Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism

Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty is yet another highly significant and extremely well-researched and theoretically contextualized contribution to the rapidly growing body of literature by native Hawaiian scholars on their history, culture, and political struggles. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's book “seeks to demonstrate how white American notions of property title, state sovereignty, and normative gender relations and sexuality become intimately imbricated in aspirations for Hawaiian liberation” (p. 3). By “paradoxes,” she refers to the “contradictions” in the contemporary sovereignty movement that emerge when “statist claims” are asserted, which often are in conflict with indigenous ones (p. 11). Major paradoxes are discussed in separate chapters. Chapter 1 notes that the legal status of native governing entities, such as that proposed for native Hawaiians by the defunct Akaka bill, is conditioned by U.S. law restricting their self-governance as “domestic dependent sovereigns” (p. 37). Chapter 2, on land, points out that, while the Mahele land division resulted in the loss of Hawaiian control over land, it paradoxically enabled contemporary nationalist claims to stolen Crown and government lands. More generally, Kauanui argues that international recognition of the Hawaiian kingdom required the commodification of land, subjugation of women, and drastic revision of sexual and gender norms—“a history of Indigenous disparagement and criminalization” (p. 196). Based on her review of such paradoxes and the work toward their resolution, Kauanui advocates “nonstatist forms of Indigenous Hawaiian sovereignty,” or ea, which, she notes, can also be defined more generally as “life,” that differ from Western notions of sovereignty and do not require a state to flourish (p. 200).

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