In this hybrid (both web-based plus face-to-face
instructional modes) course run in a workshop format, we will write 4 papers
exploring the intersections between race and settler colonialism in Hawai’i
through sociological, feminist, and political-economic perspectives. For
the first part of the class, we will engage recent public policy vs. private
sector debates as expressed in The Value of Hawai’i: Knowing the Past, Shaping
the Future, reading them against articles from Social Process in Hawai‘i: A
Reader, The Price of Paradise, and other sources, in order to locate our
racial-ethnic, regional, national, or other cultural groups within the economic
framework of Hawai‘i as a peripheral, militarized American colony in a
globalized/ing planet. You will write two short philosophical essays
demonstrating your knowledge of these materials: one on the complexities of the
structural position of your social group within Hawai‘i, and one on the
economic ideologies common within your social group/s and how you may subscribe
or depart from these belief systems. In the second half of the class, we will
translate and then interrogate portrayals of gender and sexuality within
racialized representations of Hawai‘i and the Pacific in the media, including
advertising, tv/films, YouTube, the Internet, games, tablets/PCs/PDAs/cells,
and other new technologies. You will write one long research essay
evaluating one of four independent short fictional films portraying racialized
masculinity in Hawai’i, and one long critical and persuasive essay, using some
research, on a Hawai‘i(or Pacific region)-based issue of sexuality and/or
gender, deploying artistic representations in such (new) media technologies as
evidence.
Required texts & media:
- The Value of Hawaii: Knowing the Past,
Shaping the Future
(Howes & Osorio); - daily access to course website in Laulima;
- Netflix or
other movie websites such as Hulu; - YouTube;
- other resources & PDF/HTML
handouts.