Ph.D. - American Studies
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Item SCENES OF PEDAGOGY: ART AND THE POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY(2024) Lee, Boeun Billie; Kosasa, Karen K.; American StudiesItem Kuʻu Home ʻO Keaukaha: He Lei Moʻolelo No Ka ʻĀina Aloha (My Home, Keaukaha: A Lei Of Stories For Beloved Lands)(2024) Kapuni-Reynolds, Halena K.; McDougall, Brandy N.; American StudiesItem Politics of Expression: The Contemporary Native Hawaiian Visual Arts Movement(2023) Wray, Taylor Elaine; Kahanu, Noelle M.K.Y; Kosasa, Karen K.; American StudiesItem Hawaiʻi in Japanese Tourist Imaginary: Wedding, Hula, and Power Spot(2023) Oga, Eriko; Yoshihara, Mari; American StudiesItem FROM SITE OF INTERNMENT TO SITES OF CONSCIENCE: REPRESENTING HONOULIULI’S PRISONERS OF WAR AND CIVILIAN INTERNMENT CAMP(2023) Sakaguchi, Jo Ann Tatsumi; Kosasa, Karen K.; American StudiesItem CONTRADICTIONS OF AMERICAN EMPIRE: POWER AND RESISTANCE IN TURN-OF-THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE(2023) Fukunishi, Keiko; Eagle, Jonna; American StudiesItem (Under)Mining Empire: Towards Dangerously (Re)membering Diasporic Surigaonon Stories of Lands, Rocks, and People That Move(2023) Achacoso, Katherine; Gonzalez, Vernadette; American StudiesItem African American Literature and African American Studies in China, 1933–1977: Contacts, Translation, and Literary Internationalism(2023) Li, Guoqian; Yoshihara, Mari; American StudiesItem 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 StudiesThis 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.Item An Ethics of Settler Decolonization: Non-Hawaiians in Relationship with Hawaiians(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Narikawa, Logan; McDougall, Brandy N.; American StudiesThis 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.