The Cultural Politics of Sovereignty: Semiotic circuits and the Polynesian Voyaging Society

• In Event: 1541 - Race, Colonialism and Fields in Comparative Historical Sociology

Abstract

This paper discusses forms of sovereignty and their contestation through the case of U.S. state and military rule in Hawai‘i as a settler colonial context in and over which sovereign claims are made. It argues that sovereignty, as a metaphysical figure, is a system of signifiers connected to a territory, set of territories, or a place that encompasses both lands and seas that allows for a sovereign narrative to cohere and gain legitimacy to certain audiences. Sovereignty is therefore the result of cultural work that dislodges, interns, or generates significations and systems of signification with the express attempt of producing a metanarrative by which to legitimize political power of various forms. Appeals to sovereignty often occur as an apologetics of the right to rule. As the following case shows, the sovereignties of Empire and Indigenous peoples are differently enacting. The distinction between sovereignties can be more precisely located in the semiotic breakdown of the layered meanings that undergird sovereign claims. This paper provides an empirical case with which to build upon Roland Barthes’ theory of resignification in colonial contexts and argues that the sovereignty of the United States, as a settler colonial state and an expansive empire, rests precariously on enduring reality of Indigenous history and presence. To the extent that the organization presented in this paper, the Polynesian Voyaging Society, was able to disrupt the relationships between people, power, and place over time as constructed by the U.S. state, it participated in contesting U.S sovereignty over Hawai‘i and the Pacific. Moreover, in connecting and reasserting other relationships, alternative sovereignties gained traction.

Author

• Heidi Christine Nicholls, University of Virginia