Susan Najita

Affiliations:

Core Faculty: Program in Asian/Pacific Islander American (A/PIA) Studies

Faculty Affiliate: Native Amerian & Indigenous Studies

Professor Najita holds a joint appointment in the Departments of American Culture (AC) and English Language and Literature

Forthcoming from University of California Press

Living Genealogies:
     Embodiment and Colonialism in the
        Creation of Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park

In this dynamic new analysis of colonialism and empire, Susan Y. Najita centers indigenous knowledge and embodied practice. This brings into clear focus the disruptions to creational and life-giving relationships between people, the more-than-human, and the environment. Living Genealogies focuses on the colonizing processes that led to the establishment of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on one of the most sacred places in the Pacific, the home of Pele, goddess of fire. Colonization works by severing ties to sacred life-giving places maintained through kinship and mutual thriving. In bringing together disparate fields of study—the volcano, the overthrow and annexation, and leprosy—with the embodied practice of sacred hula, Najita shows how genealogy is the basis for both critique and decolonial praxis. Reading the epic tale of Pele and her sister Hi'iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele teaches us about what Najita calls "genealogics," the connections that structure the reciprocal care and nurturing that form the basis of vibrant health of generations of living communities over time. In the end, Najita argues, we can look to this relationship of repair and mutuality as an answer to our wider health and environmental crises.
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/living-genealogies/paper

Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction 

In Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific (Routledge, 2007) Susan Y. Najita proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence. In particular, she examines how contemporary writers from Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand remember, re-tell, and deploy this violent history in their work. As Pacific peoples negotiate their paths towards sovereignty and chart their postcolonial futures, these writers play an invaluable role in invoking and commenting upon the various uses of the histories of colonial resistance, allowing themselves and their readers to imagine new futures by exorcising the past.

Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific is a valuable addition to the fields of Pacific and Postcolonial Studies and also contributes to struggles for cultural decolonization in Oceania: contemporary writers’ critical engagement with colonialism and indigenous culture, Najita argues, provides a powerful tool for navigating a decolonized future.