The environment has always been more than just a backdrop to human story telling, although attitudes towards nature and how it is described and included within literature has shifted, sometimes significantly, particularly now in a period of visible climate change, with dire, apocalyptic outcomes predicted. Yet for Indigenous and other communities, traditional ecological knowledges, forms of environmentalism, and other human initiatives, including environmental activism, social justice movements, and the intertwining of arts and politics provide inspiration and pathways for promising, life-affirming, decolonial futures.
This course focuses on narratives that center perspectives and practices of aloha ‘āina (lit. love, empathy, and respect for the land, applicable to the general environment—land, sea, and sky) that is inclusive of human relationships with, protection of, and advocacy for nature. As our university is a Native Hawaiian Place of Learning (NHPOL), we will start with Hawaiʻi and traditional Hawaiian knowledge as a piko (navel) and read comparatively across the islands, region (moananuiākea, or wider Pacific), nations, and world.
He aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauā ke kanaka (the land is the chief, humans are the servants) is an integral philosophy of aloha ʻāina deeply embedded in Hawaiian culture. Such a philosophy is not only a key part of many indigenous cultures around the globe, but also a viewpoint that resonates with many efforts to protect nature and help it thrive, with an eye not just to survival of the planet, but toward abundant futures. Thus, we will explore the power of story across selected works and their cultural, social, political, historical, ecological, as well as literary context.
Some key questions: How are narratives around the environment constructed within different (western) literary traditions? How has that changed (and has it changed enough) with the emergence of global environmental crises, such as climate change, across the 20th-21st centuries? How can decolonized western STEM knowledge support and work alongside
traditional/indigenous ecological knowledges (TEK, TIK)—and why—in combating climate change and related issues? How are politically conscious artists imaging other worlds and relationships with nature in literature and other arts? How are systems of oppression like racism and colonialism drivers for climate change and how do writers envision alternatives to settler capitalism economies of scarcity?
As literary critics at a Native Hawaiian Place of Learning (NHPOL), close textual analyses of the ways that stories are told and the narrative strategies writers use to challenge or transform the material conditions of their lives will be foregrounded. We will discuss basic literary terminology, concepts, methods, and practices that illustrate the connections among people who read and write texts and the larger conditions of production and systems of power in which their texts are produced and read.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs): increased awareness of UH as a NHPOL (through the study of Hawaiian literature in conversation with other literatures, as well as with critical approaches in English Studies, such as ecological, indigenous, feminist, queer, historical and emerging ones; identifying and applying these to the reading and analysis of selected texts; understand the purpose, practice, and potential of literary and rhetorical study of text that cross subfields such as ethnic, indigenous, Hawaiian, American, Pacific, literatures, genre studies, cultural studies, rhetorics, and ecocriticism; written and oral ability to situation the study of the selected texts within broader established and emerging critical and historical conversations; improve ability through practice and engagement with texts in asking questions and in reading, analyzing, and interpreting complex literary texts, using relevant terminology both critically and creatively within the conventions of academic writing.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS: lead a class discussion on an assigned reading (LCDR); an oral group presentation on a primary text or theme; an out of class “experience art” or “experience ʻāina” and a 1-2 page (300-500 words) reaction paper; two short essays (1500-1800 words or 5-6 pages); final exam; attendance and participation.
Tentative primary (required) texts:
- Aguon, Julian. No Country for Eight-spot Butterflies (2022).
- Hernandez, Jessica. Fresh Banana Leaves, Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science (2022).
- Leguin, Ursula. The Word for World is Forest (1972).
- Ihihaera, Witi. The Whale Rider (1987).
- Nakuina, Moses. The Wind Gourd of Laʻamaomao (1902; 1992).
Texts not out of print are available for purchase via Amazon; some may be available in Kindle versions. You may also check the UH and HSPL (Hawaiʻi State Public Libraries) to borrow print versions or for open source online access. Additional readings will be posted to Laulima, such as: Selections from Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African American Nature Poetry, Camille Dunghi et al. (2009).