Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2019. xi, 313 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0633-6.
Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, by Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) historian and gender studies scholar Maile Arvin, provides an exceptionally sharp critique of settler colonialism in and of Polynesia, from the nineteenth century to the present. This is a scholarly work that is well researched, structured, and written, and that is particularly strong in its meticulous attention to, and analysis of, a diverse set of empirical material, including eugenic scientific texts, parliamentary debates, and Pacific artwork. Arvin scrutinizes well-intentioned efforts by white settlers to combat racism, exactly because they appear so benign. She argues that long-held myths of Hawaiʻi as a racial “melting pot” use an image of Indigenous peoples to legitimate not only the white settler presence, but also seemingly universalist categories of humanism, multiculturalism, and postracialism.
The book’s main argument is that Polynesia is a white, heteronormative settler project that purports that Polynesians are descendants of, but degenerated from, the European race. While never destined to fully reach whiteness, in this antiblack logic Polynesians become exoticized, feminized possessions in-waiting for colonization, thereby naturalizing white settler presence in Polynesia. Arvin refers to this phenomenon as logic of possession through whiteness, which forms the first core concept of the book, and which she explicates using the case of Hawai‘i. She favours the important diction of through rather than by whiteness to highlight that whiteness is not an agent but a type of knowledge and power. Regenerative refusal, the second concept, consists of strategies and actions that restore the balance of injustices ensuing from ongoing settler colonial structures that Indigenous communities continue to have to navigate.
The author employs a discourse analysis, primarily of historical and contemporary Western scientific literature, as well as a wide range of visual material, such as Yuki Kihara’s artwork Nose Width with Vernier Caliper that also serves as an unsettling book cover. Besides an introduction and a conclusion, the book consists of two main parts organized around the two core concepts, with three chapters each. The introduction offers a well-structured overview of the book, with a thorough accounting of key definitions. Part I, “The Polynesian Problem”, analyzes nineteenth- and twentieth-century social scientists’ racial ideology and hierarchization of antiblackness in the distinction between “whiter” Polynesia, Micronesia, and most inferior (black) Micronesia. The first chapter is concerned with settler scholars’ quest for Polynesians’ origins, the Polynesia Problem literature (1830s–1930s), where Arvin delineates the logic of possession through whiteness: Western whiteness as Polynesians’ past and unfulfillable future. While white settlers’ belief in Polynesian exceptionalism was based on a desire to comprehend the human race, King Kalākaua’s support of this ideology of exceptionalism served his interest to maintain his people. This difference underscores the author’s argument that this logic operates through, rather than by whiteness.
Chapter 2 shows that narratives of the Polynesian Problem, that is, the origin of Polynesians, continued into the early twentieth century through physical anthropology and eugenics, which would set the foundation to the still existing blood quantum laws in Hawai‘i. The chapter deals with the work of two advocates of Native Hawaiians, Uldrick Thompson and Louis Sullivan, with the former teaching racial purity to “sustain” the Hawaiian people, and the latter supporting racial mixing. Arvin juxtaposes them to Māori scholar Te Rangihīroa (Sir Peter Henry Buck) to delineate their shared stance on Polynesians’ proximity to whiteness and distance to blackness. Yet unlike scholars like Thompson and Sullivan, and similar to King Kalākaua, Rangihīroa’s interest in Western science and technology served his interest to better understand Polynesian epistemologies. The final chapter of part I takes a critical look at past and contemporary sociological and popular renderings of Hawaiʻi as a “melting pot” purportedly free of racism. Unpublished interviews of Chicago School-trained sociologist Romanzo Adams offer ample evidence that everyday racism was a common reality in the 1930s, yet did not fit the Chicago School’s vision of Hawaiʻi as an ideal racial laboratory. Policies, social science, and the media perpetuated an image of a mixed “new race” of Hawaiians, with the key figure of the hybrid Hawaiian girl. American men as the prime audience were “to think of themselves as experimental breeders, doing their heterosexual reproductive duty for the United States in turning Hawai‘i whiter” (118), yet effectively diminishing Kānaka Maoli presence.
Part II is an interdisciplinary analysis of three contemporary cases in law, science, and art, through which the author delineates regenerative refusals: processes of regrowth in Indigenous communities. Chapter 4 focuses on the blood quantum policy, which still requires Kānaka Maoli to prove 50 percent Hawaiian descendance to be eligible for Hawaiian homesteads housing and other services. Though not defined as such, Kānaka Maoli face a constant double bind between seeking and rejecting state authorities, which Arvin aptly refers to as “call the law on the law” and “call the law on themselves” (144). Regenerative refusals to the blood quantum law, or white settler notions of race and humanity, form effective Indigenous feminist responses to such double binds.
Chapter 5 attends to genetics and genomics through which the Polynesian Problem discourse has continued into the present. Arvin delineates how genomic mapping renders Hawaiʻi a global model to end racism. Regenerative refusals, for instance to the Hawaiian Genome Project, resist normative settler notions of race, gender, and indigeneity to make way for other forms of humanity. Chapter 6 focuses on contemporary Pacific art as a site of regenerative refusal. By expanding upon Audra Simpson’s notion of ethnographic refusal, Arvin describes various unsettling strategies in the artworks of Yuki Kihara (Sāmoan) and Adrienne Keahi Pao (Kānaka Maoli). In the short conclusion, the author skillfully summarizes the content of the book in relation to the recent TMT telescope controversy. The mainstream media’s general dismissal of Kānaka Maoli as “backwards” defies the logic of Indigenous space-times, where the past is also in the future, and a place.
For Pacific Island scholars, this book will no doubt become a seminal scholarly work. It will also be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists, as it reviews troubling legacies that still reverberate in these disciplines. In the book’s critique of the social construction of science, a more expansive dialogue with (postcolonial) science and technology studies (STS) would have brought much-needed transdisciplinary discussions. Concurrently, STS scholars can in this work see the value of expanding prevalent, narrow framings around science and technology that often manifest as a kind of “total” logic. For a white European anthropologist who has worked in Hawai‘i for many years, this work provides a crucial tool for deciphering the/her pervasive white (US) settler presence in Hawai‘i. It will certainly be of much use for other white settler scholars, within and beyond Oceania.
Mascha Gugganig
Technical University Munich, Munich