University of California, Riverside
Post-Doc, Ethnic Studies
University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow
About
In August of 2009, I completed my Ph.D. in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Currently I am a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside.
My current work offers a “history of the present” of the complex interplay between different Asian American groups, Native Hawaiians and whites within historical flashpoints of interaction shaped by opposing versions of history. Current scholarship narrates Hawai‘i statehood as a liberal moral allegory, where Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians formed a united front to displace a white supremacist settler elite and defeat a notion that Hawai‘i was unqualified for statehood because it was a largely “Asiatic” territory. Asian American groups, indeed, had historical reason to agitate as they were not only constituted as “orientals”—foreign threats to be excluded from the U.S. national polity as “ineligible for citizenship”—but also used as exploitable labor by a range of industries throughout the islands. Yet, the fact that many Native Hawaiians (and their supporters) opposed Hawai‘i’s admission as a state, citing the 1893 U.S. military supported overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and more specifically, rampant capitalist development, is nearly all but forgotten. Such lapses in present memory were deliberate as my research shows that the state commissions responsible for capturing hegemony and normalizing public opinion for statehood actively suppressed Native Hawaiian opposition and historical narration. I thus defamiliarize the familiar narration of Hawai‘i statehood by tracing the production of this American exceptionalist narrative, providing a genealogy of different state apparatuses and series of knowledges of history and race (primitivism and orientalism) that worked together to materialize the historical domination that produced Hawai‘i statehood.
As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, I am expanding the historical scope of my project. I am invested in positioning the 1959 admission of Hawai‘i as a U.S. state not as a moment of apogee but rather, as a moment of profound economic and cultural transition, where the institutional workings of the state were streamlined to respond more quickly to multinational capital. Accordingly, I examine the conditions of the post-statehood era that led to the expansion of industrial tourism, global U.S. militarism, and the rise of the contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty movement.
My current work builds on the comparative and relational questions I posed in my M.A. thesis “Colonial Amnesia: Filipino ‘Americans’ and the Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement,” which I completed at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. My thesis contextualized the often conflicting aims between Filipinos in Hawai‘i to be further included into the U.S. national polity and Native Hawaiians who seek autonomy from the United States, and framed these tensions within their mutual histories of U.S. colonization both in the Philippines and Hawai‘i. This thesis formed the basis for my article published in the anthology Positively No Filipinos Allowed (Temple University Press, 2006) and its subsequent reprint in Asian Settler Colonialism (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).
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