Burning the American Flag Before the World
2022; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09528822.2022.2149993
ISSN1475-5297
Autores Tópico(s)Asian American and Pacific Histories
ResumoAbstractConcentrating 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.Keywords: Aaron Katzemanabolition ecologydemilitarisationcontemporary artHawaiʻiHui MenehuneTropic ZineJane Chang MiDrew Kahuʻāina BroderickSean Connelly AcknowledgementsAn early draft of this article was presented at the 2021 College Art Association annual conference. Its development has benefited immensely from feedback shared in workshops hosted by the UCI Environmental Humanities Research Center and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Mahalo to Marika Emi, Nanea Lum, Josh Tengan, Jane Chang Mi, Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick and Sean Connelly for discussing their work with me. I would also like to thank T J Demos, Siobhan Angus, Martabel Wasserman, James Nisbet, Scott Volz and Marianna Davison for their respective insights and support.Notes1 Haunani-Kay Trask, speech given at ‘Iolani Palace on 17 January 1993 protesting the centennial of the US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.2 The original video shared on Twitter has been viewed over 20,000 times, 4 July 2020, https://twitter.com/karaokecomputer/status/1279513489514496001, accessed 4 July 2020.3 Jenn Boneza, ‘1,000 American Flags in Kailua Back Up after It Was Removed, Vandalized’, KHON2, 3 July 2020, https://www.khon2.com/local-news/1000-american-flags-in-kailua-back-up-after-it-was-removed-vandalized/, accessed 4 July 2020. See also Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina’s 1992 documentary, July 4th at the Palace4 Frederick Douglass, ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’, speech given on 5 July 1852, Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/, accessed 22 November 2020, emphasis in original5 Ibid6 Trask’s poem, first published in Anglistica, vol 2, no 1, 1998, p 44, originally ended with ‘and spit on America’s flag’. The more well-known version quoted by Hui o Nā Menehune was published in Haunani-Kay Trask, Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, 2002, p 28.7 See Hui o Nā Menehune’s Instagram account, 31 July 2020, https://www.instagram.com/hui_menehune/, accessed 31 July 2020. The date they posted the image, Lā Hoʻi Hoʻi Ea, commemorates the day in 1843 that sovereignty was restored to the Hawaiian Kingdom; the event is still celebrated annually at Thomas Square in Honolulu.8 Mary Kawena Pūkuʻi, Tales of the Menehune, Kamehameha Schools Press, Honolulu, 19609 This art historical shift was preceded by a general ‘social turn’, analysing art practices that replicate participatory political processes on a relational, dialogical or issue-based scale more so than that which is directly involved in mass movements. Such socially engaged art has been widely debated between its primary proponent, Grant Kester, and its foremost critic, Claire Bishop. See eg Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004; and Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, New York, 2012. Emerging from this discourse and with an eye towards collective activist formations rather than the practice of individual artists is the work of Yates McKee. See Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition, Verso, New York, 2017. For examples more pertinent to this article relating to art, activism and climate change, see T J Demos, Emily Eliza Scott and Subhankar Banerjee, eds, The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, Routledge, London, 2021.10 For an overview of the US military’s malevolent occupation of Hawaiʻi, see Kyle Kajihiro, ‘Resisting Militarization in Hawai‘i’, in Catherine A Lutz, ed, The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts, Pluto Press, London, 2009, pp 299–331; and Kyle Kajihiro, ‘The Militarizing of Hawaiʻi: Occupation, Accommodation, and Resistance’, in Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y Okamura, eds, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi, University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, 2008, pp 170–194. For more on the US military’s general environmental impact, see Neta C Crawford, ‘Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War’, Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, 13 November 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/ClimateChangeandCostofWar, accessed 15 November 2020.11 Stephen J Pyne, ‘The Fire Age’, Aeon, 5 May 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/how-humans-made-fire-and-fire-made-us-human, accessed 10 December 202012 T J Demos, ‘The Agency of Fire: Burning Aesthetics’, e-flux 98, February 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/98/256882/the-agency-of-fire-burning-aesthetics/, accessed 10 December 202013 This analysis is further influenced by Mike Davis’s class-based case for letting things burn and the creative power of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire. See Mike Davis, ‘The Case for Letting Malibu Burn’, Environmental History Review vol 19, no 2, Summer 1995, pp 1–36; ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Voices of Fire: Reweaving the Literary Lei of Pele and Hiʻiaka, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2014. I also draw here on the artist collective MTL’s statement, ‘While combative, decolonization is also creative.’ See MTL Collective, ‘From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art’, October 165, summer 2018, p 194.14 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, ‘Founding Statement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’, 11 December 1967, http://pflp-documents.org/founding-statement-of-the-popular-front-for-the-liberation-of-palestine-english/, accessed 11 December 202015 leilani portillo, Punahele and Noʻu Revilla, ‘“It Is Okay to Spit Fire on Our Oppressors”: Interview with leilani portillo and Punahele’, Biography, vol 43, no 3, 2020, p 59416 Charmaine Chua, ‘Abolition Is a Constant Struggle: Five Lessons from Minneapolis’, Theory & Event, vol 23, no 4, supplement, October 2020, S–127. See also Abolition Collective, Making Abolitionist Worlds: Proposals for a World on Fire, Common Notions Press, New York, 202017 Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2019, p 3. For more on Blackness and/in Hawaiʻi, see Joyce Pualani Warren, ‘Reading Bodies, Writing Blackness: Anti-/Blackness and Nineteenth-Century Kanaka Maoli Literary Nationalism’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol 43, no 2, 2019, pp 49–72; Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Hawaiʻi Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2021; and the work of Dr Akiemi Glenn and the Pōpolo Project. For more on Blackness and/in Oceania and the Black Pacific more broadly, see Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: US Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War, University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, 2007; Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections, Bloomsbury, London, 2015; Teresia Teaiwa et al, ‘Black and Blue in the Pacific: Afro-Diasporic Women Artists on History and Blackness’, Amerasia Journal, vol 43, no 1, 2017, pp 145–193; ‘Special Section on Pacific Worlds: Indignity, Blackness, and Resistance’, Ethnic Studies Review, vol 44, no 3, autumn 2021, pp 5–30; and Quito Swan, Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World, New York University Press, New York, 2022.18 Trask acknowledges these three thinkers specifically in the introduction to From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, 1999, p x. The symbolic garb of the Black Panthers, particularly their berets, was also worn by groups such as Kōkua Hawaiʻi and the Polynesian Panthers in Aotearoa during the 1970s.19 Joy Enomoto, ‘Where Will You Be? Why Black Lives Matter in the Hawaiian Kingdom’, Ke Kaʻupu Hehi ʻAle, 1 February 2017, https://hehiale.com/2017/02/01/where-will-you-be-why-black-lives-matter-in-the-hawaiian-kingdom/, accessed 1 August 2020. See also Craig Santos Perez, ‘Black Lives Matter in the Pacific’, Ethnic Studies Review, vol 43, no 3, 2020, pp 34–3820 W E B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1935; Angela Y Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2005; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, Verso, New York 202221 Nik Heynen and Megan Ybarra, ‘On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”’, Antipode, vol 53, no 1, January 2021, pp 21–35. See also Nik Heynen, ‘Toward an Abolition Ecology’, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, no 1, 2018, pp 240–24722 Laurel Mei-Singh, ‘Accompaniment Through Carceral Geographies: Abolitionist Research Partnerships with Indigenous Communities’, Antipode, vol 53, no 1, January 2021, p 77. For more on ea, see Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, ‘Introduction’, in Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Ikaika Hussey and Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright, eds, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2014, pp 1–33.23 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington, trans, Grove Press, New York, 1963, p 3824 See Ciara Lacy’s 2017 documentary Out of State, which follows Hawaiians as they reconnect with cultural practices while imprisoned at Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona.25 Jen Jenkins, ‘Puʻuhonua Not Prisons, a Manifesto’, The Harbinger 46, special issue, ‘Movements for Freedom: Scholarship from the Inside’, https://socialchangenyu.com/harbinger/puuhonua-not-prisons-a-manifesto/, accessed 1 July 202226 Charles Sepulveda, ‘To Decolonize Indigenous Lands, We Must Also Abolish Police and Prisons’, Truthout, 13 October 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/to-decolonize-indigenous-lands-we-must-also-abolish-police-and-prisons/, accessed 15 October 202027 The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth, Common Notions, New York, 2021, p 4528 Ibid, p 64. See also the NDN Collective’s position paper, ‘Demilitarization is Decolonization’, https://ndncollective.org/ndn-collectives-position-on-militarization/, accessed 11 November 2021.29 In his analysis of Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline, Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa) writes that Indigenous protesters were ‘working to protect their lands and waters – they were Land Defenders and Water Protectors’. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, Verso, New York, 2019, p 49, emphasis in original. David Pellow has argued that environmental injustice is a form of criminalisation itself. See David N Pellow, ‘Struggles for Environmental Justice in US Prisons and Jails’, Antipode vol 53, issue 1, January 2021, p 61.30 See Gilmore in interview with Chenjerai Kumanyika, ‘Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition’, The Intercept, 10 June 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/, accessed 10 June 2020.31 For an account of how artists have articulated the elemental in a more philosophical manner, see Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010.32 Contemporary art in Hawaiʻi has slowly gained wider coverage and recognition thanks, in part, to the Honolulu Biennial (now Hawaiʻi Triennial), launched in 2017, which built on decades of existing local arts efforts. For coverage of a number of exhibitions hosted by various institutions of differing size, see Noelle M K Y Kahanu, ‘A MAMo State of Mind: Kanaka Maoli Arts and the Review of Three Concurrent Exhibitions’, American Quarterly, vol 67, no 3, September 2015, pp 959–967; Ngahiraka Mason, ‘Contemporary Art in Honolulu in the Spring of 2019’, American Quarterly, vol 72, no 1, March 2020, pp 233–255; and Drew K Broderick, Josh Tengan, Marika Emi and Maile Meyer, eds, CONTACT 2014–2019, Puʻuhonua Society and Tropic Editions, Honolulu, 2021.33 For more on the military history of the H-3 and the highway’s role in shoring up settler colonial dispossession, see Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaiʻi and the Philippines, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2013, pp 67–81.34 The destruction was documented for years by the photographic duo Piliāmoʻo, consisting of Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf. See Piliāmoʻo, Ē Luku Wale Ē, ‘Ai Pōhaku Press, Honolulu, 2015.35 Hui o Nā Menehune’s Instagram account, 24 August 2020, op cit, accessed 24 August 202036 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene’, English Language Notes, vol 57, issue 1, April 2019, pp 21–3637 Craig Santos Perez, ‘Blue-Washing the Colonization and Militarization of Our Ocean: How US Marine National Monuments Protect Environmentally Harmful US Military Bases Throughout the Pacific and the World’, The Hawaii Independent, 26 June 2014, https://thehawaiiindependent.com/story/blue-washing-the-colonization-and-militarization-of-our-ocean, accessed 15 November 202038 Simeon Man, A Naomi Pai and Melina Pappademos, ‘Violent Entanglements: Militarism and Capitalism’, Radical History Review 133, January 2019, pp 1–1039 Trask, From a Native Daughter, op cit, p 1740 John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman and Brett Clark, ‘Imperialism in the Anthropocene’, Monthly Review, 1 July 2019, https://monthlyreview.org/2019/07/01/imperialism-in-the-anthropocene/, accessed 15 November 2020, emphasis in original. Trask and Vijay Prashad have both attested that scholarship attending to the Pacific and the Third World more broadly is lacking an analysis of imperialism. While Trask argues that imperialism ‘appears to have passed from the scholarly canon’, Prashad insists, ‘Our political world is impoverished by the lack of the category “imperialism.”’ Trask, ‘Politics in the Pacific Islands: Imperialism and Native Self-Determination’, From a Native Daughter, op cit, p 41; Vijay Prashad, ‘The Time of the Popular Front’, Third World Quarterly, vol 38, issue 11, 2017, p 2536.41 Tropic Zine, https://tropiczine.com, accessed 1 December 202042 For more on the residency see Aupuni Space, https://aupuni.space/TZ3, accessed 15 September 2020.43 Hawai‘i Non-Linear, ‘A Justice-Advancing Architecture Tour’, e-flux Architecture, July 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/410036/a-justice-advancing-architecture-tour/, accessed 28 July 202244 League of Revolutionary Struggle, ‘Stop RIMPAC bombing of Kaho‘olawe!’, Unity, vol 5, no 5, 26 March 1982, https://unityarchiveproject.org/article/stop-rimpac-bombing-of-kahoolawe/, accessed 11 February 2020; Jonathan Kamakwiwoʻole Osorio, ‘Hawaiian Souls: The Movement to Stop the US Military Bombing of Kahoʻolawe’, in Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Hussey and Wright, eds, A Nation Rising, op cit, pp 137–160; Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina, RIMPAC ‘82, 198245 See Kahoʻolawe: Nā Leo o Kanaloa, ‘Ai Pōhaku Press, Honolulu, 1995; Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor, ‘Kaho‘olawe: Rebirth of the Sacred’, in Nā Kuaʻāina: Living Hawaiian Culture, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2007, pp 249–285. For more recent artistic and cultural engagement with the island as it relates to connected struggles elsewhere, see Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick and Tengan, ‘Notes from Kaho‘olawe, Ka Pae‘āina o Hawai‘i, Moananuiākea’, Artlink, vol 40, no 2, June 2020.46 Because of the diversity in the racial and ethnic makeup of Hawaiʻi resulting from plantation capitalism, the framework of Asian settler colonialism has developed to account for how those of Asian descent are implicated within the structures of settler colonialism and capitalism and, therefore, can perpetuate the project of Indigenous dispossession. See Fujikane and Okamura, eds, Asian Settler Colonialism, op cit, which builds upon and includes a reprint of Trask’s influential essay ‘Settlers of Color and “Immigrant” Hegemony: “Locals” in Hawaiʻi’, originally published in Amerasia Journal, vol 26, issue 2, 2000, pp 1–26.47 McKee, Strike Art, op cit48 Artists Space, https://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/decolonizethisplace, accessed 10 December 202049 Nitasha Dhilon, ‘Art as Training in the Practice of Freedom’, The Brooklyn Rail, November 2015, https://brooklynrail.org/2015/11/criticspage/art-as-training-in-the-practice-of-freedom, accessed 10 December 202050 Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, eds, Disobedient Objects, V&A Publishing, London, 201451 Gene Ray and Gregory Sholette, eds, ‘Introduction: Whither Tactical Media?’, Third Text 94, vol 22, issue 5, September 2008, pp 519–52452 I borrow the phrase ‘neither emergency nor event’ from Ikaika Ramones’s historical materialist analysis of the structural forces of capital accumulation in Hawai‘i and their relation to the proposed construction of the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope atop sacred Mauna Kea. Ikaika Ramones, ‘Mauna Kea as Neither Emergency Nor Event’, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, 19 February 2020, https://abolitionjournal.org/mauna-kea-as-neither-emergency-nor-event/, accessed 15 February 2020. For a visual history of decades of struggle in Hawai‘i, see Trask and Ed Greevy, Kūʻe: Thirty Years of Land Struggle in Hawaiʻi, Mutual Publishing, Honolulu, 2004.53 For Freedoms, https://forfreedoms.org, accessed 15 January 202054 For the positive impact of such murals, see A Mārata Ketekiri Tamaira, ‘Walls of Empowerment: Reading Public Murals in a Kanaka Maoli Context’, The Contemporary Pacific, vol 39, no 1, 2017, pp 1–35. See also Tadashi Nakamura’s 2016 documentary film Mele Murals.55 I note this because the flag is commonly presented upside down in political messages to signal Hawaiʻi’s status as a nation in distress.56 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawaiʻi Statehood, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2018, p xiii57 Meant to stay up for months through the 2020 US presidential election in November, the mural was removed within a few days for unknown reasons.58 Hawaiian activist Kaleikoa Ka‘eo has likened the military in Hawai‘i to a monstrous heʻe, or octopus, with its head represented by the US Indo-Pacific Command and its tentacles now spreading over half of the earth’s surface. Kajihiro, ‘Resisting Militarization in Hawai‘i’, op cit, p 30159 Such ideas have been explored by figures ranging from King David Kalākaua to Pacific studies scholar Epeli Hauʻofa, as well as by the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement. See Kealani Cook, ‘Kalākaua’s Polynesian Confederacy: Teaching World History in Hawai‘i and Hawai‘i in World History’, World History Connected, vol 8, no 3, 2011, https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/8.3/forum_cook.html, accessed 25 November 2020; Epeli Hauʻofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2008; and Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina, A Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific, 1983.60 Running from 17 January to 5 February 2020 at Aupuni Space, the exhibition coincided with the 127th anniversary of the US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. It was also inspired by the increased visibility of Hawaiian flags linked to the widespread movement that coalesced in resistance to the Thirty Meter Telescope. See note 52 above. Email correspondence with Josh Tengan, 12 January 2022.61 Adria L Imada, ‘“Aloha ‘Oe”: Settler-Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol 37, issue 2, 2013, p 35, p 3762 Mi’s residency also resulted in The Eyes of the Gods (2017), an historical examination of Pearl Harbor utilising diving footage, surveillance software and woodblock prints, which was displayed in the 2017 Honolulu Biennial.63 The work is viewable on Jane Chang Mi’s website, http://janecmi.com/Aloha-Oe, accessed 25 January 2020.64 Claire Caulfield, ‘Oil Constantly Leaks from the USS Arizona: Is That an Environmental Problem?’, Honolulu Civil Beat, 24 February 2020, https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/02/oil-constantly-leaks-from-the-uss-arizona-is-that-an-environmental-problem/, accessed 20 February 2020. The nearby underground fuel tanks discretely constructed by the military beginning in 1940 at Kapūkakī, or Red Hill, to fuel ships at Pearl Harbor have also leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil and are threatening Oʻahu’s aquifer and the island’s drinking water. For a brief overview of the tanks, see Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2021, pp 163–166.65 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011, p 2. For how environmental slow violence might better be applied within the settler colonial context, see Estes, Our History Is the Future, op cit, pp 166–167.66 For more on the commemoration of Pearl Harbor, see Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, ‘Memorializing Puʻuloa and Remembering Pearl Harbor’, in Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L Camacho, eds, Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010, pp 3–14. For the intertwined histories of Pearl Harbor, US occupation and RIMPAC, see David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile, ‘RIMPAC and the Military Occupation of Hawaiʻi’, The Red Nation, 16 August 2016, https://therednation.org/rimpac-and-the-military-occupation-of-hawaii/, accessed 10 July 2020.67 Craig Santos Perez, ‘Detour of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument’, Academy of American Poets, 2016, https://poets.org/poem/detour-world-war-ii-valor-pacific-national-monument, accessed 25 January 202068 Ibid69 ‘DeTour’ is a shortening of ‘demilitarization tours’ and ‘decolonial tours’ and is also inspired by the Situationists’ concept of détourment. Kyle Kajihiro, ‘DeTouring the Empire: Unsettling Sites and Sights of US Militarism and Settler Colonialism in Hawaiʻi’, in Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, Adam Doering and Bobbie Chew Bigby, eds, Socialising Tourism: Rethinking Tourism for Social and Ecological Justice, Routledge, London, 2022, p 148.70 Kajihiro and Terrilee Keko‘olani, ‘The Hawaiʻi DeTour Project: Demilitarizing Sites and Sights on Oʻahu’, in Hokulani K Aikau and Vicuña Gonzalez, eds, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2019, p 24971 Mi is not the first artist in Hawaiʻi to position the American flag in this manner. Hawaiian artist Kaili Chun’s Kaʻai a Kaiaʻupe (The Stroke of Kaiaʻupe, 1997) pierced the US flag to the ground through the fiftieth star with a pololū (spear) and burned the titular phrase into the fabric, accusing the US of treachery. While Dread Scott’s work comments on the mistreatment of Black people in the US and the country’s military interventions abroad, perhaps a more fitting example regarding Euro-American colonisation in the Pacific is that of Māori artist Diane Prince (Ngāti Whātua, Ngā Puhi), whose Flagging the Future: Te Kiritangata – The Last Palisade (1995) is a plea to viewers to walk upon a New Zealand flag in defiance of British settler colonialism. See Edward Hanfling, ‘An Affect Alien in Aotearoa: Diane Prince and the Flag Controversy’, Third Text 171, vol 35, issue 4, July 2021, pp 431–452.72 Robert L Wiegel, ‘Waikiki Beach, Oahu, Hawaii: History of Its Transformation from a Natural to an Urban Shore’, Shore & Beach, vol 76, no 2, spring 2008, pp 3–3073 Kathy E Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull, Oh, Say, Can You See: The Semiotics of the Military in Hawaiʻi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998, p xiii74 Kelema Lee Moses, ‘Shorelines and Settlements’, Avery Review 49, October 2020, https://averyreview.com/issues/49/shorelines-and-settlements, accessed 1 December 202075 Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, in Mei-Li M Siy and Richard Hamasaki, eds, Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947–1984), University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, 2009, pp 138–169. See also the short film Down on the Sidewalk in Waikīkī (2019) by Justyn Ah Chong, inspired by Westlake’s poems.76 Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick, ‘Down on the Sidewalk in Waikīkī’, Tropic Zine, https://tropiczine.com/Down-on-the-Sidewalk-in-Waikiki, accessed 1 December 202077 Westlake, Westlake, op cit, p 16078 Teaiwa, ‘Reading Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Hauʻofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the “Polynesian” Body’, in Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, eds, Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, Rowman & Litterfield, Lanham, Maryland, 1999, p 25179 Ruth Wilson Gilmore quoted in adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, AK Press, Oakland, California, 2020, p 180 Ibid81 Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement: Kalama Valley, Oʻahu’, The Hawaiian Journal of History 21, 1987, p 146. In 1979 Westlake made the concrete poem ‘Huli’, consisting only of the word itself turned upside down. Westlake’s ‘Huli’ was anonymously replicated in 2020 on a cardboard shipping box with the word cut out, which was part of a selection of signage produced during Tropic’s August residency that was later exhibited in Koa Gallery’s display case in Kapi‘olani Community College’s Lama Library; it also appeared in Tropic’s installation for the 2022 Hawaiʻi Triennial.82 Ala Wai Centennial, https://www.alawaicentennial.org, accessed 1 February 202183 Connelly’s practice triangulates experimental cartography, video work and sculpture for designing forms of architectural justice. Informed by the Ala Wai Centennial research, Connelly constructed Waterway, an 816.5 kg sculpture made with coral sand, quartz sand, cement and water, for the 2018 exhibition ‘Tropical Disturbance’ curated by Filipino-American Trisha Lagoso Goldberg at San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery. Formed as a narrow-angled slope reminiscent of a water slide, Waterway derives its shape from the angular cut of the Ala Wai, the top-down view of the canal’s hockey stick shape having been stood upright with its ocean mouth at the top. Described by Connelly as an ‘internal earth sculpture’, the raw materials for the work were partially obtained by removing sand from Manhattan Beach in southern California, repeating the long-held rumour that sand had to be brought from Manhattan Beach to Waikīkī during the twentieth century to replenish the beaches suffering erosion due to the construction of sea walls, themselves built to protect hotel property. For more on Connelly’s sensitive use of materials, see Aaron Katzeman, ‘Making Room for Earth in Hawaiʻi: Sean Connelly’s A Small Area of Land, Pacific Arts, vol 20, no 1, 2020–2021, pp 42–75.84 Sara Jensen Carr, ‘Water Is Wealth’, Places Journal, October 2021, https://placesjournal.org/article/watershed-urbanism-and-indigenous-ecological-design-in-honolulu/, accessed 5 January 202285 Timothy A Schuler, ‘Why Some Hawaiians Are Fighting a Massive Flood-Control Project’, Bloomberg CityLab, 20 December 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-20/the-battle-over-honolulu-s-ala-wai-canal, accessed 11 December 202086 For more on Waikīkī’s agricultural past, see the documentary Taking Waikīkī: From Self-Sufficiency to Dependency (1994) by Edward Coll and Carol Bain; and Andrea Feeser and Gaye Chan, Waikīkī: A History of Forgetting and Remembering, University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, 2006.87 Connelly has described Oʻahu as a ‘giant military base’ and Honolulu as a ‘utopian fort’, highlighting the missile defence system that once stretched across the entire southern shore. See Sean Connelly, ‘Our City as Ahupuaʻa: For Justice-Advancing Futures’, in Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Craig Howes, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio and Aiko Yamashiro, eds, The Value of Hawaiʻi 3: Hulihia, the Turning, University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, 2020, p 232. See also Connelly’s presentation at the ‘Global Uprising: Indignity, Land, Heritage // Hawaiʻi & Palestine’ event hosted by the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, 15 November 2020, YouTube, https://youtu.be/UrKm4dh_Mvs, accessed 15 November 2020. Working with Dominic Leong, Connelly initiated the architecture collective Hawaiʻi Non-Linear. See note 43 above. Their 2021 exhibition ‘Learning from Lēʻahi’ at Koa Gallery explored similar histories of militarisation and urbanism in Honolulu.88 Sean Connelly, ‘Ahupuaʻa for Peace’, in Jaimey Hamilton Faris, ed, Inundation: Art and Climate Change in the Pacific, University of Hawaiʻi Art Gallery, Honolulu, 2020, pp 8–15. Such a demand closely parallels Bolivia’s Cochabamba People’s Agreement call for climate debts to be paid by the Global North to the Global South.89 Connelly has presented Ahupuaʻa Holodeck to over 1,200 students at both public and private schools in Honolulu. Using maps and diagrams from Ala Wai Centennial as initial learning tools, Connelly has students draw their own plans for how they would like to see the Ala Wai Canal and the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī transformed, which they are then able to project on the holodeck and discuss with classmates.90 Demos uses this phrase to describe ‘art that envisions and enacts the repair of damaged habitats and degraded ecosystems’, referring to the kind of work popular between the 1970s and 1990s that often reinforced temporally static environmental relations and lacked geopolitical complexity. See T J Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2016, p 39. For an early critique outlining the problematic limitations of such projects which nevertheless continued to propagate, see Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation’, October 12, spring 1980, pp 87–102. In discursively shifting the Ala Wai Canal from a functional form of architecture to a monument, Connelly cites on the project website for Ala Wai Centennial the influence of artists such as Robert Smithson and Maya Lin while nonetheless envisioning a much broader scale of transformative healing.
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