Contributors

Contributors

Cynthia Franklin is professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i and coeditor of Biography. She is the author of Writing Women's Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Multigenre Women's Anthologies and Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today; her coedited collections include a special issue of Biography on "Life in Occupied Palestine." Her current book project, "The Human in Crisis: Narrating Public Lives and Movement Politics in the Contemporary US" draws upon her solidarity work in struggles for freedom in Palestine (as a white, anti-Zionist American) and in Hawai‘i (as a settler ally). She is on the Organizing Collective for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and a cofounding member of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH).

Candace Fujikane is a Professor in the English Department. She has just published Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and critical settler cartographies in Hawaii. She also co-edited Asian Settler Colonialism From Local Governance to Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i.

Vernadette Gonzalez is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her areas of research include studies of tourism and militarism, transnational cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial studies, Asian American cultural and literary studies, and globalization studies with a focus on Asia and the Pacific. She has a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her first book, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke UP, 2013) won the Association for Asian American Studies book award for the best book in cultural studies published in 2013. In 2016, she co-edited, with Jana K. Lipman and Teresia Teaiwa, an American Quarterly special issue on the convergences of tourism and militarism. Her second book Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke 2021), is an exploration of the intimacies of imperial geopolitics through the life story of a mixed-race vaudeville and film actress and sometime mistress of General Douglas. She is co-editor, with Hōkūlani Aikau, of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i, a collection of alternative mappings, narratives, and images of Hawai‘i that challenge the dominant guidebook framing of the islands, and a co-editor of a decolonial guide series with Duke University Press. 

Bianca Kai Isaki, Ph.D. attends the William S. Richardson School of law, pursuing an interest in law that advocates at the intersection of environmental conservation and decolonization in Hawai‘i. Previously, she was a summer clerk with the Earthjustice Mid-Pacific office and a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She now works at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Women Studies department and continues to revise her manuscript, A Decolonial Archive: The Historical Space of Asian Settler Politics in a Time of Hawaiian Nationhood.

Lee Kava is an Assistant Professor of Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies (CPIOS), housed within the department of Race and Resistance Studies at SFSU. She has a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Brown University (2012), her Masters in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2015), and her PhD in Creative Writing (2019), also from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is the founder of the Pacific Verse project, a community-based workshop series based in Nukuʻalofa, Tonga that works with participants to create, perform, and publish original poetry and music. From 2019-2020, she completed a Fulbright grant in Tonga working with the artists of Selekā—a community arts collective based in Haveluloto, Tongatapu led by artists Tevita Latu and Taniela Petelō—to develop curriculum and host poetry and music-writing workshops. Dr. Kava’s areas of research and practice are rooted in Pacific Islander literary studies, Indigenous theory and poetics, and creative writing as a vehicle for critical imagination and decolonization. Alongside Craig Santos Perez and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, she is currently co-editing an anthology of Pacific Islander writing that draws together multi-genre, multi-generational work centering Pacific Islander genealogies, knowledge, and relationships to the environment (forthcoming from University of Hawaiʻi Press). 

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is Professor of American Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in Indigenous sovereignty, anarchist history and activism, settler colonialism and decolonization, and critical race studies. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008) and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018). And she is editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018), which features select interviews from her public affairs radio show “Indigenous Politics,” which aired on WESU from 2007-2013. Her work is widely published in academic journals and edited volumes. Kauanui co-edits a book series with Jean M. O’Brien called “Critical Indigeneities” for the University of Carolina Press. She recently guest-edited a special issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, “The Politics of Indigeneity, Anarchist Praxis, and Decolonization” (May 2021).  Kauanui is one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. 

ʻIhilani Lasconia is an ʻŌiwi poet from Waimānalo, Oʻahu. She is currently a senior majoring in Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Over the course of the summer, Ihilani has been a part of the ʻŌiwi Undergraduate Research Fellowship under the mentorship of Noʻu Revilla, where she has been studying ʻŌiwi Poetics and decolonial love poetry.

From Kula, Maui, Brandy Nālani McDougall, is of Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiʻi, Maui, and Kauaʻi lineages), Chinese and Scottish descent. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai (Kuleana ʻŌiwi Press 2008) and the co-editor of Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific, an anthology focused on Pacific aesthetics and rhetorics (University of Hawaiʻi Press 2014).  A former Mellon and Ford postdoctoral fellow, her monograph Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (University of Arizona Press 2016) was awarded the 2017 Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies and a Ka Palapala Poʻokela Honorable Mention. Aside from her scholarship and poetry, McDougall is the co-founder of Ala Press, an independent press dedicated to publishing creative works by Indigenous Pacific Islanders.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist, activist, and scholar born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Heoli earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Currently, Heoli is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Heoli is a three-time national poetry champion, poetry mentor and a published author. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). Her book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2021. 

Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi queer poet and educator. Raised with the Līlīlehua rain of Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she now lives and loves with the Līlīlehua rain of Pālolo on the island of Oʻahu. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing in the Department of English at UH-Mānoa and is proud to have taught a poetry workshop at Puʻuhuluhulu University while standing with her lāhui in the summer of 2019.

Nohelani Teves is a Kanaka Maoli feminist born and raised in Ewa Beach. She came to so-called consciousness after watching Haunani-Kay Trask and other Hawaiian scholars/activists fight for Hawaiian sovereignty in the 1990s. She got her BA from the Department of Womenʻs Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi, and her M.A. in the Department of American Studies (UH) and Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Lani is deeply committed to public education in Hawaiʻi and aims to support and nurture students in the ways that she was. She studies Hawaiian life on the fringe. Her approach is informed by Indigenous feminist methodologies and ʻŌiwi epistemologies. She has written about Hawaiian hip-hop, film, and sexuality in the Pacific. She specializes in theorizing alternate forms of Kanaka Maoli gender performance and recognition politics. 

Patricia (Trish) Tupou is a hafekasi Tongan woman born and raised in Kirikiriroa on Waikato-Tainui lands. She now lives on Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country where she works and studies at The Australian National University. Her PhD research aims to recast our understanding of Tongan sovereignty, centering the gendered implications of nineteenth century nation-building that continue to permeate what it means to be Tongan today. Her past work has focused on settler colonialism in Oceania, the Tongan diaspora and climate change. 

Raised in the moku of ʻEwa, Amy Kikue Hemakanakeiakalanimai Vegas is a scholar of Kanaka Maoli, Puerto Rican, Japanese descent (Hawaiʻi, Kauaʻi, and Oʻahu lineages). She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in the Department of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with a concentration in Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific, and specialties in Place-based and Indigenous Composition Pedagogies, Critiques of U.S. Imperialism and militarization, and Literatures of Hawai`i. Her dissertation is a decolonial mapping project that critically interrogates how wonder and huakaʻi can be mobilized to (re)map and (re)claim severed Kanaka Maoli genealogical ties in the face of ongoing militarized geographies on Oʻahu. 

Joyce Pualani Warren is an assistant professor in the UH Manoa Department of English, where she teaches Native Hawaiian, Pacific, and Ethnic American literatures. Her teaching and research interests include Po, Blackness in the Pacific, diaspora, Mana Wahine, Indigenous futurisms, and literary nationalism. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Amerasia Journal.

Advisors

Professors Cynthia Franklin, Vernadette Gonzalez and Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua are the faculty advisors of the Mauna Kea Syllabus Project.