The Journal of Pacific History

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjph20

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler

Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania; Staking
Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in
Hawai‘i
Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i
and Oceania. By Maile Arvin. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2019. xi +
313 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781478006336 (pbk).
US$27.95.; Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai‘i.
By Judy Rohrer. Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press, 2016. x + 228 pp.,
notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780816502516 (hbk), 9780816537303 (pbk),
9780816533787 (ebook). US$55 (hbk), US$30 (pbk and ebook).

Warwick Anderson

To cite this article: Warwick Anderson (2021) Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler
Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania; Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in
Hawai‘i, The Journal of Pacific History, 56:3, 365-367, DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2021.1924101

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2021.1924101

Published online: 25 May 2021.

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The Journal of Pacific History, 2021
Vol. 56, No. 3, 365–367

REVIEW ESSAY

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania. By Maile Arvin.
Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2019. xi + 313 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. ISBN 9781478006336 (pbk). US$27.95.

Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai‘i. By Judy Rohrer. Tucson, AZ,
University of Arizona Press, 2016. x + 228 pp., notes, bibliography, index. ISBN
9780816502516 (hbk), 9780816537303 (pbk), 9780816533787 (ebook). US$55 (hbk), US
$30 (pbk and ebook).

In recent years, Hawai‘i has become a key site for critical inquiry into racial formations of
settler colonialism, joining other prominent places of resistance and contestation such as
the southwest borderlands of the continental United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, and
outback Australia. Led by Indigenous and Mestizo scholars, these new histories of the racia-
lizations and dispossessions inflicted under settler colonialism are transforming our apprehen-
sions of contemporary legacies of white privilege and white violence, whether epistemic or
physical. Drawing on a variety of theoretical resources, including settler colonial studies, Indi-
genous studies, critical race theory, and decolonial and critical postcolonial approaches, the
authors of these histories challenge conventional imperial assumptions about agency and
place, possession and sovereignty. They are generating fresh histories oriented around Indi-
genous resistance and continued flourishing, displacing sham historical claims of white super-
iority, conquest, civilization and development. Both Possessing Polynesians and Staking Claim, in
different ways and from different standpoints, reveal vividly what it might mean to decolonize
Pacific or Oceanic histories and just what is at stake in this necessary endeavour.
In Possessing Polynesians, Maile Arvin, a Native Hawaiian feminist historian, from
O‘ahu and currently at Utah, focuses on the contributions of mid-20th-century sciences
and early 21st-century legal reasoning to the fabrication of possessive whiteness and its
attempt to eliminate the ‘natives’. She argues that settler colonialism in Hawai‘i has been
‘fueled by a logic of possession through whiteness’ (p. 3). Physical anthropologists in the
1920s and 1930s imagined ‘Polynesians’ as almost white, thereby reframing Oceania as a
natural place for ‘authentic’ whites such as themselves. Meanwhile, according to Arvin, ‘Poly-
nesians become exotic, feminized possessions of whiteness – possessions that never have the
power to claim the property of whiteness’ (p. 3). Arvin seeks to trace here a critical genealogy
of Pacific whiteness, juxtaposed to illusions of almost-white Polynesians and threateningly
black Melanesians.
While much of the earlier part of the book will be familiar to readers of Serge Tscher-
kézoff and Bronwen Douglas, among many others, Arvin breaks new ground, or leads us into
largely unexplored waters, when she considers the pre-war research of anthropologists like
Louis Sullivan and Te Rangihı̄roa (Peter Buck) into racial origins and Pacific racial differ-
ences. She contrasts Sullivan’s continued investment in racial typologies with Te Rangihı̄roa’s
commitment to recording, and participating in, Pacific cultural expression, but in so doing she
mutes the haole anthropologist’s engagement in studies valorizing ‘race-mixing’ and ignores
the Māori anthropologist’s earlier analysis of native somatotypes. Unfortunately, Arvin
misses the opportunity to analyse here the work of Boasian physical anthropologist Harry
L. Shapiro (mentioned in passing on p. 125) on the qualities of mixed-race populations and
the bodily adaptation of Asians (and presumably whites) to Pacific environments. To do so
would complicate, though not necessarily subvert, her argument about the naturalization of

© 2021 Warwick Anderson

366 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

white possession of Polynesia. In these opening sections of the book, Arvin compellingly
signals the multiple complicities of human biology with white settler colonialism.
Arvin is particularly concerned to challenge the ways in which Hawai‘i is conjured as
a sort of mixed-race paradise, a place where people of Native Hawaiian, Asian, and European
descent can blend harmoniously. Like Christine Manganaro, she concentrates on sociologists
from the University of Hawai‘i, disciples of Robert E. Park who sought to embed Chicago-
school theories promoting racial assimilation and amalgamation. Drawing discerningly on
unpublished interviews of mixed residents of the islands conducted by Margaret Lam, a
local researcher of Chinese descent, Arvin shows that ‘the discourse of Hawai‘i as melting
pot has always been a saleable fiction that masks structural racism against Native Hawaiians
and others’ (p. 99). Sociologists like Romanzo Adams and Andrew Lind chose to paint glossy
pictures of racial harmony and the manifold benefits of white sovereignty. According to Arvin,
then, mixed-race discourses offer an excuse for, or an evasion of, ‘the settler colonial logic of
possession through whiteness’ (p. 176). She concludes that ‘settler colonial ideologies that
valorize and universalize racial mixture can be just as dystopic and damaging as valorizing
racial purity’ (p. 232). Emphasis on ancestral and cultural heterogeneity and compatibility
thus might imperil efforts of Indigenous people to decolonize (p. 209). For Arvin, it seems,
the category of the in-between needs to be eliminated in any effective decolonization project.
One of the more valuable aspects of Possessing Polynesians is the focus on what Arvin
calls ‘regenerative refusals’ of Kānaka Maoli or Native Hawaiians to be taken in and encom-
passed by the artefactual whiteness of settler colonialism. In the second part of the book, she
discusses arguments about definitions of Indigeneity according to ‘blood quantum’, genetic
testing and genomics research, and representations of Indigenous and hapa, or mixed,
peoples in contemporary Pacific and Asian-American art. Arvin thus leaps rather awkwardly
from pre-war biological and sociological inquiries regarding racial differences in Hawai‘i to
recent debates, often conducted through the law, about Pacific identity and sovereignty.
She clearly is deeply and critically engaged with contemporary legacies of settler colonial
racialization, analysing extremely complicated contentions about Indigeneity, mixedness
and whiteness with impressive delicacy and tact. Her final inference, however, is sharp and
powerful. ‘Mixed-race discourses’, she writes, ‘have long been part of structuring and enliven-
ing settler colonialism … This is fundamentally incompatible with, or even opposed to, the
decolonization sought by many Indigenous people, for whom mixed-race identity has been
imposed upon them as a structural feature of settler colonialism’ (p. 209).
Possessing Polynesians is a hybrid of subtle and probing historical analysis of colonial
racialization in Hawai‘i and the rather blunt application of a singular theory of settler coloni-
alism that tends to homogenize all kinds of interaction and exploitation. The more compelling
sections of the book, derived largely from Indigenous studies and from thinking through Indi-
genous life worlds, attempt to situate racialized thought and practice in Hawai‘i, which on
closer inspection proves to be settler colonial in a specific, even exceptional, way. The
uniform continental settler-colonial frame is even less well suited to other parts of Polynesia,
which are poorly charted despite frequent gestures in their direction. The distinctiveness of
French and British colonial enterprises and racial formations in the region is ignored in
favour of the ubiquitous imposition of a North American theoretical framework. As I read
Arvin’s important book, I found myself wishing she had tried to decolonize the continental
US version of ‘settler colonial studies’ too.
In Staking Claim, Judy Rohrer also resorts to settler colonialism as a convenient orga-
nizing principle as she exposes how in Hawai‘i racialization is used ‘to obscure, with the ulti-
mate goal of eliminating, Native Hawaiian indigeneity, homeland, nation, and sovereignty’
(p. 3) – but she remains somewhat sceptical of the theory’s extensibility. Drawing on the
insights of Vicente M. Diaz, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Noenoe K. Silva, and Teresia Teaiwa,
among others, Rohrer explores the actual ‘flexibility and porosity of racial categories’
(p. 76) as they emerged and were refigured specifically in Hawai‘i. The more substantive chap-
ters, along what is primarily a stimulating theoretical itinerary, involve close analysis of major
 REVIEW ESSAY 367

recent legal cases concerning definitions of Indigeneity and the validity of stipulating
Indigenous ancestry for admission to Kamehameha Schools. Like Arvin, Rohrer offers a
telling critique of the phoniness of images of interracial blending and harmony, the cant of
colour-blind ideology, and the spurious normalizing of white subjectivity – which all work
to conceal deeper histories of white privilege in the islands. As she puts it, ‘race works differ-
ently in Hawai‘i than on the continent, although still within the overall framework of U.S.
white supremacy’ (p. 79).
Positioning herself as a haole feminist scholar based now in the continental US,
Rohrer invokes Native Pacific cultural studies, a body of work concentrated on Indigenous
epistemologies which ‘reveals native survivance and resistance, works against innocent posi-
tioning, and complicates dualistic thinking’ (p. 51), in order to trouble the conventional
Native/settler binary of settler colonial studies. She regards Hawai‘i as ‘fluid and dynamic,
as oriented toward the Pacific and not the continental United States, as having unique indi-
genous Pacific history and culture that stretch back for centuries’ (p. 15). In this locale, settler
colonial studies, with its focus on land, not ocean, can be an awkward fit. Rather, Rohrer
echoes Isaiah Helekunihi Walker in trying to shift historical perspective, observing colonial
racializations and claims of possession from the vantage point of the ocean. ‘Oceania
happens through complex interlinkages and delinkages’, she writes, ‘articulations and disarti-
culations, identifications and disidentifications, ebbs and flows and cycles that defy normative
concepts of time and space’ (p. 45). Musing on Walker’s reimagination of surfing in the ka
po‘ina nalu or ‘boarder-lands’ and Barack Obama’s graceful body surfing, performatively yet
indeterminately local, at Sandy Beach, O‘ahu, in 2008, Rohrer seeks to decolonize white
strategies of authority through multiplying heterogeneity and difference, not by rearticulating
binaries with a critical inflection. ‘If colonization relies on tidy categories and bright lines of
demarcation’, she insists, ‘decolonization gains strength in choppy waters with multiple,
fluid subjectivities’ (p. 103).
Eschewing any structuralist ‘logic’, Rohrer concludes instead with a discussion of
Mestiza consciousness and Oceanic border-spaces (not borderlands), arguing pointedly that
‘settler colonialism cannot hold water’ (p. 177). Staking Claim thus opens up spaces where
continuing colonial racializations – fundamentally the deployment of whiteness as a strategy
of authority, as Homi K. Bhabha called it – might be unsettled or undermined in making
visible deconstructive ‘complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, entanglement, paradox, and
messiness’ (p. 165). In our poststructuralist salad days, we used to bruit this as postcolonial
critique. But I expect that Arvin and many other Indigenous scholars would regard it as a
dodge, a deflection from the more meaty decolonization they are demanding.

ORCID

Warwick Anderson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2572-035X

WARWICK ANDERSON
University of Sydney, Australia
warwick.anderson@sydney.edu.au
© 2021 Warwick Anderson
https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2021.1924101