Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance

Critical Indigeneities

by Stephanie Nohelani Teves

"Aloha" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kānaka Maoli people, the concept of "aloha" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the "hula girl" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kānaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning.

While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.

Genres: Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2018

Reviews

[Gregory Pōmaika’i Gushiken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephanie Nohelani Teves engages with unconventional sites of analysis, sites that are “dissonant or out of sync––the hiphop cipher, the gay nightclub, the streets of Waikīkī, the kitchen, the hotel, the haunted stage, online commenting spaces––in order to expose the violence enacted through the “spirit of aloha” while also highlighting the creative and innovative ways Kānaka Maoli are disarticulating and rearticulating Hawaiʻi” (6) to document what she terms the idea of “defiant indigeneity“––“ an amorphous performance that challenges settler colonialism and refuses the elimination of the Native…it is a performance that intends to help your people to survive” (11). By being attendant to the ways in which indigeneity can be outside of what Māori scholar Brendan Hokowhitu calls the “primitive inertia” imposed on Native peoples by systems of settler colonialism by asserting indigeneity as something performed––that is, the dislodging of “the Native” as a “prediscursive foundation upon which modern subjectivity asserts itself” (15). Indigenous performativity for Teves, thus, allows us to see beyond these temporal dislocations enacted by settler colonialism by viewing “the material experiences of being in community, of being Kānaka Maoli“ (17) to understand that a focus on ontology as opposed to identity categories might “open up space for much more nuance and acceptance of incommensurability“ (18). One of Tevesʻs most interesting and powerful contributions is that “how we perform our aloha as an experiential knowledge that need not appear ʻHawaiianʻ but is nonetheless Hawaiian because of our shared connections and consciousness of what it means to be Kānaka Maoli” (21). In other words, through reading deeper into the ways in which Kānaka Maoli perform everyday practices of survivance, revitalization, as well as the ways in which we choose to exist in the quotidian, Tevesʻs work finds space in the incommensurable for Kānaka Maoli who might not have grown up “traditional” or with such deep connections to culture as is expected of Natives by settler colonial states and, yet, continue to perform indigeneity as an act of defiance, an ʻaloha spiritʻ that seems at first disavowal but is actively “working to build…countercultural spaces…not only defying what is perceived to be their ʻnatureʻ [but as] producers of theories and worlds“ (20). Readers will find that Tevesʻs interdisciplinary training is paramount and compelling, ranging from ethnographic engagement to literary analysis. Still, the one element that stands out is her thesis: that “By denaturalizing what indigeneity is supposed to look like, we allow indigeneity to be performed in very strategic ways” (15). Indeed, Teves gives language to Hawaiians struggling to survive just outside of Honoluluʻs urban epicenter, to Hawaiians living far and away from home, to Hawaiians who perform in spaces that are not exactly “Indigenous.” And as one such Hawaiian, I highly recommend Tevesʻs text for its powerful theoretical analyses, its deep emotional pull, and for the language it gives at last to the taste of the salt wind between Downtown Honolulu bus stops, to the thumping electronic bass of Scarlet Honolulu, to queer fictions and hushed kinships.

[Kaile Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite books. The way Stephanie weaves the stories and situations of the illegal overthrow, the plantations and the current situations of our Kānaka communities stuck in low paying tourism jobs with poor schools and brain drain together is masterful. We need more Kānaka wahine like her telling our stories. I actually bought this book to support a sister. 110% recommend.

[Cece · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teves challenges the idea of what it means to be Indigenous under settler rule! This book was a beautiful academic text that also brought in different types of written form, and looked closely at what’s that people defy settler notions of Indigeneity. I loved how she analyzed gender, especially Indigenous gender, and recognition and performativity politics!

[Mills College Library]

305.89942 T353 2018