Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty

Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism

J. Kehaulani Kauanui

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780822370758
  9780822370499
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822371960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty J. K?haulani Kauanui examines contradictions of indigeneity and self-determination in U.S. domestic policy and international law. She theorizes paradoxes in the laws themselves and in nationalist assertions of Hawaiian Kingdom restoration and demands for U.S. deoccupation, which echo colonialist models of governance. Kauanui argues that Hawaiian elites' approaches to reforming and regulating land, gender, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century that paved the way for sovereign recognition of the kingdom complicate contemporary nationalist activism today, which too often includes disavowing the indigeneity of the Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) people. Problematizing the ways the positing of the Hawaiian Kingdom's continued existence has been accompanied by a denial of U.S. settler colonialism, Kauanui considers possibilities for a decolonial approach to Hawaiian sovereignty that would address the privatization and capitalist development of land and the ongoing legacy of the imposition of heteropatriarchal modes of social relations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Contradictory Sovereignty
• One. Contested Indigeneity: Between Kingdom and “Tribe”
• Two. Properties of Land: That Which Feeds
• Three. Gender, Marriage, and Coverture: A New Proprietary Relationship
• Four. “Savage” Sexualities
• Conclusion. Decolonial Challenges to the Legacies of Occupation and Settler Colonialism
• Notes
• Glossary of Hawaiian Words and Phrases
• Bibliography
• Index