By Comparison and In Solidarity: Hawai‘i, Ireland, and Palestine in the Cultural Studies Classroom

• In Event: Teaching About Palestine: Changing the Pain and Fury of Ignorance to the Pleasures of Knowing

Abstract

For the vantage point of Hawai‘i, Ireland and Palestine are quite literally half a world away. This sense of geographic distance is exacerbated by the frequent use of images of spectacle political violence used to represent these places in mainstream media and the added problem that the roots of these conflicts are often said to reach back millennia. Unsurprisingly, then, many students in Hawai‘i not only admit they know little of conflicts in these parts of the world but sometimes feel justified in remaining ignorant. By contrast, in her 1993 book, "From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i," the now retired kanaka maoli political theorist and sovereignty activist, Haunani-Kay Trask writes: “Just as Palestinians are justified in their hostility towards Israelis, just as Jews are justified in their hostility towards Germans, just as the Northern Irish are justified in their hostility towards the British, . . . so too we Hawaiians are justified in such feelings towards the haole.” Trask’s carefully structured statement suggests that what binds these seemingly disparate political groups is a history of racialized oppression and the experience of dispossession, loss of rights and land and by extension sovereignty. As Trask notes, such a history gives rise to resistance and also solidarity.

I use her statement as a starting point and touchstone in several classes—“the politics and poetics of mourning” and “staging resistance," at the advanced undergraduate level and in an introductory course to cultural studies theories and methods at the graduate level—in order to get students to think about the possibilities and limitations of comparing different settler colonial states and the political histories of occupation and partition that have given rise to them. In this paper, I consider how this comparative framework provides a reason to understand political conflicts in seemingly disparate regions. Keeping these three sites in mind, we analyze the ways in which, as Patrick Wolfe persuasively argues, settler colonialism is not an event but a structure, the logic of which is the elimination of the natives on their own land. Such a discussion involves a consideration of the status of “occupation” in international law (drawing on J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s work in relation to Hawaiʻi and Palestine), use of biopolitical power to repress unruly subjects, and the forms of resistance available to them. Through an analysis of poems, political tactics (boycotts, anti-eviction campaigns and hunger strikes, as well as murals and political posters), students begin to understand, and sometimes to counter, the interests behind attempts to suggest that these places are too singular to be compared and to uncover the colonial and anti-colonial networks that link these three places in both conceptual and material terms.

Author

• Laura Lyons, University of Hawaii, Manoa (HI)