University of California, Riverside

Faculty Member, Ethnic Studies

Assistant Professor

About

My current book project tentatively titled, The Theatricality of the Settler State: Hawai‘i Statehood and the Liberal Politics of Empire Making, is an interdisciplinary project that examines sets of cultural productions read through the theories and practices of cultural studies, and works historically through archival research.  I take a discursive approach to statehood, illuminating how state agencies framed the rules of discourse for civil society through a range of state sanctioned opinion campaigns that reveal practices of governance and the theatricality of the state (such as the Kilauea Cyclorama exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, heritage gardens, state sponsored commemorations, and state seals).  I also examine cultural productions and texts that are seemingly autonomous from the state (such as political cartoons, novels, films, television dramas, newspapers and social science discourse).  Organized by different historical flashpoints of economic crisis or capital expansion, each chapter juxtaposes the cultural work of statehood proponents with previously unexamined Native Hawaiian actions and cultural productions that denaturalize U.S. nation narrations, many through environmental critiques of cultural genocide and rampant capitalist development (a lawsuit against the Statehood Commission, a million dollar hoax on the tourism industry, stories of hauntings, once nationally acclaimed but currently forgotten history books, and contemporary visual art).