A decolonial archive: The historical space of Asian settler politics in a time of Hawaiian nationhood

Abstract

I task this archive with creating a place of pausing. Outside of the prescriptive and diagnostic temporalities that are usual to politics, this locale paces un-thinking intimate attachments to colonial orders. Here, "un-thinking" hosts a double valence. As an adjective, it describes those attachments as unconscious directives of hegemony in everyday movements. As a verb, it acts on those attachments in material things that are inclusive, and in excess, of thought. Things like inheriting a family name, "everyday life," and feelings have political and economic rhythms that suffuse relationships to the colonial state (government, U.S. militaries, juridical institutions) and society (plantation owning elites, the health sector, academia, and the faith community). The decolonial archive is a theoretical apparatus for approaching structures that alternately invest Asian settlers in an American-Hawaii, tense against U.S. hegemony, and recuperate those tensions into attachments to America.To access the micrological textured of colonization, I've looked to the intimate paper-trails that my own family-names generate into one of Hawai'i's defining colonial institutions, the Territorial-era (1900-1959) plantation. These plantation communities were crucial arenas of the labor organizing, wartime economic expansion, patriotism and consumer socialization that contributed to the emergence of a new multiracial local ruling class in a post-Statehood epoch (1959). Their political and economic enfranchisement, gauged in increased property ownership, professional employment and public office-holding, has been adorned with liberatory signs of racial justice. But this format assumes only political-economic investments secure Asian settler allegiance to Hawai'i's U.S. occupation. To stop the translation of this history (acceleration of multiculturalism under globalization) into that evidence (proofs of American capitalism's capacity to incorporate difference), I archive Asian settlers colonialism in new capillary forms of power that target affect, feeling, sensation and memory. My use of the decolonial archive derails kinship's commitments to heteronormative conventions, while exploiting genealogy's idiomatic kinship with reproductive familiality to turn a (hetero)normative narrative of existential continuity into a narrative of political accountability to a Hawaiian-Hawaii.