Ph.D. - English

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/2053

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Blood work and other stories
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Carreira Ching, Donald; Kahakauwila, Kristiana; English
Blood Work and Other Stories is a short story collection, consisting of seventeen stories set in contemporary Hawaiʻi, primarily the Koʻolaupoko district of Oʻahu. The characters in these stories find themselves at the center of challenges that many in Hawaiʻi face, including a perceived rise in crime, gentrification and overdevelopment, and the ongoing meth epidemic. Key themes include an exploration of identity, historical and intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, militarization, colonialism, and family dynamics. The dissertation aims to challenge the problematic aesthetics of “local” literature as well as several learned aesthetics of realism and modernism. In doing so, the dissertation engages directly with and interrogates the perspectives and ideologies at play in the stories while at the same time offering an example of a more ethical path for settler writers in Hawaiʻi. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, ScholarSpace, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Donald A. Carreira Ching.
Making love in(to) the future: Queer indigenous literatures and the politics of aftercare
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Pruitt, River; Manshel, Hannah M.; English
Indigiqueer speculative fiction offers a reflection of colonial pasts and opens the window for potential Indigiqueer futures where we might survive and thrive. The author establishes aftercare as a methodology and a practice of reading essential to understanding the presence of care within literature in the post-apocalyptic contemporary and the ability of such care to transform and transfer across bodies, space, and time. The author additionally takes up a metaphor and methodology of traditional pottery making to encapsulate steps of embodied care through each chapter. This dissertation engages with the radical care present within/through Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, Leanne Simpson’s As We Have Always Done, Amanda Strong’s Biidaaban: The Dawn Comes, Louis Esmé Cruz’s “Birthsong for Muin, in Red,”Adam Garnet Jones’s “History of the New World,” jaye simpson’s “Ark of the Turtle’s Back,” as well as auto-ethnography, and considers how stories allow for transitions to new futures while simultaneously holding space for the complexities of loss and life, mourning and joy, and an abundance of queer Indigenous love. The author concludes that Indigiqueer speculative fiction as a genre offers us unique glimpses into futures of radical care that will help us become as we move toward more uncertain times.
Where does my mother end / where do I begin: A lyric memoir on matrescence and estrangement
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Huynh, Amanda Michelle Galvan; Kahakauwila, Kristiana; English
This creative dissertation is a hybrid nonfiction collection of essays and poems titled Where Does My Mother End / Where Do I Begin: A Lyric Memoir on Matrescence and Estrangement that follows a woman in early adulthood through her journey of adult child estrangement while she embarks on becoming a new mother. The collection walks alongside the narrator as she begins to understand and mourn the true nature of her co-enmeshed relationship with her mother and the emotional abusive cycles tied to the women in her family. As she begins to distance herself from her mother, she ultimately makes the difficult decision to go no-contact in order to protect herself once she finds out she is pregnant with her first child. The aftermath of this estrangement weaves across time and countries as the journey of healing and forgiveness begins. The narrator confronts how to become a mother without a mother, how to reparent herself in anticipation of her own child’s arrival, and how to move forward as an estranged daughter. The themes and ideas found in this creative dissertation center around the heritage of mothering in relation to intergenerational trauma, healing, transformation, and reclamation of self.
Trans-Pacific environmental studies: Indigenous literatures from Taiwan and the Pacific islands
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Lin, Chia-hua; Perez, Craig Santos; English
This study focuses on contemporary Indigenous literatures from Taiwan, Guam and Hawaiʻi to envision a decolonized Environmental Studies. The works discussed in this study include I Wish to Be a Fish Scale of the Ocean (2021) by Syaman Rapongan, Palisia Tongku Saveq (2008) by Neqou Soqluman, Habitat Threshold (2020) by Craig Santos Perez, and The Salt-Wind: Ka Makani Pa`akai (2008) by Brandy Nālani McDougal. The theoretical frameworks of this research are Trans-Pacific ecopoetics, Trans-Indigenous studies, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Hawaiian and Pacific literary studies, and Taiwanese Indigenous literary studies. This study highlights the voices and worldviews of Indigenous Taiwanese and Pacific Islanders and creates center-to-center dialogues among Indigenous Taiwanese and Pacific Islanders to challenge and expand Western-centric Environmental Studies. The specific fields of Environmental Studies revisited in this research are ecotopia (chapter one), Sacred Ecology (chapter two), Environmental Justice (chapter three), and Deep Ecology (chapter four). This study points out the problem that Indigenous Taiwanese and Pacific Islanders are still essentialized, romanticized, and exploited in the study of Environmental Studies, and argues for a centering of the Island perspective and Indigenous Taiwanese and Pacific Islanders’ worldviews since most scholarships in Environmental Studies still focus on land/continent. This study reads the agency and resilience of Indigenous Taiwanese and Pacific Islanders in their voicing out to the mainstream Environmental Studies and shaping a more sustainable and just future.
HOW TO SAY MY NAME IN THUNDER
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Suneja, Shilpi; Shankar, Subramanian; English
The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, ScholarSpace, https:// scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Shilpi Suneja. This creative dissertation is a novel titled HOW TO SAY MY NAME IN THUNDER that dramatizes an admissions scandal at an Ivy League university, its aftermath, and the academic journeys of three Asian American women at the institution thereafter. When Meera Singh erroneously admits an inadmissible applicant into the Graduate School of Design, she has to face the faculty and the deans for a hearing and face the prospect of losing her dream job. After a surprising turn of events and amid fears of backlash from irate parent groups and media, Winter Wang—Singaporean, 40-ish, and a resident of the Admission Office's "do-not-respond" folder—comes to Houghton. As soon as she lands, Winter leans on Meera, the only person in all of Houghton who's been kind to her (at least on email) for intellectual, emotional, and moral support. But Meera is a house of cards on the verge of collapse: her relationship with the economics professor is on the rocks, and her colleagues at the writing program hate her stories. Then there is Afrooz, a 20-something Arab woman, a favorite of the program, who is not happy about having to share her funding with Winter. At a school that values excellence above all else, the women attempt to outdo each other in academics and in love with disastrous consequences, questioning the idea of merit and the emotional cost of meritocracy.
Preparing High School Students for the 21st Century through Critical and Community-Engaged Pedagogies: An Examination of the Efficacy of Competency-Based Learning
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Clapp, Kaela; Nordstrom, Georganne; English
Over the last two decades, increasingly scholarship has promoted pedagogies and curricular frameworks that push students to develop skills that transfer between disciplines and outside of classroom contexts. There are a number of kairotic moments that are taking hold of our society today that warrant a shift in education. As new AI tools emerge, professional career paths change, and global challenges progress, secondary education must adapt to meet the needs of contemporary learners. This dissertation examines progressive frameworks in secondary education, including Competency-Based Learning (CBL), Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and Project-Based Learning (PBL), to understand the intersection with community engaged pedagogies in composition studies. Through this examination, this dissertation attends to the following research question: How do SEL and CBL align with the goals of critical pedagogy in terms of impact on student engagement and their ability to be critically reflective? This project details the scholarship in CBL (Levine and Patrick; Aurora Institute) and SEL (Comer; CASEL) alongside critical pedagogy (Freire; Macedo; hooks; Shor; Kincheloe), place-based pedagogy (Ball and Lai; Esposito; Gruenewald), indigenous pedagogy (Johnson; Powell; ho'omanawanui; Lyons), collaborative learning (Bruffee; Trimbur; Yonezawa and Jones; Cochran-Smith and Lytle), and community engagement (Honnet and Poulsen; Cushman). The scholarly conversation situates my IRB-approved study, “An Approach to Teaching Place, Perspective, and Partnership in Ninth Grade,” which investigates the efficacy of a co-taught, interdisciplinary course grounded in CBL. Using the pilot course, Global Sustainability by Design: Place, Partnership, and Perspective as a case study, this dissertation ultimately contributes to the discussion and understanding of the ways in which CBL and SEL action values and concepts outlined in critical pedagogy, creating frameworks for implementing progressive educational approaches into high school settings.
REALITIES REIMAGINED: ACCESSING FANTASTIC BODIES AND MINDS THROUGH THE REALISTIC IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH FANTASY
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Ventura, Hsin-Yun Tsai; Feuerstein, Anna; English
The resurgence of fantasy literature in recent years inspired the reexamination of the connection between the possible and the impossible. Nineteenth-century Britain experienced remarkable social changes and developments. Political reforms, industrialization, modernization, feminist movements, and other forms of social movements greatly shifted the lives of its citizens. At the same time, these changes inspired a group of writers to create a new form of literature which included fantastic elements and yet varied from myths and legends. In addition, these writers also address the limitations of the prominent literary form—realism—exhibited. These fantasy texts are innovative and highly personalized with reflections of the fantasists’ psychological views and their social standings. This project examines how these writers utilize fantastic elements to connect and adapt to social changes while exercising their creative expressions. This project includes four major fantasy texts produced in the 19th century that display significance in defining social conditions in relation to individuals: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I identify a group of fantasy texts where the primary world is largely included while new rules are added to suit the authors’ specific needs. The fantastic elements are invented as additions to the world as we know it. These creations employ specific psychological powers to change personalities, engage with moral issues, and even transform social conditions.
Aunty Uncle Dog Chicken Bee
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Picard, Tiare; Zuern, John; English
Aunty Uncle Dog Chicken Bee is a collection of poetry that explores the precarity experienced by many communities in Hawaiʻi as a result of the growing economic gap between the people who live in the state. The poems are inspired by the neighbors who live in a small community and who share the space with the growing numbers of houseless people in Hawaiʻi. The series resists notions of Hawaiʻi as a “paradise” and brings into question the way in which groups are marginalized and ignored both by people who live in Hawaiʻi and people who live elsewhere. The collection explores poetic forms including prose poetry, lyric, sound poetry, and character sketches. Along with English, Hawaiʻi Pidgin weaves in and out of the poetry and reflects the movement of the languages used in neighborhoods and shared spaces. Bees are an ongoing motif throughout the poems. They act as symbols for the way that people meander in and out of each other’s lives and for the way that language and poetry work in tandem. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, ScholarSpace, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Tiare Picard.
The Moon Sees Me: Biographical fiction inspired by the real life of Albert D. J. Cashier & the Soldiers of the 95th Illinois Infantry
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2020) McAngus, Krystalynn; Howes, William C.; English
The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, Kahualike, kahualike.manoa.hawaii.edu. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Krystalynn McAngus.
Say When: A Novel
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Casey , Alexander Nicholas; Kahakauwila, Kristiana; English
Say When (novel) is a creative writing dissertation that follows transgender protagonist Tommy Catalano on a cross-country road trip to find his father’s lost time machine. Tommy hasn’t seen his father in ten years when he receives a call telling him the man has committed suicide and given Tommy his entire multi-million-dollar tech company. Only ninety-days sober and working a dead-end job, Tommy barely has time to process his sudden inheritance before he receives one more surprise: a time traveler from 1969 who claims Tommy’s father sent him to the future and he needs Tommy’s help to return to the past. In thirty chapters that navigate several different points of view and timelines, Say When maps the story of a family, a company, and a legacy, as Tommy and the time traveler road trip from California to New York to find the machine that will put their lives back on track. The critical introduction of this dissertation covers themes of queer temporality, the road trip genre, queer history from the 1950s onward, and the tech industry under late capitalism. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, ScholarSpace, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Alexander Casey.
Poquoson
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Long, Jeffery Ryan; Ryan, Shawna Yang; English
N/A
Intelligent Movement: Locked into the Dynamic, Improvisational, Synchronized, Collective Overstandings of Hip Hop and Heʻenalu as Language, Literature, and Literacy
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Davey, Lane Marie; Howes, Craig; English
Intelligent Movement advocates for the dynamic, improvisational, synchronized, collective overstandings of Hip Hop (deejaying, emceein, b-boyin, beatboxin, and graffiti) and heʻenalu (surfing) performance to be read as language, preserved as literature, and taught as critical literacies through the use of remix methodologies and multimedia. The first half of the dissertation (I-IV) lays out the theoretical foundation for DISCO pedagogy, which argues for a shift from the foundations of persuasive argument to fusion models of felt experience derived from deejay culture and heʻenalu, I provide an extensive analysis of traditional surfing moʻolelo, and performative African American Protest Literature to reveal alternative epistemologies and philosophies such as ubuntu, akamai, and ma ka hana ka ‘ike that prioritize relational experience over mediated consensus, and reprogram traditional norms through deviant, impolite improvisational performance. Drawing from Ngūgī wa Thiong’o’s reorganization of the literacy space, Foucault’s “subjugated knowledges” and Dwight Conquergood’s radical performance studies interventions, I argue that once taken seriously, DISCO can compete with the encryptions of Christendom and the colonizing mindset especially as the visual, aural, and kinetic aspects of writing composition are elevated to the same level of authority as alphabetic word. The second half of the dissertation (V.) is a sample of the performative literatures I propose in the first. As a lifelong member of these revolutionary subcultures, I combine memoir with substantial oral histories, over a decade of weekly surf news articles I wrote for publications such as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and a daily surf report that I have maintained on Twitter since 2008 to compose non-linear biographies of two surf spots: Pipeline and Ala Moana Bowls. I offer fresh approaches to life writing, highlighting geographic space and the outstanding performances taking place there to provide a critical reading across the barrel riding genre of heʻenalu on Oʻahu for over three decades. I apply the same template in my Hip Hop section to advocate for musical literacy and deejay culture’s dependence on transition effects, which hold the five elements together, linking them to heʻenalu and multimedia literacies. Subsequently, I provide new methods for documenting, archiving, and analyzing improvisational performance extending from my case studies of he‘enalu (surfing) and Hip Hop to the subcultures of 3-D animation, film, gaming, and other popular performative networks and new media.
Navigating (S)Pacific Classrooms: Exploring Indigenous Pacific Islander Metaphors in First-Year Composition
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Thompson, Norman; Nordstrom, Georganne; English
This dissertation argues for the use of metaphor as a means of teaching first-year composition that values Indigenous cultures and identities, and as a way for Indigenous non-Pacific Islander and Indigenous Pacific Islander students to be able to succeed in the college classroom. The research in this project draws upon the field of Indigenous and Western pedagogies, including Place, Land, and ‘Āina-based education, as well as that of Composition and Rhetoric, to articulate the complexity of literacy and learning practices in general, but particularly in Indigenous cultures, in order to make a case for metaphor as one way to address our struggles in the university setting, and writing courses specifically. One component of this project is to suggest that not enough is being done to combat the evolving landscape of education within which Indigenous students are striving to succeed. Another is to suggest that more accountability needs to be taken on the part of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous instructors in making sure we’re identifying and addressing the pedagogical needs of Indigenous students. Additionally, through a tracing of the history of English and Composition studies respectively, this project seeks to understand the origin(s) of the ongoing indifference between instructors of composition and of literature.
Indigenous Place in Virtual Space: Disrupting Western Approaches to Research and Pedagogy in an Online Course and Curriculum
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Nakahodo, Koreen Uto; Nordstrom, Georganne; English
The Caroline College and Pastoral Institute (CCPI) opened in 2010 in Weno, Chuuk. Students took classes online in community-built classrooms and faculty taught courses from outside of Chuuk. A 2016 study on the pass rates for EN102, Expository Writing, of students from CCPI compared to students taking the class on the Chaminade (CUH) campus in Honolulu indicated that students at CCPI were almost five times as likely to fail the same course taught over the same time period. As a result, English faculty from CCPI and CUH recommended that a bridge class, HU128, Approaches to Information Literacy, should be created for students in Chuuk. The class was developed and implemented, but did not provide the students with culturally appropriate methods of conducting research. The purpose of this study was to develop an ecologically based, culturally relevant, placed-based framework for students taking an online research course in Weno, Chuuk. As a means of assessing the framework and the larger Associates Degree curriculum, three groups of participants provided perspectives on Eurocentric/western research practices, articulated challenges due to cultural and geographic differences, and assessed the efficacy of the framework. Chuukese Educators were interviewed as a means of understanding Chuukese perspectives of western research. CCPI faculty, all non-Chuukese, and teaching online were surveyed on the challenges faced and solutions implemented for their courses. Finally, the students were surveyed on their perceptions of the framework. Findings from all three groups of participants argue for 1) integrating the community into research and other educational practices and curricula, 2) recognizing the hierarchy of the English language throughout the curriculum and the difficulty of translations between Chuukese and English, and 3) creating space for discussion and other collaborative practices.
Luminal Reality: An Exploration Of Queer Posthumanism In Liminal Thresholds
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Silliman, Amanda; Ryan, Shawna Yang; English
This dissertation seeks to expand the borders of Science/Speculative Fiction (SF) by reconceptualizing the posthuman as a queer literary figure capable of disrupting hegemonic systems of domination from within liminal spaces. The exploration of cybernetic systems and cyborg identities within the narrative are written in response to critiques of twentieth-century theorists on the destabilizing power of human, animal, and machine configurations. This dissertation thus depicts an interconnected collection of short stories that demonstrate how those with hybrid identities and not fully-human-subjectivities have a way to both discuss and exercise self-determination, in addition to empowering others to do the same. Collectively, these sections articulate social anxieties about the effects of surveillance capitalism and neoliberalist policies; and, ultimately, suggest potential strategies for reconciling those anxieties through communal collaboration and storytelling.
Refuse the Weather: Atmospheric Refusal and Selvage Praxis in the Work of Indigenous Pasifika and Black Feminist Creator Theorists
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Lys, LynleyShimat Renee; Perez, Craig; English
In this dissertation, I argue for the concept of atmospheric refusal, a way in which Black, Indigenous Pasifika, and Afro-Indigenous communities refuse overwhelming atmospheres of anti-Blackness, Indigenous genocide, and settler colonial nation-states in favor of their own pre-existing and ongoing epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmogonies. I draw from Maile Arvin’s concept of regenerative refusal, from Christina Sharpe’s concept of the weather as a totality of anti-Blackness, and from Hōkūlani Aikau’s concept of the alaloa kīpapa as a sky path of Indigenous knowledge. I propose the term atmospheric refusal – a refusal of imposed colonial atmospheres of oppression, in favor of ongoing Afro/Indigenous creative work that centers on gender, genre, and genesis. These authors also engage selvage praxis – re/weaving themselves, their families, and their polities into their work to maintain the integrity of the work, the way that weavers plait the edges of a basket, rug, or garment back into itself so that it maintains integrity and doesn’t unravel. The authors I engage in this dissertation refuse gender and genre limitations of colonial models, and ground their work in ongoing forms of genesis - ontologies, cosmogonies and genealogies that continue to generate themselves. A key element of this refusal includes re/weaving oneself, one’s family, and one’s community and polity into the work, and the refusal of binary genre divisions between literature and orature, between literature and craft practices, and between literature and literary criticism, theory, and philosophy. For this reason, I engage with all work by these authors as creative and intellectual work. Following their lead, I refuse Western colonial concepts of genre that would try to silo these works into imposed categories of creative versus intellectual or art versus theory. I refer to this re/grounding of self and community and this refusal of imposed genres and the correlating embrace of combined forms of creative, intellectual, and theoretical work as selvage praxis. Selvage praxis may take the form of poetry with theoretical underpinnings, theory written in lyric prose or personal narrative style, or work with multiple genres included. Multi-genre work of this nature also calls to orature and socio-religious texts such as the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, and Hawaiian and Pasifika texts such as the Kumulipo and moʻolelo, as well as West African syncretic religious orature and literature. Selvage praxis is a key element of atmospheric refusal. In many Indigenous and West African traditions, cosmogony is inherently generative, and tied to ancestry - continuing generations add to the creation of the cosmogony. Thus, the refusals I examine form part of an ongoing cosmogony, which has existed in pre-colonial times, in parallel to colonialism, and continues to exist in ongoing forms that bridge into the future. I tie my framework and methodology to Indigenous Theory, Black Feminist Theory, and the intersections between them, to scholars of Blackness including Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Michelle M. Wright, and Tiffany Lethabo King; and to Indigenous scholars including Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Dian Million, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Hōkūlani Aikau, kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, and Brandy Nālani McDougall. Grounded within these frameworks, I analyze Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous literatures using the lens of atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis. Overview of Chapters Each chapter of this work engages a pair of writers and examines how the writers engage atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis in their work. The first chapter focuses on the work of Kanaka ʻŌiwi writers Haunani-Kay Trask and Hōkūlani Aikau. I read selections from Trask’s Light in the Crevice Never Seen and Night is a Sharkskin Drum, with the lens of writing by Brandy Nālani McDougall, as activist and intellectual practice, and embodied and aesthetic theory, in conjunction with reading atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis in Aikau’s “Following the Alaloa Kīpapa of Our Ancestors: A Trans-Indigenous Futurity without the State (United States or otherwise).” I argue that these authors engage atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis in these works, rejecting binary divisions between critical and creative work in favor of Kanaka ʻŌiwi centered cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual practices that move beyond imposed Western forms of genre, gender, and genesis. They reject atmospheres which are both figuratively and literally toxic in order to embrace Kanaka ʻŌiwi ways of knowing and being, including the necessity of self, family, and polity. The second chapter focuses on Katerina Teaiwa’s Consuming Ocean Island and work by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, including the multimedia performance “Lorro: Of Wings and Seas,” the poem video “Anointed” and Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. I argue that these works enact atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis – refusing Western colonial atmospheres and re/weaving Indigenous Pasifika worldviews and communities. Teaiwa infuses multiple genres, including personal narrative, cartographies, and images into her work to move beyond Western forms of criticism and history writing to an embodied and aesthetic theory and intellectual practice rooted in Banaban ways of knowing and being. Jetñil-Kijiner creates aesthetic forms in multiple genres to re/claim Marshallese intellectual, aesthetic, and embodied forms of knowledge, including the practice of weaving as intellectual, theoretical, and activist practice. The third chapter engages with concepts of Blackness in Oceania in Teresia Teaiwa’s work and Kaiya Aboagye’s “Australian Blackness, the African Diaspora and Afro/Indigenous Connections in the Global South.” I also bring in background from “Black and Blue in the Pacific,” which Teaiwa contributed to and edited, and from Bla(c)kness in Australia, in which Aboagye’s work appears. These works consider the intersections of Blackness, Indigeneity, and Aboriginal ways of knowing and being. I argue that these works engage atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis as well as bringing together Black and Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmogonies. The fourth chapter focuses on Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and Dionne Brand’s Bread Out of Stone: Recollections Sex Recognitions Race Dreaming Politics and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. In the context of Black Feminist Theory and Black Queer Theory, these works engage atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis, refusing the limits of Western criticism in order to embrace embodied, aesthetic, and political forms of Black epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmogonies. I argue that Sharpe and Brand refuse the boundaries between critical and creative work, as well as figuratively and literally toxic atmospheres of anti-Blackness, in order to re/assert Black women’s and Black queer ways of knowing and being. The conclusion ties together the discussion of these authors’ engagement of atmospheric refusal and selvage praxis. I provide an overview of the ways that Aikau, Trask, Katerina Teaiwa, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Teresia Teaiwa, Aboagye, Sharpe, and Brand refuse colonial atmospheres and re/weave themselves, their family backgrounds, and their communities and polities into their work, across Indigenous, African Diaspora, and Afro-Indigenous communities and polities. I suggest paths forward that build on these practices.
Juliette May Fraser: A Kama'āina Life in Art
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Weiner, Sharon Rose; Howes, Craig; English
Juliette May Fraser (1887-1983) was distinguished as the first artist born in Hawai'i whose artistic focus was on Hawaiian myth, culture and nature. Her earliest mural (1938) was produced for a World's Exhibition in San Francisco and is now displayed at Hamilton Library at the University of Hawai'i. Her murals focusing on Hawaiian myths grace the walls of public building in Hawai'i including the State Library, the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and Bilger Hall at the University. May Fraser was also an accomplished writer, producing her book Ke Anuenue in 1952 and contributing numerous articles of art criticism for Honolulu newspapers. Later in life she frescoed and painted every inch of a small chapel in Chios, Greece as a "gift from the people of Hawai'i to the people of Greece." A Fraser mosaic mural greets students and staff when the arrive at Mid-Pacific Institute and her sweeping Mexican tile mural welcomes students to Benjamin Parker School. She attended Punahou School in Honolulu, Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the Art Students League (ASL) in New York.
What Became of the Birds
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Lazarus, Joshua; Ryan, Shawna Yang; English
The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, Kahualike, kahualike.manoa.hawaii.edu. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Joshua Lazarus.
Transnational Kinship—Neoliberal Peace and Economic Violence in Vietnamese American Literature and Culture
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Vo, Quynh H.; Fujikane, Candace; English
This dissertation argues that Vietnamese movement to France and the US is animated by similar rhetorics of freedom under neoliberal forms of choice and the free market: France offers “liberté, egalité, fraternité” and the US offers the “gift of freedom.” This slippage from French colonialism to US imperialism deepens the ideological, cultural, and economic precarity of Vietnamese displaced communities. 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the United States–Vietnam normalization (1995–2020), but the gaping chasm between Vietnamese nationals and Vietnamese Americans remains seemingly insurmountable. This ongoing antagonism is exacerbated by the way that Vietnamese communities still inhabit asynchronous temporalities and navigate different ideological representations that shatter their kinship. An interdisciplinary project, this dissertation weaves together literary analysis and personal narratives to scrutinize Vietnamese Americans’ relationships to Vietnamese nationals; to histories of war, colonialism, and US neoliberal empire; and to each other. While presenting new readings of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2016), Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003), Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) in juxtaposition with testimonies from Vietnamese American communities, this study posits “transnational kinship” as a conceptual approach and political framework to complicate power intimacies, asymmetric economies of memory, trauma and healing; and to illuminate the heterogeneity of Vietnamese American communities in literature and culture. Drawing on the seminal works of David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Michel Foucault, David L. Eng, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Yen Le Espiritu, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and others, this dissertation builds on theories of transnationalism studies, kinship, memory, critical refugee studies and neoliberalism to reimagine a reconciliatory futurity through transnational kinship or borderless migration of knowledge, memory, culture, and history in the face of neoliberal peace or economic violence that engenders assemblages of incommensurable structures and discourses. Structured as four chapters, this dissertation begins by parsing Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt and interviews with Vietnamese American personalities in light of the longue durée of Vietnamese history to show how the colonial apparatus has gone into reverse, highlighting the mobility of colonial subjects back to the center of colonial power, Paris where they negotiate belongings through a transnational kinship. Alongside an exegesis of Vietnamese American testimonies, chapter two revisits the lingering animosity between Vietnamese nationals and Vietnamese Americans represented in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, investigating how this tension intersects with incompatible representations of war and memory. Chapter three examines neoliberal economies of reciprocation in Le Ly Hayslip’s memoirs in conversation with personal narratives from Vietnamese American personalities. Chapter four centers on Ocean Vuong’s semiautobiogrphical novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in conversation with voices from the Little Saigon enclave, showing how creating beauty becomes a coping mechanism for refugees in the face of the unequal freedom and incommensurable economies that jeopardize their lives.
The Family Body
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2020) Wieting, Julia; Ryan, Shawna Yang; English
The Family Body is a verse novel reimagining the Osiris myth cycle, a central narrative in ancient Egyptian religion, as a modern family drama that explores the emergent nature of sibling relatedness in the face of moral ambiguity and crises of identity. The work reduces narrative structure to alternating, character-identified verse forms that act both as fragmentary leitmotifs and as vocative indicators of fluctuating moral self-awareness. The novel’s elliptical qualities interrupt readerly expectations of denouement in order to complicate notions of relatedness in mythic, narrative, and familial terms. The effect foregrounds characters’ interiority by fusing lyrical intimacy with narrative structure. The verse novel comprises five chapters. Chapter one details the central conflict of the Osiris myth, which is a pair of murders, and establishes the verse forms of the main characters. Chapter two positions this conflict as the outcome of a family narrative that operates along a continuum of dysfunction and mistrust arising from the dynamics of marriage and the politics of professionalization. The narrative as a whole is presented as a type of archive. Chapter three is the quest to resolve the conflict, which doubles as a circumnavigating meditation on human material culture and archetypal roles. Chapter four tells the anti-quest of the home front, presenting the stakes that arise from creating conflict and accepting accountability for it. Chapter five is concerned with aftermath, and questions how a conflict’s successful resolution creates its own problems, such as how to identify with the conflict, its outcome, or its retelling. The end of one story proliferates new stories and new insights into received ones. In addition to adapting the Osiris myth, this verse novel explores academic identity as socialized and socializing, and suggests that forms of institutional relatedness, whether genetic, domestic, or intellectual, are prone to imbalance when the psychological and emotional motives driving them are obscure, often in large part through the dynamics of reproduction. Institutional practices and spaces -- papers, maintenance, libraries, models, conferences -- become arenas in which to productively literalize research as an iterative process of charting new paths among the seemingly already known, as sexual reproduction does analogously through a family’s genome. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, Kahualike, kahualike.manoa.edu. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Julia Wieting.

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