What To Do With Settler Stories?

Abstract

Working from a critical settler perspective, this dissertation makes several interventions in colonial storytelling in and about Hawaiʻi through contrapuntal readings of texts across media and genre by settler authors or by US corporate media makers. In performing these readings I attend to the fantastic and its multi-genre stories of wonder as a strategy for making visible the settler colonial fantasies in literature of Hawaiʻi by settler authors as well as in corporate action detective and action sf television. These readings are undertaken with hopes of generating resistant knowledge about the structures of belief that shape the identities and relationships to bodies and ancestors of settlers in Hawaiʻi, with an eye toward shifting and ultimately transforming settler relationships to ʻāina. I also consider texts by Kanaka Maoli and Pacific Islander authors that challenge settler colonial fantasies and build possibilities for imagining Indigenous futures and forms of relationship outside of settler colonial storytelling structures.