Re-tracing the Haole female teacher–traveler in Hawaii

Abstract

Within this article I draw on the use of stories and interpretative reading practices: my own personal story and the literature of Asian American writer, Lois Yamanaka, to explore the racialization of social groups in Hawaii within a critical postcolonial perspective. I ask how we might learn to ‘read back’ to the colonial story of Hawaii without surrendering to a reification of the very structures of racial oppression and supremacy that drove the Imperial project, and I would argue, still influences the racial and social injuries of contemporary American life in Hawaii. I set Yamanaka’s fictional account of various white teachers in Hawaii against my own startling experiences of being a haole or foreign female teacher in Hawaii over the last four years as a way to consider a more ethical framework for human relations within education.

Keywords:

• postcoloniality
• education
• literacy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Hannah Tavares and Aparna Mishra Tarc for their insights and support.