Unsettling Late-stage American Empire in Hawai’i

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

At this conjuncture of rising fascism in the United States, intensifying climate catastrophes, an ongoing genocide in Palestine, rampant militarization, and regional wars that threaten to trigger a great power nuclear conflict, the pillars of late-stage American Empire are shaky. We reflect on how this moment of crisis and hulihia (overturning) offers opportunities for liberatory scholarly and activist projects to unsettle the ground of the U.S. imperial project in Hawaiʻi in order to reimagine how we can understand and dismantle U.S. empire: What does late-stage American empire look like from the perspective of Hawaiʻi and the Pacific? What forms and strategies of decolonial movement building and Indigenous resurgence are emerging in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific? How can scholar-activists make these struggles legible and accessible for settlers willing to engage in the work of solidarity? How have Indigenous practices on the land continued to contest settler colonialism?

Through the example of his own family’s resistance to removal from their land, Uahikea Maile (Kanaka Maoli) examines (1) Hawaiian land reforms and the influence of American political thought in the 19th century; (2) case law regarding Hawaiian land rights; and (3) the land dispute involving his family and its implications for refusing and unsettling US settler colonization. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar (Kanaka Maoli) discusses Kanaka Maoli resistance to the Thirty-Meter Telescope on Mauna a Wākea as part of a continuum of struggle against U.S. empire that resonates with Indigenous resistance and decolonial movements globally, including the movement for a free Palestine. Laurel Mei-Singh and Levina Parada discuss their involvement in grassroots efforts for the return of the sacred, militarily-occupied Mākua Valley on Oʻahu’s Waiʻanae Coast. They argue for the critical role of popular education in uplifting and amplifying Indigenous land back efforts. Judy Rohrer argues that popular education to unsettle white supremacy must incorporate anti-racist and anti-colonial analysis and strategies which address the fundamental difference between the Kanaka Maoli relationship to ʻāina—that which feeds, a kinship with land—and western notions of land as property. Through his involvement with various activist and scholarly endeavors, including the Hawaiʻi DeTours project and the successful campaign to shut down the Navy’s leaking Red Hill fuel tanks, Kyle Kajihiro reflects on the ontological politics of place and the disruptive and generative potential of kīpuka aloha ʻāina—Kanaka Maoli spaces of ea—breath, life, sovereignty, and rising—that surround and unsettle “the fort." Together these presenters rethink American Studies from a crucial fulcrum of U.S. empire that has long served as a strategic military site. We collectively examine how popular education, organizing, and Indigenous remapping enable us to reimagine new questions and methodological and theoretical frameworks. These approaches foster new modes of knowledge production that can enable future-building and decolonization in our current moment of overlapping crisis, unfurling new and generative possibilities.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Hiilei J Hobart, Yale University

Panelists

• Kyle Kajihiro, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

• Laurel Mei-Singh, UT Austin

• Levina Parada, The University of Texas at Austin

• Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Uahikea Maile, University of Chicago

• Judy Rohrer, Eastern Washington University

Biographical Information

Judy Rohrer (she/her) grew up in Hawai’i and earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She is a scholar-activist with expertise in a number of fields that animate critical interdisciplinary scholarship: feminist studies, queer studies, settler colonial studies, Indigenous studies, critical race theory, critical ethnic studies, and disability studies. Before and during her graduate studies she worked for progressive nonprofits in Hawai’i and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies at Eastern Washington University.

Rohrer’s first book, Haoles in Hawai’i, was published in 2010 through the University of Hawai’i Press. The text interrogates the politics of haole (whiteness in Hawai’i) in current debates about race and colonization in Hawai’i. Her short monograph, Queering the Biopolitics of Citizenship in the Age of Obama (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) demonstrates the importance of developing an understanding of the machinations of governmentality and biopolitics in the (re)production of the (proper) citizen.

Rohrer’s third book, Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai’i (University of Arizona Press, 2016) situates Hawai’i at global crosscurrents between Indigeneity and race, homeland and diaspora, nation and globalization, sovereignty and imperialism. The book works to expose how racialization is employed in settler colonial processes to obscure, with the ultimate goal of eliminating, native Hawaiian Indigeneity, homeland, nation and sovereignty.

Over the years she has published in many peer-reviewed journals and, especially since the pandemic, has also written for more popular audiences. Rohrer was on the board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) and one of a handful of junior scholars who organized the 2018 CESA conference at the University of British Columbia. She served as a member of the Program Committee of the American Studies Association Annual Conference in Honolulu in November 2019, as well as the Program Committee for the Berkshire Conference of Women, Gender and Sexualities in Santa Clara, June 2023.

Kyle Kajihiro (he/him) grew up in Mōʻiliʻili in Honolulu. After attending college in Oregon he participated in anti-racist activism, Central America solidarity organizing, and anti-war and labor organizing. As a program director with the American Friends Service Committee Hawaiʻi Area Program he focused on demilitarization and building a LGBTQ+Māhū youth liberation program. His research interests include militarization and U.S. imperial formation in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific, demilitarization social movements, and World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

Kajihiro has published articles in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Okinawa Journal of Island Studies. His work also appears in Environmental Justice in North America (Routledge, 2024), The Value of Hawai’i 3: Hulihia, the Turning (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020), Socialising Tourism for Systemic Change (Routledge, 2021), Resistance to Empire and Militarization (Equinox, 2020), Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (Duke University Press, 2019), Under Occupation: Resistance and Struggle in a Militarised Asia-Pacific (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), The Bases of Empire the Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts (Pluto, 2009), and Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008).

Dr. Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, organizer, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is assistant professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.

Maile’s research interests include: history, law, and activism on Hawaiian sovereignty; Indigenous critical theory; settler colonialism; political economy; feminist and queer theories; and decolonization. Their work is published in American Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal, Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, and Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies. His work also appears in Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presences (Duke University Press, 2023), Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (Duke University Press, 2019), and Standing With Standing Rock: Voices From the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

Maile’s current book manuscript, Nā Makana Ea: Settler Colonial Capitalism and the Gifts of Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, examines the historical development and contemporary formation of settler colonial capitalism in Hawai‘i and gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn it by issuing responsibilities for balancing relationships with ‘āina, the land and that who feeds.

Their statements appear in The Guardian, CBC, CNN, NBC, Democracy Now!, Toronto Star, The Breach, Canada’s National Observer, and Yahoo! News.

Before Chicago, Maile was assistant professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, St. George. While there, he was the founding director of Ziibiing Lab and received the Terry Buckland Award for Diversity and Inclusion in Education (2024), Milner Memorial Award (2023), and Early Career Teaching Award (2023). Maile earned their Ph.D. in American Studies in 2019 from the University of New Mexico, and continues serving as vice president of Red Media.

Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar is an assistant professor of Indigenous studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Casumbal-Salazar lives on the unceded ancestral territories of the Uypi Tribe of the Awaswas Nation—lands today stewarded by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. He teaches courses in critical Indigenous studies as well as Indigenous resurgence, decolonization, militarism & empire, Native feminist theories, race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and postcolonial science & technology studies. His research is comparative and relational, focusing mainly on Kanaka Maoli political thought and praxis, but also Indigenous movements for life, land, and liberation beyond Hawaiʻi and Oceania. Casumbal-Salazar’s book manuscript, entitled First Light: Kanaka ʻŌiwi Resistance to Settler Science at Mauna a Wākea, examines the politics and poetics of Indigenous struggle to protect the sacred Hawaiʻi Island summit from the construction of the proposed “Thirty Meter Telescope.”

Levina Parada (she/her) is a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She remains curious about how food is imagined, valued, produced, preserved, consumed, and repurposed. Looking towards critical geography, feminist studies, and science and technology studies, she is interested in how these food matters are playing out at different scales, including one’s own body, the land, a locale, and international networks.

Currently, she works as a graduate research assistant to provide project management support to the community organizing and scholar-activist struggles for the return and future of Mākua Valley and to connect those efforts with the public through developing high school and college-level curriculum.

She is also pursuing a research project that examines hunting and gathering as alternatives to agribusiness models of food production. Some questions that animate this project are: How do gender, property, state and federal regulations, and ecological knowledge shape the hunting, gathering, consumption, and public understanding of “invasive species”? What are the implications for food sovereignty, land management, and ecological restoration in the midst of capitalist ruins? (Tsing, 2015). How do various actors engage with the public? What can we learn from evasive, willful, and lively subjects?

Laurel Mei-Singh serves as an Assistant Professor of Geography and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include environmental justice, militarization, the relationship of race and indigeneity to histories of war, fences and self-determination, abolition, racial capitalism, and the Pacific. Her current project develops a genealogy of military fences and grassroots struggles for land and livelihood in Wai‘anae, a rural and heavily militarized region of the island of O'ahu in Hawai'i. She has published articles on this topic in American Quarterly, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Pacific Health Dialog.

A devoted public scholar, she has participated in community organizing efforts in New York City and Hawai‘i, and has served as a board member of Hawai'i Peace and Justice and CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities based in New York City. She is an aspiring filmmaker, currently producing a documentary film in collaboration with community group Mālama Mākua.

Laurel previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawai'i Mānoa. She earned her PhD in Geography with a certificate in American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, a Masters in Public Health at Columbia University, and Bachelors of Arts in English at UCLA. She was born and raised near Lēahi (Diamond Head) on O'ahu.