The UCI School of Humanities hosted a virtual event, “Possessing Polynesians: In Conversation with Maile Arvin,” that covered and discussed the science of colonial whiteness in Hawaii and Oceania on Jan. 21.
The event began with University of Utah gender studies and history professor Maile Arvin giving an introduction of the premise of her book and brief highlights of its two main theories — the logic of possession through whiteness and regenerative refusals.
“In graduate school, one of my advisors really pushed me to seek out genealogies of race in Hawaii within the larger history of social scientific knowledge production about race broadly and specifically in Hawaii and the broader Pacific. Such work was needed I felt, and partly because there’s such a popular and enduring myth that Hawaii has no racism,” Arvin said.
Though Hawaii is certainly more racially diverse than many parts of the continental U.S., white supremacy and colonialism have embedded racial hierarchy and violence within the islands for a very long time. This myth of racial harmony in Hawaii was tied in significant ways to an older racial fiction, namely the idea that Polynesians are almost white.
Arvin’s book is, essentially, a critical history of the question, “What is a Polynesian?” Her book discusses the fascination of partial identifications with the racial origins of Polynesians as expressed by white Europeans, and later white Americans, during first encounters of Europeans and Indigenous Pacific Islanders. The book also discusses the concept of exotification of Polynesians, such as the sexualization of Hawaiian hula girls as available, sexual conquests for visiting white tourists to complicated matters of legal recognition for native Hawaiian people.
“The central argument of the book is that settler colonialism in Hawaii and Polynesia is fueled by the logic of possession through whiteness,” Arvin said. “The logic of possession through whiteness, both Polynesia the place and Polynesians the people, become exotic feminized possessions of whiteness; possessions that never have the power to claim the property of whiteness for themselves.”
Arvin’s research found that the Polynesian race is repeatedly positioned as “almost white,” even said to be descendants of the Aryan race. This was so that white settlers could claim indigeneity and Polynesia; according to this logic, whiteness itself is indigenous to Polynesia. The logic naturalized white settler presence in Polynesia and allowed white settlers to claim, in various ways, rightful ownership of various parts of Polynesia.
Noah Patterson Hanohano Dolim joined the conversation and spoke on the Pacific Islands having long been treated as sites of experimentation and observation.
“The text ties together three major arcs: race making, indigeneity and settler colonialism. Here, Arvin has us rethinking the process of settler colonialism, not just as a need to eliminate the indigenous but the need to possess bodies, land, histories [and] futures,” Dolim said.
Dolim notes that there are constant parallels between new and old colonialism that still exist and affect the islands to this day, whether it be the enduring myth of all races coexisting peacefully in Hawaii or the thought of Hawaiian women having difficulty in keeping the culture alive through reproduction.
The rest of the discussion varied from the discourse of settler colonialism to how deeply rooted it is embedded into the Polynesian culture.
Arvin’s full book “Possessing Polynesians” is accessible to UCI students through the UCI Libraries in collaboration with JSTOR and ProQuest.
Jamie Luke is a Campus News Intern for the Winter 2021 Quarter. They can be reached at jnluke@uci.edu
