When the familiar is strange: encountering the cultural politics of Hawaii in the college classroom

Abstract

Weaving feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial strands of social criticism, I recount an incident that is emblematic of the complex arrangements or dispositions of space in the Pacific. The specific moment – an encounter in the college classroom where an entangled racial–ethnic–gender dynamic of identification surfaced – acts as a catalyst for probing questions concerning expert systems of knowledge that constitute the institutional space of teaching/learning as distinctly rational; processes of identification where love and betrayal are dramatized; and domains of the political where embodiment, histories, memories, and racial fantasies come together in complex ways. Drawing on the concept of ‘racial melancholia’, I tease out the strands of this entangled dynamic and demonstrate how the corporeal and the psychic are intimately bound.

Keywords:

• difference
• embodiment
• racial melancholia
• identification

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two blind reviewers and the editors, Jo-Anne Dillabough, Julie McLeod and Martin Mills, for their critical comments and suggestions. I am indebted to Kathie Kane, Grace Livingston, Alana Parpal, and Michael Shapiro for their politically insightful conversations.