Blood work and other stories

Abstract

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.