We're All Hawaiians Now: Kanaka Maoli Performance and the Politics of Aloha.

Abstract

The Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s produced an upsurge in Native Hawaiian political consciousness and nationalist sentiment that continues in the present day. Aspirations for Native Hawaiian federal recognition or Hawaiian independence has become a divisive issue within the Native Hawaiian community. Political realities rife with tension and possibility hide beneath the revitalization of Hawaiian cultural performance. Against this backdrop, I examine how “aloha”—Hawai‘i’s primary cultural referent—is performed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. I focus on the ways that “aloha,” loosely defined as love, is used to discipline Native Hawaiians and how Native Hawaiians in turn, negotiate their identification with aloha through performance. I argue that Hawaiian indigeneity is performative and that indigeneity itself is performed into existence. Weaving together Marxist, post-colonial, and performance theory, I theorize why Native Hawaiians still perform aloha despite its commodification and often detrimental effects. I contend that is through aloha’s constant performance that Native Hawaiians have been able to survive, even if the performance of aloha contradicts their material realities. Through the exploration of the work of two contemporary Native Hawaiian performers—Krystilez, a rapper from a rural Hawaiian Homestead and Cocoa Chandelier, a drag queen performing in urban Honolulu—I provide a critique of neoliberal knowledge production and the desire to identify the “truth” or “essence” of Native Hawaiians. Whereas, Krystilez performs aloha through a refusal, Cocoa Chandelier performs aloha in drag. Krystilez resists the paradisiacal construction of Hawai‘i to exhibit defiant forms of indigeneity that speak against U.S. hegemony in Hawai‘i, while he also utilizes state logics of racialization to claim legitimacy and ground his indigeneity. Cocoa Chandelier, in contrast, hides her indigeneity by performing aloha in drag to destabilize “Hawaiianness” and the grounds upon which Hawaiian performance is traditionally defined. I theorize the ways in which Cocoa Chandelier’s performances unsettle attempts to appropriate the indigenous subject. The representational strategies of these performers illuminate the political stakes of Native Hawaiian Federal Recognition, Native cultural politics and U.S. multiculturalism, the latter which is at the heart of any invocation of “the spirit of aloha.”