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.
Theorizing the Use of Aesthetic Texts in Social Studies Education
Abstract The researching and practicing of social studies education is often infused with poetry, art, literature, film, photography, and music. Engagements with and production of these aesthetic texts can promote critical thinking, foster empathetic thinking, and aid historical analysis. This article provides 3 potential theoretical explorations for why this might be so. The authors theorize aesthetic encounters in social studies education by deploying the terms of aesthetic experience, aesthetic conflict, and relational aesthetics. Each of those theoretical terms aids in the exploration of why aesthetic texts are so compelling and crucially important for social studies education. Further, these theoretical terms have potential to frame future research within social studies education. The complicated aesthetic dimension to powerful social studies pedagogy, research, and practice is described herein.
Sensing the past : seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching in history
Do we rely on different senses now than the ones we relied on in the past? How have our senses affected history? How have the senses themselves changed? What role have the senses played in the ways we discriminate? Exploring illuminating examples from antiquity to the twenty-first century, this lively, concise introduction to the essential, emerging field of sensory history presents a new way of looking at the past that takes the everyday, the average, and the banal as seriously as it takes the history of elites, the intellect, and the exceptional. Considering each of the five senses, Mark M. Smith explores diverse subjects: visual culture in Victorian Britain and South America; sound in nineteenth-century Australia and France; gender politics and touch in early modern Europe and in native America; 'race' and olfaction in the United States and scent in ancient Christianity; and, the role of taste in shaping national identity in modern China and early America.