Putting feathers on our words: Kaona as a decolonial aesthetic practice in Hawaiian literature
544x376 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE In this essay, I examine contemporary literary examples of “kaona connectivity,” the ways that kaona requires Hawaiians to connect with our kūpuna and with each other, as an affirmation of our aesthetic sovereignty. I begin by offering a reading of the kaona within Donovan Kūhiō Colleps’ “Kāhulu” to discuss kaona as an intellectual and aesthetic practice. I then discuss Hawaiian literary aesthetics and aesthetic sovereignty before giving close readings of contemporary literary works for their kaona. Specifically, I examine a short story by John Dominis Holt, as well as poems and art by Imaikalani Kalahele, who both employ kaona to connect Hawaiians with the Kumulipo, a genealogical chant tracing the last two monarchs of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi to the beginning of the universe. I conclude with a discussion of the Kumulipo’s continued cultural, spiritual, and political significance and the power of Hawaiian aesthetic sovereignty.
Sniffing Oceania's Behind
Part tribute to the late Epeli Hau‘ofa and part reflective historiography, this essay examines the figure of the anus in Hau‘ofa’s short story Kisses in the Nederends in order to open up an inquiry into an olfactory history of Oceania. My broader goal is to augment if not challenge canonical methods still heavily reliant on lit- eracy and visuality, and realist modalities that I believe are inadequate to the task of apprehending subaltern aspects of Oceania’s ongoing past. keywords: Pacific Islands history, Pacific Islands historiography, Native Pacific cultural studies, narratology, Epeli Hau‘ofa
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.