Hawai'i Is My Haven

Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

Indigenous Feminist Notes on Embodying Alliance against Settler Colonialism

How can we enact meaningful forms of solidarity across Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities? This essay, which focuses specifically on the context of settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi, examines existing or potential alliances between Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminisms. Written from a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) feminist perspective, the essay looks to the foundational work of Kanaka Maoli scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask as a too often overlooked theorist of settler colonialism writ broadly. The essay also looks more specifically at Trask’s theorizing of Asian settler colonialism in the Hawaiʻi context, in relation to contemporary examples of conflicts between Native Hawaiians and the state, as well as Native Hawaiian activists and white feminists. Overall, the essay questions how reframing Asian settler colonialism in more concerted conversation with Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminisms might provide space to move our practices of solidarity against settler colonialism, imperialism, nativism, militarization, and environmental destruction into a generative space for Kānaka Maoli and non-Indigenous peoples alike.