ʻEliʻeli ʻAikū: Igniting Abolitionary Futures Beyond Settler Sovereignty

Abstract

Sovereignty is a carceral binary confining the futures of Kanaka Maoli to a state-based mode of domination, where liberation is presented as a struggle between the occupied, colonized Hawaiian Kingdom and the occupying, colonizing United States. My research finds that despite the apparent antagonism between the former and the latter, this state-based mode of domination is a politics that unites both Hawaiian and Haole in sovereign supremacy sustained through the incarceration of land as territory, the imprisonment of people as property, and the punishment of bodies as binary. Initiating an ethics of refusal that rejects Hawaiian and Haole state-based modes of domination, my research seeks not sovereignty within the binary but liberation from it. I therefore ask: what can a Hawaiian imagination do when no longer incarcerated within the solitary confinement that is sovereignty? In alignment with this inquiry, the purpose of my research is to transform the movement of our politics from Hawaiian sovereignty to Hawaiian liberation, where state-based modes of domination no longer confine the limits of our future. Turning to the visionary wisdom and practices of Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans anarcha-feminist abolitionists, I argue that we can prophesy in the present to dream of liberatory futures within and against, beneath and beyond the Hawaiian Kingdom and the United States.