Burning the American Flag Before the World

Abstract

Concentrating on contemporary art, visual culture and politics in Hawaiʻi, this article articulates a specific kind of abolitionist aesthetics that has ecology at its core and through which traces of a demilitarised futurity are interwoven. The work of anonymous collectives, artists and architects – including Hui Menehune, Tropic Zine, Jane Chang Mi, Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick and Sean Connelly – stretches abolitionism to consider the role US militarism in Hawaiʻi plays in maintaining and enforcing global capitalism, holding captive alternative ways of organising society and the possibility of an environmentally just future. Analysing experimental residencies, video work, socially engaged proposals and other public interventions produced in relation to movements for racial justice, demilitarisation and Hawaiian sovereignty, these projects offer the provocation that the US might have to burn before the world, both spatially – in terms of being visible for all to see – and temporally, a prerequisite to mitigating the worst of climate catastrophe.