three chapters examine how lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking for (2003), Ku Yu-ling’s Our Stories: Migration and Labour in Taiwan (2008/2011) and Return Home (2014), Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter (2005), and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) illustrate Cold War afterlives in sites not commonly known as the frontstage of US wars in Asia. By grounding US wars in militarization and nuclearization in the Pacific and foregrounding Japan’s disavowal of war crimes and Canada’s complicity with US empire, obscuration of militarization and colonialism in Okinawa, and the explicit and implicit US presence in Taiwan and Vietnam, I argue that the texts help us further investigate historical atrocities that are intertwined with the more well-known US wars in Asia and yet rendered implicit. In addition to analyzing the entwined imperial networks in the texts, this dissertation also underscores how limits of the texts’ representation foreground the difficulties necessarily involved in comprehending and representing the Cold War. Through highlighting how the texts refuse to render traumatic memories into comprehensive narratives and instead attending to unlikely friendship and alliances, I show that imperial networks represented in these texts are not totalizing; rather, they generate, however briefly, relationalities forged by shared yet distinct histories and positionalities.
An Ethics of Settler Decolonization: Non-Hawaiians in Relationship with Hawaiians
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Narikawa, Logan; McDougall, Brandy N.; American Studies
This study uncovers, details, and analyzes a settler ethics of decolonization. To do so, I forward the beliefs, values, and acts of exemplary settler activists who variously deployed their professional skills as lawyers and documentarians, intentionally defied state laws as activists, and preserved Hawaiian cultural practices in their support of Hawaiian movements for self-determination. Collecting and analyzing interviews of Kānaka Maoli and non-Hawaiians who have been at the forefront of various causes from the 1970s to the present, this project focuses on several Indigenous-settler alliances forged to prevent urban development and working-class tenant evictions; to advocate for legal, cultural, and land protections for Hawaiians; and to collaborate with Hawaiians in decolonial artistic creation. This project draws from and intervenes in the existing research on settler colonialism and proposes normative positions—ethical commitments and actions that ought to be held and undertaken—regarding the conduct of settlers in Hawaiʻi. I present instances of non-Hawaiians who partnered in exemplary ways with Hawaiians in pursuit of ea. In contending with the relative lack of examples of this sort, I present the stories and experiences of twelve interviewees—Joel August, Mike Town, Alan Murakami, Bart Dame, Gwen Kim, Gigi Cocquio, Charlie Reppun, Paul Reppun, John Reppun, Jon Matsuoka, Joan Lander, and John Witeck—who help answer the questions: 1) What should be the role of non-Hawaiians in Hawaiian movements? 2) In what ways did non-Hawaiians behave ethically in their conduct with Hawaiians during the early modern Hawaiian movement? 3) How might non-Hawaiians today learn to act in ethically similar ways? Using a methodology of ethics ethnography influenced deeply by Indigenous research methodologies, I argue that there are at least three ways in which we can understand ethical conduct for settlers in Hawaiʻi: 1) Through effective discharge of one's professional duties in partnership with Kānaka in the protection of ʻāina; 2) Through clear defiance of settler authority, alongside Kānaka and in assumption of personal risk; and 3) Through sustained and intentional relationship building with ʻāina and Kānaka in the service of ʻāina and Hawaiian communities. This written work serves as an attempt to fulfill my sense of responsibility, as a settler in Hawaiʻi, by seeking to recover models of ethical settlers while also attempting to persuade other settlers to emulate their beliefs, values, and actions. To put it another way, this work is my attempt to recover ethical ancestors—exemplary elders whose dispositions and acts we might emulate—amongst those settlers who contributed to the early sparks of the modern Hawaiian movement.
Race, Class, And Identity Formation Among The Portuguese Of Hawaiʻi 1880–1930
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) DeMattos, Michael Christopher; Gonzalez, Vernadette V.; American Studies
This dissertation explores Portuguese race and class formation in Hawai‘i from the first organized and structured immigration in the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century when Joaquim Francisco Freitas published Portuguese Hawaiian Memories. This was a key historical period in the Islands for the Portuguese, but also for other immigrant groups, the haole economic elite, and Native Hawaiians as the sugar industry became a dominant force directly impacting the sociocultural, economic, and political aspects of Island life. Utilizing and examining the works and actions of the Portuguese themselves I show the various ways they coalesced as a people forming a unique identity while also assuming a significant role in the cultural tapestry of the Islands.The Portuguese of Hawai‘i are under-studied and under-researched as a group. More troubling than the lack of scholarly interest is the assumption that extant scholarship and research on the group is sufficient to understand them as a people and their contributions to the unique multicultural fabric of Hawai‘i. Recruited in the late nineteenth-century as white European settlers and to extend the labor force on the plantations, the Portuguese occupied a liminal race and class space in Island society serving as a buffer between the haole economic elite and Asian labor both on and off the plantations. Racial logics active at the turn of the twentieth-century created a hierarchy among haole, Kanaka Maoli, and other groups imported to work the plantations with the Portuguese initially enjoying preferred minority status. This preferred status had race and class determined boundaries which the Portuguese found difficult to overcome. The Portuguese of Hawai‘i formed an unique identity from the tension created by their aspirations and their race and class assignment as a people. Never haole, sometimes white, but always local, the Portuguese have much to teach us about race and class formation in general, but also about how these processes manifested in Hawai‘i in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Indigenous Asian Muslim Refugees: The Complex Identities of Cham Americans
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Mostiller, Marimas Hosan; McDougall, Brandy N.; American Studies
Cham peoples are a hyper invisibilized community who are generally not seen or are misunderstood in public platforms. Although Cham peoples have multiple identities as Indigenous Asian Muslim refugees, or children of refugees, we are never viewed as bearing these multiple identities. Instead, we are viewed as bearing only one identity and are singularly racialized in that capacity. In this way, our intersectional identity is erased. This dissertation argues that Cham intersectional identity is erased through a transnational network by which state and social institutions in the U.S., Vietnam, Cambodia, and the United Nations reduce and homogenize our intersectional identity, maintaining our invisibility in national and international platforms. This dissertation argues that social and state institutions socially construct, racialize, and erase our intersectional identity through multiple mediums, including through institutional labeling, cultural representations of Champa at museum and tourist sites and mass media, and racial stereotypes. Utilizing a Critical Refugee Studies lens and Yến Lê Espiritu’s conception of “critical juxtaposition,” this dissertation critically juxtaposes two social categories, “Indigenous” and “refugee,” which are often viewed as separate identities. As our communities are not nationally or internationally recognized as Indigenous peoples of present-day Vietnam, this dissertation interrogates how nomenclature plays a role in erasing our Indigenous identity and perpetuating colonialism. Laws meant to protect marginalized communities privilege the nation-state as the governing body determines who is and is not worthy of the state’s protection. This dissertation also critically juxtaposes two other social categories, “Asian” and “Muslim,” and shows how we are racialized in both capacities. As Asian Americans and Muslims, we experience both forms of racialization successively in the same space. In this way, as perceived Asians, we are viewed as model minorities until we are racialized as Muslim terrorists. The Cham Muslim American experience shows how Muslims are pathologized against Asian American stereotypes. Despite these multiple racializations, Cham Muslim American communities have forged a collective identity and fight against assimilation by emphasizing Muslim identity. In addition, within Muslim spaces, this dissertation discusses authenticity politics of Muslimness and Chamness, as Cham Muslims and other Asian Muslims are not viewed as authentically Muslim by other Arab Muslim missionaries. By understanding the complexity of Cham identities, we can better support social justice and anti-racist initiatives that may overlook or neglect smaller invisible communities.
Moving from the Margins to the Center: Elevating the Space on Kahoʻolawe through a Modern Navigational Platform
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Iaukea, Lesley Kehaunani; Chapman, William R.; American Studies
The first Hawaiian Renaissance took place in the 1880s during the reign of King Kalākaua. A second Hawaiian Renaissance occurred in the 1970s and included numerous forms of resistance, agency, and empowerment of an Indigenous culture, although within a colonial context. I start with the catalyst event of the Kalama Valley evictions to show how a community comes together in peaceful, non-violent direct action to protest and spark a cultural resurgence in oral traditions. This dissertation examines the two main social movements, The Protect Kahoʻolawe ‘Ohana and the Polynesian Voyaging Society, that emerged from this era, and showcases how Native Hawaiians negotiated pathways of knowledge through these movements by reclaiming, reasserting, and reconceptualizing Hawaiian identity in modern times. The power of the two movements joining together in 2004 created a dynamic and collaborative space for traditional voyaging practices to be recognized and practiced, thereby elevating the sacred island of Kahoʻolawe. The voyaging scientific and cultural concepts and practices are, once again, coming back into the main framework of the Hawaiian culture and allow for a conscious mindset of possibilities that open up a space for voyaging practices, lessons in stewardship, and the aloha ‘āina philosophy. I used three methodologies: (1) geospatial technology analysis through GIS mapping of two navigational platforms, the Moaʻulaiki Navigational Platform and the Kuhikeʻe Navigational Platform; (2) quantitative analysis of traditions and practices; and (3) Indigenous research methods in moʻolelo, mele, oli, and elements of reference (stars, sun, and moon). Data has been collected from numerous archives, nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers and literature, published reports, Hawaiian cosmology and genealogical chants, and aerial pictures from drone technology. I used the results from my extensive research and fieldwork on Kahoʻolawe to create a Hawaiian pedagogy along with a voyaging-based curriculum designed for navigational students to learn and practice at the Kuhikeʻe Navigational Platform on the island of Kahoʻolawe but also anywhere else in the world.
Becoming Digital Chattel: A Media Archaeology Of Black Cybernetic Subjectivity And The Plantation Informatics Of Internet Culture
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Goldberg, David Albert Mhadi; Eagle, Jonna; American Studies
As surely as the prison industrial complex developed in the wake of US chattel slavery, the twenty-first century digital subject is an object of surveillance, commoditization, simulation, mediation, and algorithms that extend slavery’s information-management, control, and representational strategies. This project conceptualizes the roles that information and data processing played in dehumanizing captured Africans and their descendants, and also proposes a more than analogous relationship between US chattel slavery and contemporary, technologically-determined, social configurations. The resulting centuries-spanning complex, what I call Immaculate Slavery, connects past to future, and Africa’s Gold Coast to California’s Silicon Valley. This interdisciplinary project braids various threads of media history, Black studies, materialist philosophy, Internet culture, and software engineering methodology. I analyze how chattel slavery’s anti-Black stereotypes and ideological concepts survived Abolition to inhabit and animate artifacts of symbolic slavery: derogatory literary caricatures, cartoons, toys, corporate mascots like Aunt Jemima, and household objects. This material and media culture has been supplanted by digital objects such as racist animated GIFs, avatars that perpetuate anti-Black stereotypes, and photorealistic Black digital puppets created for cinematic visual effects and video games. I attend to the ways that a historical Black reliance on “positive” media representations in media such as film and comic books is destabilized by the use of Black avatars and other racial prosthetics online, and by media that ostensibly criticizes Immaculate Slavery through the depiction of traumatized Black characters. I argue that even though the presence of Black characters can often counter anti-Black stereotypes, they do not always function as objects of symbolic liberation. Instead of portraying the agency and creativity that facilitated Black survival to complicate these dystopian narratives, Black characters are reduced to Black Digital Icons that are deployed to shock and horrify the audience, thereby revisiting the horrors of slavery via technology-driven allegories. As a result, Immaculate Slavery is portrayed as inescapable and if a Black character can’t escape in a work of fiction that is supposed to criticize reality, then neither can those who live the reality that is being subject to criticism. Ultimately, I propose the conception of alternative forms of Black cybernetic subjectivity that, on the one hand are not based on many-to-one representations (hero identification), and on the other not dissolved in the many-to-many representations of social media. The Black avatar as I am imagining it is not an anthropomorphic representation of an idealized protagonist or social configuration, but an interface for massively complex software objects that are built with Black-aligned storytelling platforms, design tools, GitHub repositories, Stack Exchanges, programming languages, database schemas, and machine learning algorithms. This project does not imagine a “separate but equal” cyberspace, but a separate and radically different one.
Sweet Leilani Syndrome: The Statehood Movement, Tourism, and Music in 1930s Hawaiʻi
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Otto, Jesse Jacob; Chapman, William R.; American Studies
In 1930s Hawai‘i, the statehood movement allied with the tourism industry to use the music industry to market their causes on a global scale using a fantasy that presented the islands as a feminized and exoticized, yet white-dominated space. White elites had used this fantasy, built on old racist ideas from the US continent, for decades before the 1930s while actively working in many ways to make Hawai‘i into a white space in both reality and the colonial imaginary. A key component of this process was the work of the tourism industry in collaboration with the US continental music industry to replace an island industry and culture innovated largely by Kānaka Maoli with haole musicians and popular styles of music from the US continent. Harry Owens, a haole from the US continent, became the most prominent musician in the process initially as musical director on the internationally popular government funded radio show Hawaii Calls and shortly after through his music being featured in hit motion pictures. Owens’ autobiography, music, TV show, and the movies with which he was associated were built on tourism’s distorted image of the islands. The formulaic nature of these commodities fueled the spread of tourism and pro-statehood messaging as it granted spokespeople like Harry Owens a sense of authenticity and authority that Americans found credible because it conformed to and confirmed their false notions of Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture and music. Statehood and tourism advocates’ successful use of the music industry brought about profound changes for individual musicians in the islands including new opportunities along with challenges to navigate. The entertainment industry’s use of this fantasy to market Hawai‘i proved so profitable that this fantasy remains the foundation of entertainment industry commodities depicting the islands into the twenty-first century.
Migrating Beyond the Mattingan: Chamoru Diasporic Routes, Indigenous Identities, and Public Exhibitions
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Bennett, Jesi Lujan; McDougall, Brandy N.; American Studies
This dissertation demonstrates how Chamoru history is rooted in mobility, yet waves of colonization within the Mariana Islands have also heavily dictated the ways and places our people move and migrate. I utilize my theoretical concept, Chamoru diasporic routes, to examine Chamoru mobility in relation to colonialism and the community building that takes place in the continental United States through archival research, testimonies, creative writings, interviews, museum exhibitions, and participant observations. I apply a long-range view of Chamoru migration, beginning with examples predating colonial powers in the Marianas and moving into the present day, where we continue to move and expand our world. Throughout this project, I argue that Chamoru diasporic routes are characterized by a crucial truth: colonialism has and continues to play a major role in the mobility of Chamorus. As a concept, Chamoru diasporic routes also recognizes how Chamorus in 2021 actively stay rooted in their home islands despite intergenerational decisions to move away from, or conditions that may have forced them to relocate, such as the continued militarization of the Marianas. Despite this distance, we continue to build communities in new geographic and cultural spaces. While the concept of Chamoru diasporic routes helps analyze how colonial pathways shape mobilities, it also reveals how we continue to express and celebrate our island ancestry, especially within Chamoru-run festivals. This project considers the role and importance of how our diasporic communities are connected to those living in the Mariana Islands and the types of relationships we maintain with one another.
Chased Women, NASCAR Dads, And Southern Inhospitality: How NASCAR Exports Southern Culture
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2020) Ladner, Ava Huston Kawailiula; Stannard, David; American Studies
This work explores the relationship between southern culture and NASCAR. The sport began in 1948 in Daytona Beach, Florida, though its history can be traced back to moonshine running in the Blue Ridge Mountains. NASCAR’s innate sense of southern culture means that the sport employs and exports the region's behaviors and attitudes. These messages manifest themselves through patriarchy, violence, racism, misogyny, anti-intellectualism, religiosity, and the traditions that accompany these elements. As NASCAR reaches between 3 and 5 million fans 36 weeks a year, the sport can consistently proffer these messages to its audience. This project argues that NASCAR is a conduit for problematic messages that are continually digested and regurgitated across the US. This relationship furthers the cycle of the South, both being apart and a part of the country, demonstrating how the South reflects the US and acts as its own culture. The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the pathologies that the sport delivers to the country and how they are derived from the South’s historical conventions.
After The Ruins: The 9/11 Complex, Memory, And The Global War On Terror
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2020) Morikawa, Tomoaki; Kosasa, Karen; American Studies
While once a place that defined Lower Manhattan as the mecca of international business, the World Trade Center was destroyed and turned into a site of national trauma called “Ground Zero” by the events of 9/11. Right after the terrorist attacks, efforts to recover and reconstruct the site were quickly taken, and now, a memorial complex stands there. Naming it the Ground Zero memorial complex, this dissertation attempts to understand the significance of this place within the American landscape and American history. For this purpose, I closely trace the reconstruction process of the WTC site and examine the rebuilt memorial complex mainly consisting of the primary tower One World Trade Center, the memorial Reflecting Absence, and the National September 11 Museum. At the same time, I make a methodological decision to move beyond Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan in time and space. Guided by the notion that the site is the focal point of the flow of violence that is foundational to the U.S., this dissertation shifts the sites of investigation from Lower Manhattan to Vietnam, the U.S.-Mexico border, Hawai‘i, and Hiroshima. By situating the Ground Zero memorial complex within much larger contexts, I reveal that the WTC site was reconstructed into a place that sanctioned violence as a result of the American violence perpetrated globally following the 9/11 events. The Ground Zero memorial complex is thus a battleground where people may not physically lose their lives, but are encouraged to sanction the logic of the Global War on Terror as well as other ideological and physical wars waged on behalf of the U.S. To some visitors, the site may appear apolitical and neutral. It may appear to be dedicated to consoling and healing a wounded nation. However, the Ground Zero memorial complex is much more complex than it seems.
Cold War In The Heartland: Transpacific Exchange And The Iowa Literary Programs
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) Liu, Yi-hung; Yoshihara, Mari; American Studies
Titled “Cold War in the Heartland,” this dissertation investigates the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW) and the International Writing Program (IWP) against the backdrop of the Cold War and the ongoing Chinese Civil War. By tracking the enterprise of the IWW and the IWP through a transpacific framework, this dissertation implies that “Cold War freedom” has conditioned our ways of doing literature and imagining political futures. Through the two Iowa literary programs, this dissertation presents a history of U.S. cultural Cold War with a focus on the exchange between the United States, the Republic of China in Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China. Having become a renowned writing program under the directorship of Paul Engle, the IWW welcomed in 1964 a female Chinese writer from the ROC, Nieh Hualing, with whom Engle co-founded the IWP in 1967. As this dissertation suggests, Engle’s close relationship with the U.S. government evidences that the achievement of the two Iowa programs was associated with U.S. cultural diplomacy, while Nieh’s transpacific movement attests to how U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis “China” from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was instrumental to the making of the IWW and the IWP. Mining English and Chinese archives that are related to the Engles and the U.S. diplomacy, this dissertation uncovers that the U.S. fought the Cold War under the banner of cultural exchange on both sides of the Pacific. The IWW and the IWP were embedded in the Sino-U.S. relationships and Cold War bipolarity. “Cold War in the Heartland” also attends to writers to reveal that the cultural exchange conducted at and through the two Iowa literary programs involved a number of stakeholders and yielded unpredictable results. American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver responded to the social circumstances of the 1960s U.S. in their works during their time at the IWW. Vonnegut engaged himself with the antiwar movement and opposed U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, while Carver exposed the division between classes in a supposedly equal, affluent society. Chen Yingzhen and Wang Anyi, coming respectively from the ROC and the PRC, encountered each other at the IWP. In Iowa City, they dealt with political and personal divisions as a result of the Chinese Civil War. By analyzing the actions and writings of the IWW and the IWP participants, this dissertation argues that the two Iowa literary programs were undergirded by the entanglements of the intimate and the geopolitics. Iowa City as a community of writers and a City of Literature was not only an outcome of the cultural Cold War, but also a series of wars between the nation-states, literary ideals, cultural identities, and individuals.
Father Nurtures Best: Neoliberal Melodrama Of Beset Nurturing Fatherhood In The Late Twentieth Century
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018-12) Sekiguchi, Yohei; Sands, Kathleen; American Studies
Offering the first sustained critical analysis of the cultural interaction between melodramas of the nurturing fatherhood and the emergent ideology of neoliberalism, my dissertation explores the representation of white middle-class fathers in late-twentieth-century American literature and movies. The nurturing father is a poster child of neoliberalism: he is represented as an entrepreneur who individually manages his time and skills; taking care of kids is represented not as a tiresome drudgery but as a part of a white middle-class father’s self-investment which enhances his (children’s) human capital. The nurturing father’s pain and suffering are instrumental in understanding the cultural interaction between neoliberalism and melodrama. Echoing the anxiety that special rights given to groups are violating white middle-class men’s rights as individuals, the melodrama of the nurturing father implicitly contests the law’s protection of mothers as a gendered group and its intervention into private issues. Furthermore, the nurturing father is almost always represented as white middle-class with African American and/or working-class deadbeat fathers serving as counterpoints. By critically examining the significance of the freedom and self-government the white middle-class nurturing father embodies, this dissertation discusses how the melodrama of the nurturing father evokes and eases anxiety about a fatherless society. While traditionally the American family’s morality was predicated on the mother’s sentimental and religious power to secure home as the place of comfort, an oasis from the ravages of capitalism, morality and innocence in the age of neoliberalism are marked by the father’s choice to nurture human capital and become an independent subject in the market economy. Untangling the intertwined relationship between home and the world, this dissertation analyzes the significance of nurturing fatherhood as a lifestyle choice and traces the contested negotiation between production and reproduction in the age of neoliberalism.

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