Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania by Maile Arvin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania by Maile Arvin Xine Yao (bio) Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania, by Maile Arvin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Xi + 313 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0633-6. Maile Arvin’s Possessing Polynesians was prominently displayed alongside other works by Native Hawaiian scholars at the 2019 American Studies Association conference in Honolulu, Hawai’i. The conference included the celebration of legendary activist-scholar Haunani-Kay Trask, who received the Angela Y. Davis Prize, as well as panels featuring the kia’i (guardians) defending Mauna Kea against the threat of the Thirty Meter Telescope. The American Studies Association is another home to many fields of critical race and ethnic studies, Asian American studies included. I wondered about Asian Americanists and Asian diasporic scholars who might attend but not deign to go to any of the events centering Native Hawaiians. On the one hand, there are Asian settlers, like Candace Fujikane and Dean Saranillio, committed to working in coalition with Kānaka Maoli and Indigenous Pacific Islanders. On the other hand, what of those of us content not to engage settler colonialism and Indigeneity, content to be tourists or interpellated as “locals” (which Fujikane and Trask decry as a settler colonial ruse)—and content to unquestioningly use the category of “Asian American Pacific Islander”? Possessing Polynesians argues powerfully about the ways Polynesia and Polynesian peoples are claimed as contingently white, tracking the unsettled convergences of processes of racialization and imperial and colonial regimes writ large. Native Hawaiian feminist Maile Arvin’s monograph, like David Chang’s acclaimed The World and All the Things Upon It before it, foregrounds Hawai’i to reorient understandings of global modernity in contrast to the islands’ settler colonial image as an exotic, escapist fantasy. Using an Indigenous feminist methodology that engages an archive ranging from over two centuries of science to contemporary art, Arvin interrogates the construction of Polynesia and Polynesian peoples: feminized as the possessions of white [End Page 337] settler colonialism, structured by antiblackness, and with its Indigeneity further dispossessed by a “postracial” multiracialism that privileges Asianness. She writes, “The relation between the logics of possession through whiteness and antiblackness, and between anti-indigeneity and anti-immigration, is not merely one of analogy or comparison, even as they are distinct logics; rather, they are inextricable.” Sometimes these discourses have been leveraged by Native Hawaiians for self-determination—at the expense of other Kānaka Maoli and Pacific Islanders, thus enabling a settler colonial haunting within ostensible projects of decolonization. Nonetheless, as Arvin underlines through discussions of activism and cultural production, possession can be unsettled through “regenerative refusal” as Indigenous feminist analytic. Such Indigenous refusals across past and present point toward resurgent Pacific Islander futures, regenerating kinships between Kānaka Maoli and other Indigenous peoples of Oceania, which include work that Arvin highlights for being in promising coalition with Black Lives Matter. “What is a Polynesian?” is Arvin’s central question. For Arvin, heteropatriarchy functions as the crux of whiteness that claims Polynesians as possessions without ever conceding the power of whiteness to them. She stresses “the logic of possession” over the more familiar framing “logic of elimination” in order to emphasize “the gendered aspects of settler colonialism” dependent upon heteropatriarchy that either implicates Native Hawaiian women as producers of mixed-race children toward a white futurity or requires them to be responsible for “race-saving” by only having children with men of high Native Hawaiian blood quantum. The global workings of antiblackness are central to her theorization: Melanesians were racialized as Black, while Polynesians could also be coded as such despite their conditional whiteness and tactics of Polynesian exceptionalism. Triangulated as non-Black and non-Indigenous, Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese, are co-opted by whiteness as evidence of a utopian multiracialism that erases Native Hawaiians, especially through intermarriage. Undergirding Arvin’s discussions is Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of raciality and spirit via Hegel that deliberately departs from the Foucauldian model of biopolitics to account for spiritual investments in the logics of racism that haunt the present beyond...