Virtual Guest Speaker | "Hawai'i is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific"
Virtual Guest Speaker | "Hawai'i is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific"
Dec 7, 2021
3:00 - 4:00pm
Add to Calendar12/07/2021 3:00 PM12/07/2021 4:00 PMAmerica/Los_AngelesVirtual Guest Speaker | "Hawai'i is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific"
About the talk: Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local.
Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”
About the Speaker: Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a comparative race studies scholar who offers an interdisciplinary, comparative, and ethnographic approach to the study of difference, inequality, and racism. The central goal of her teaching, research, and writing is to contest interminority racisms by ethnographically detailing existing models of cross-racial solidarities among nonWhite groups. By highlighting historical crossovers, comparative or relational racialization, and expansive political orientations, Sharma’s work attempts to imagine liberated futures for all people. Sharma is the co-editor of Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018) and is working on a project on Black Music in the Hawaiian Islands.
Open to the SUA community | Sponsored by the International Studies Concentration | Zoom link will be posted soon
About the talk: Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local.
Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”
About the Speaker: Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a comparative race studies scholar who offers an interdisciplinary, comparative, and ethnographic approach to the study of difference, inequality, and racism. The central goal of her teaching, research, and writing is to contest interminority racisms by ethnographically detailing existing models of cross-racial solidarities among nonWhite groups. By highlighting historical crossovers, comparative or relational racialization, and expansive political orientations, Sharma’s work attempts to imagine liberated futures for all people. Sharma is the co-editor of Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018) and is working on a project on Black Music in the Hawaiian Islands.
Open to the SUA community | Sponsored by the International Studies Concentration | Zoom link will be posted soon