Polyface in Paradise: Exploring the Politics of Race, Gender, and Place

Yuki Kihara’s 2016 work Der Papālagi (The White Man) provides a critical reappropriation of an early twentieth-century account of a Samoan chief and his views on “white people” and the artifice of European “civilization.” This work was popular as an invocation of island paradise that appealed to German sensibilities of the time. It has, however, been revealed as a literary masquerade written by Erich Scheurmann, who resided briefly in Sāmoa in the early twentieth century. This tale has been further interpreted in a photographic project by artist Yuki Kihara who uses it to reexplore contemporary evocations of paradise and to dis- rupt hierarchical relations through a series of racial crossings and inversions of looking at relations that work to provincialize boundaries of race and question understandings of cultural appropriation. In both Scheurmann’s and Kihara’s works, as well as in the collaborative project of writing this essay, the dynamics of possessing paradise via colonial imaginaries, neocolonial leisure industries, and the practice of ethnography are explored to highlight the complexities of exploitation, cultural ownership, and desire

Whose Paradise? Encounter, Exchange, and Exploitation

This essay is a critical reexamination of the trope of paradise. This trope has a long global history encompassing colonial imaginings and missionary and travel narratives, and notions of “paradise” continue to influence contemporary nar- ratives of place and landscape in the Pacific for Indigenous groups and others. While much has been written about the potency of the paradise trope in the West, it is often implicitly assumed that Indigenous engagement with the trope amounts to a simple rejection or dismissal of “paradise.” In contrast, we suggest that the dynamics of possession, dispossession, and repossession of paradise require fur- ther investigation. Paradise is both an imaginary that frames foreign engagement with the Pacific and a complex political landscape that is mobilized by Indigenous people both to contest neocolonial forms of appropriation and exploitation and to affirm local articulations of ownership and belonging in the Pacific

En las fronteras del género: política y transformaciones de la no-heteronormatividad en Polinesia

  En las sociedades polinesias, las personas con un género o sexualidad no-heteronormativos ocupan, a un mismo tiempo, posiciones marginales y lugares centrales en la estructura social: forman una categoría social extremadamente visible, pero cuyas fronteras son a la vez borrosas. Esta duplicidad nos insta a pasar desde una aproximación que pretende aislarlos en tanto categoría identitaria a otra aproximación que se centra en las prácticas sociales, culturales y políticas. Esta aproximación comienza con la historia de los contactos entre Isleños y Occidentales, una historia que parece haber cumplido un papel central en la emergencia social de la no-heteronormatividad en la región. Rechazando los modelos simplistas que enfrentan “tradición” y “modernidad” para abrazar en su lugar la complejidad de estas categorías, pretendemos localizar la no-heteronormatividad polinesia en la convergencia de fuerzas locales y globales y en los intersticios entre moralidades diferentes que, sin embargo, funcionan simultáneamente.

Queer Asian Subjects: Transgressive Sexualities and Heteronormative Meanings

This special issue of Asian Studies Review explores comparatively the production and transformation of gender and sexual subjectivities across and beyond South and Southeast Asia. More specifically, papers in this special issue disclose the complex intersections of ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion and nationality through which sexual subjectivities are formed and subject positions inhabited within and across these regions. By tracing the transnational movement of people and the circulation of images and ideas, their appropriations and effects, the papers in this volume reveal mutable and multiple sexual subjectivities that are no longer fixed in place, even as state discourses, hegemonic meanings and individual actors work to attach specific meanings to particular bodies. In this special issue we ask, what are the effects of migration, forced and chosen, on forms and formulations of gender and sexuality for people's embodied and discursive entanglements? How do spatial and temporal, as well as religious, economic and political changes alter and foreclose some kinds of intimacies and subjectivities even as they open and enable others? What are the social and cultural processes through which heteronormativity is articulated, enforced, transgressed and challenged

Globalizing Drag in the Cook Islands: Friction, Repulsion, and Abjection

Male to female cross-dressing and performing have a long indigenous history in the Cook Islands. In recent years, Western-style drag shows have also been included in the Cook Islands cross-dressing repertoire. This article takes the highly cosmopolitan vehicle of the drag show and uses it to track the relationship between local and global models of gender and sexuality. It examines ways in which the iconography of domesticity and motherhood has been used to signify an uneasy relationship between local and global ideas of sexuality and gende

Dancing from the heart : movement, gender and sociality in the Cook Islands

This thesis explores dance through the lens of performance, globalization, gender and postcolonialism. It also relies on contemporary Pacific scholarship to argue about the centrality of active agency in cultural production. Cook Islands dancing is not simply a reflection past and present gendered cultural politics. Throughout, I argue that the mediational power of expressive practices actively produces the modalities through which regional and local identities engage with broader global processes. Dance, I suggest, is a generative process which occupies the hearts, minds and bodies of many Cook Islanders