Sweat and Salt Water: Selected Works by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sweat and Salt Water: Selected Works by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa Josephine Faith Ong (bio) Sweat and Salt Water: Selected Works. Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa. Compiled and edited by Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson, and Terrence Wesley-Smith. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021. Published posthumously by the Pacific Islands studies scholars Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson, and Terrence Wesley-Smith, Teresia Teaiwa’s 2021 book Sweat and Salt Water brings together the articles she published between 1992 and 2017. Divided into the sections “Pacific Studies,” “Militarism and Gender,” and “Native Reflections,” the collection brings forth Teaiwa’s major contributions to the field of Pacific studies, her incisive critiques about militarism’s gendered and colonial impacts, her poetry that challenged colonial narratives, and her framing of Indigenous people’s inherited and chosen genealogies (xvii). As the editors mention in their introduction, Teaiwa modeled these ideologies through her emphasis on “collaborative learning” (xvii) and her ideological willingness to stand at the edge of where different academic fields, colonial histories, and Pacific Islander communities meet (54). Importantly, the editors had deep ties with Teresia Teaiwa. Katerina Teaiwa is her sister, while April K. Henderson and Terrence Wesley-Smith were her constant collaborators and close friends (xiii). In the editors’ introduction to Sweat and Salt Water, they describe the book’s focus on “Teresia’s vision of what Pacific Studies could be,” while also tracing how “Teresia’s intellectual genealogy” engaged multiple disciplines, communities, and artists (xiii). While Sweat and Salt Water was published posthumously, the book’s editors effectively center Teaiwa’s voice and commitment to the formation of Native Pacific cultural studies through the anthology’s structure. The editors’ choice to organize the first section, “Pacific Studies,” thematically, rather than chronically, follows Teaiwa’s commitment to fluid and intentional intellectual journeys. “Pacific Studies” groups Teaiwa’s 2005–2017 articles about Native Pacific cultural studies, and introduces the reader to the field’s place-based and comparative frameworks. Beginning with Teaiwa’s 2010 reflective piece “The Classroom as a Metaphorical Canoe” grounds the collection in Teaiwa’s dedication to cooperative learning as a process that builds “alternative spaces where indigenous knowledges can be more fully reclaimed, affirmed, and revitalized” (10). In the 2001 article “Lo(o)sing the Edge,” Teaiwa’s analysis utilizes different rhetorical strategies (such as placing with spacing, using italics to identify common themes, and writing in different fonts) to center the hybridity and diasporic implications of Native Pacific cultural studies (55–57). In a sense, the section’s structure guides the reader through Teaiwa’s poetry, teaching, and scholarship’s common focus on reclaiming the complex histories and heritage of peoples across the Pacific (73). [End Page 146] In the section “Militarism and Gender,” Teaiwa’s essays offer several important insights about the military industrial complex. Teaiwa’s intellectual genealogies in this section are grounded in cultural studies frameworks, Black feminist mentors like Angela Davis (169), Freudian psychoanalysis (116), and Marxist analysis. For example, in the often-cited 1994 article, “bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans,” Teaiwa points out militarism and tourism’s combined embodied impacts on the “female body” (110). Using cultural studies theories about colonial optics and the commodification of the colonized body, Teaiwa traces how the bikini as an item exposes but also negates Bikini Islanders’ colonial histories (114). She thus names “militourism” as a process in which militarism and tourism work together to commodify and dispossess Pacific Islanders through “dominant historical and cultural constructions of islands as military bases and tourist sites” (120–21). Later, in the 2005 essay “Articulated Cultures,” Teaiwa further clarifies that the disciplining of the Fijian man’s body and “social relations” (131) is both a product of colonialism and enabled by Indigenous practices and ideas (140). For Teaiwa, then, the military industrial complex both negates and enables Indigenous cultural practices and ideologies (165). In the third section, “Native Reflections,” Teaiwa’s essays and poems utilize rhetorical strategies such as changes in capitalization in the 1998 piece “Yaqona/Yagoqu” (191–295) and transforming the spelling of “poetry” to “poetree” to convey Pacific Islanders’ genealogical and grounded roots in their scholarship (206–207). In this section, Teaiwa’s reflections...