The race of settlers: Nancy Huayan Carranza, ‘Problematizing the Multiracial Promised Land: Multiracial Settler Belonging in Hawaiʻi in the Asian American Literary Imagination’, MELUS, 2025, #mlaf012 | settler colonial studies blog

The race of settlers: Nancy Huayan Carranza, ‘Problematizing the Multiracial Promised Land: Multiracial Settler Belonging in Hawaiʻi in the Asian American Literary Imagination’, MELUS, 2025, #mlaf012

27May25

Excerpt: Puanani Burgess’s poem “Choosing My Name” (1998) articulates the fraught positioning of multiracial Asian-Native Hawaiians under the conditions of settler colonialism and the tenacity of Indigenous genealogy to persist under what Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination” (“Settler” 387), as the poet-speaker demands recognition and refuses erasure of her Kanaka Maoli heritage by both the settler state and her own Japanese American family. This “logic of elimination” operates not only through state institutions that uphold the poet-speaker’s English name “Christabelle” as the “real” and “safe” name but also in settler colonialism’s assimilative demands on Asian migrant-settlers, as seen in her “home name,” “Yoshie,” which “made [her] acceptable” to her Japanese American family (Burgess 278), signaling the disavowal of Indigeneity as a precondition for belonging. Burgess’s poem also highlights the way that racial and ethnic identification via naming becomes linked to specific spatial imaginaries: “Christabelle” operates in state institutions such as the school; “Yoshie” offers conditional acceptance in the migrant-settler home; and the “chosen” name “Puanani” tethers the poet-speaker to the land (āina) and the sea (kai) as an umbilical cord (piko) to her Indigenous genealogy.

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