Event

Related to a new book project (in-progress), this presentation will address the politics of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women’s nationalist activism in the mis-1980s-1990s, which includes the construction and deployment of cultural discourses of reclamation in the area of gender and sexuality within Hawaiian nationalist initiatives. The majority of what has been produced on the question of Hawaiian women and feminism from that era was by Haunani-Kay Trask. She went from identifying as a feminist – as reflected in her first book, Eros and Power: The Promise of Feminist Theory (1986) – to dismissing feminism altogether as irrelevant to the realities of Native Hawaiian women in her last, From a Native Daughter (1992). Trask advanced a critique of the Western individualism promoted by white American feminism, which she argues undermines Hawaiian collective struggles for self-determination. The presentation will engage Trask’s political engagement with feminism, while exploring the political, epistemological, and ethical dimensions of her critique in relation to the project of decolonization.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian) is an activist, radio producer and writer. She is Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses related to Indigenous studies, critical race theory. settler colonial studies and anarchist studies. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018); and Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018). Her work is widely published in a range of academic journals and edited books, and she also co-edits a book series on “Critical Indigeneities” for the University of Carolina Press. She is one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, established in 2008. And she is the recipient of the Western History Association’s 2022 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award.