Abstract: We conduct a synthetic archaeological and ethnohistoric dating program to assess the timing and tempo of the spread of peaches, the first Eurasian domesticate to be adopted across Indigenous eastern North America, into the interior American Southeast by Indigenous communities who quickly “Indigenized” the fruit. In doing so, we present what may be the […]

Excerpt: Take those farmers. On the one hand, “the exception to the rule of early American history as virtually a theory-free subdiscipline is the recent, intense, and growing interest in the Antipodean export of the idea of settler colonialism as an overarching methodology” (13). On the other hand, evidently early American historians no longer write […]

Abstract: “Asian settler colonialism” calls attention to the simultaneous denial of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi dispossession and the celebration of descendants of Asian immigrants as industrious members of Hawai’i’s multicultural middle class. While we acknowledge the importance of confronting settler colonialism, we argue that Asian settler colonialism reinscribes an inaccurate understanding of Hawai’i Asians today and over […]

Abstract: How is Indigenous-settler solidarity to protect interconnected social ecologies urgent yet altogether precarious? The essay stews on this question in the context of Hawai’i and, through immanent critique of theories about settler aloha ‘āina, demonstrates that becoming hoa provides a necessary alternative practice and dialectic process of binding relations together to aloha ‘āina. First, […]

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, the US federal government created homesteading programs to “Americanize” Hawai’i by encouraging the mass settlement of white families “of good character” to Hawai’i, but to little avail. This essay analyzes a 1912 hearing about the failure of white homesteading in the Territory of Hawai’i, focusing on discourses of race […]

Abstract: Celebrating Indigenous zones and movements of revival and “resurgence” has become a dominant frame of sorts for Indigenous political theory. Emergent Indigenous political praxis in Hawai’i, led by certain grassroots groups and organizers, leads me to theorize a qualitatively and quantitatively different modality of Indigenous politics—what I offer as “insurgent Indigeneity.” This essay traces […]

Description: True West explores myths of the West and how, if left unexamined, they distort the realities of the present and exacerbate polarizations. These misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the wellbeing of western communities overrun by newcomers seeking a dream—and the country, unless America recognizes the dangers of building a national identity […]

Abstract: Thanksgiving-themed episodes of cooking television open up questions about the interrelations of food, history, power, and culture. This study addresses such questions through textual and thematic analysis of 46 Thanksgiving-themed episodes of reality cooking competition programmes on US cable TV, exploring how the Thanksgiving episode operates as a site for the deployment of the […]

Abstract: The United States is, and always has been, an empire. A host of recently published works expound the inseparable link between imperialism and the development of the United States and of its global standing. This dissertation aims to further this trend by examining U.S. imperialism in its key possession—the Isthmus of Panama. Few studies […]

Excerpt: In fact, some queer subjects may be complicit with settler colonialism, just as they may profit from or fail to resist white supremacy, capitalism, or misogyny.3 This seemingly obvious reality is remarkably hard to keep in view, for doing so means abiding with discomfort, both the discomfort of responsibility and that of uncertainty, ambivalence, and […]