Literatures of Hawaiʻi: Transformative Relationality
This course examines critical approaches to reading Hawaiʻi’s literatures and literary theories, focusing specifically the ways that struggles over land and preserving sustainable cultural and traditional practices have been the impetus for writers to imagine, debate, and transform social relations in this contested place. We will examine the ways that an archipelago like Hawaiʻi is an intensified space for negotiating the complexities of social relations between diverse peoples and holds the potential for radically different social relations. How are the forces of settler colonialism, capitalism, militarism, heteropatriarchy, racism, and globalization narrated in the literatures we have long called “local” to influence ways that we as people in Hawaiʻi envision alternative social relations and alternative economies? In what ways have narratives of solidarity under the term “local” provided both possibilities for transformation and masked other problematic processes of domination? How do Kanaka ʻŌiwi moʻolelo provide a knowledge base from which Hawaiʻi writers build affinities and through which both ʻŌiwi and settlers are currently engaged in both statist and non-statist forms of nation-building? Under these conditions, how do the literatures and theories of Hawaiʻi offers us ways of envisioning new land-based social possibilities and more sustainable futures?
The course will trace the contours of this shifting terrain by traveling through key historical and narrative moments of peoples’ movements in land struggles. We will begin with a text that foregrounds a clear political shift to settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi: Queen Liliʻuokalaniʻs autobiography, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. We will be reading her account in light of Noenoe Silvaʻs research on the Aloha ʻĀina movement and the often unexpected alliances that grew in response to the overthrow of the Queen. Narratives of local resistance against continental forms of domination in the 1970s like those in Rodney Morales’ The Speed of Darkness, Growing Up Local and A Nation Rising corresponded to visually powerful representations of “local” solidarity in newspaper photographs of people protesting against police-enforced eviction in front of the Waiāhole Poi Factory. Protesters linked arms in a human blockage across Kamehameha Highway as they fought to preserve a “local” rural lifestyle threatened by continental notions of “progress” and “development.” More recently, critiques of the term “local” have emerged from literary debates centering on the relations of power between different groups in Hawaiʻi and problems that include racism, struggles, between classes, gendered forms of oppression and homophobia within Hawaiʻi communities as well as the global exigencies of corporate development, the biotech industry and the threats they pose to sustainability in Hawaiʻi. Asian Settler Colonialism emerged as a cautionary text about the problems with assumptions about “local” solidarity in the face of ongoing process of settler colonialism that Kanaka ʻŌiwi continue to struggle against, and even in this collection, we see powerful moments of alliances between Kanaka ʻŌiwi and settlers and among critical settlers. Two texts, The Value of Hawaiʻi Volume 2 and A Nation Rising, focus on social relationships rooted in different forms of relationality to land, one to land as the kulāiwi, the national land base, the ancestral lands, and the other as ʻāina momona, the abundant land. To consider the forms of relationality between land and people and alternative land-based economies, we will be looking at Hoʻoulumāhiehie’s The Epic Tale of Hi’iakaikapoliopele. We will conclude the course by considering a cluster of multi-genre texts on the struggle to protect Mauna a Wākea from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope. Mauna a Wākea has been the focal point bringing so many different groups together to protect the sacred mauna, even as it has been a rallying point for other movements, including the independence movement, ‘Ōiwi resurgence movements, restoration movements rebuilding loko iʻa, fishponds, at Kahana and other places, movements supporting sustainable farming against biotech corporations.
To help us to put the narratives of Hawaiʻi in conversation with narratives from other places that seek alternative political and social economies, we will be considering Leanne Simpson’s discussion of Nishnaabeg resurgence in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, pieces by Richard Day on affinity movements, and selections from The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement.
Student learning outcomes include an awareness of the contributions of Hawaiʻi literatures to the formation of the contemporary field of English Studies, including such subfields as ethnic literature, rhetoric, indigenous land-based literacy and visual literacy, an understanding of advanced research methods, written and oral ability to place one’s own scholarly work within a broader critical conversations, independent research using primary and secondary sources.
Required Texts (texts available at Revolution Books):
1) Queen Liliʻuokalani, Hawaiiʻs Story by Hawaiiʻs Queen (1898)
2) Eric Chock, James Harstad, Darrell Lum, and Jim Teter, eds., Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawaiʻi (1998)
3) Rodney Morales, The Speed of Darkness (1988)
4) Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaiʻi and the Philippines (2013)
5) Hoʻoulumāhiehie, The Epic Tale of Hiʻiakaikapoliopele (1905, 2006)
6) Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi (2008)
7) Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Recreation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence (2011)
8) Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (2014)
9) Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua and Ikaika Hussey, eds., A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty (2014)
10) Aiko Yamashiro and Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, eds., The Value of
Hawaiʻi, Vol. 2: Ancestral Root, Oceanic Visions (2014)
11) kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, Voices of Fire: Reweaving the Literary Lei of Pele and Hiʻiaka (2014)
A course reader will include work by Noenoe Silva, kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, Hokulani Aikau, Gizelle Gajelonia, Walter Ritte, Kīhei de Silva, Kapā Oliveira, Charlie Reppun, Kikiloi Kekuewa, Vivien Wong, Dean Saranillio, Kapulani Landgraf, James Geshwender, Kealoha Pisciotta, Kū Ching, R. Zamora Linmark, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Andrea Smith, Dennis Kawaharada, Craig Santos Perez, Nordstrom and McDougall, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Cristina Bacchilega, Alfred Taiaiake, Driskill, Finley, Gilley, and Morgensen, Kepā Maly.
Course requirements: 1) a 5-page project proposal (10%) that outlines the objectives of the seminar paper that will be built upon for 2) a 20-page seminar paper (40%), 3) one page write-ups for two presentations to the class, one on a primary text and one on a problem or issue (20%); 4) short assignments that will help to build toward the final essay (15%), 5) weekly e-mail letters to the class on the assigned readings (15%).