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THE ENVIRONMENT FORUM
SPEAKER: Hi'ilei Hobart, Yale University
In Conversation with Sarah Dimick and Rebecca Hogue
In February 2020, a group of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawaiʻi in the late nineteenth century. This talk explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically 14 iwi poʻo (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Koʻolau mountain range of Oʻahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, Professor Hobart engages with theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Drawing upon the Native Hawaiian concept of hoʻopahulu, which encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from over-farming in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), the talk highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, Professor Hobart argues against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geographies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.
About the Speakers
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is a recipient of the press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award and the co-winner of the 2023 NAISA First Book Award. Her articles have appeared in refereed journals such as NAIS, Media+Environment, Food, Culture, and Society, and The Journal of Transnational American Studies, among others. She is the co-editor of the special issue “Radical Care,” for Social Text (2020), and the editor of Foodways of Hawaiʻi (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on a project about cultural memory, commemoration, and hauntings in Hawaii State Parks. Professor Hobart holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University, an MA in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and an MLS in Rare Books Librarianship and Archives Management from the Pratt Institute. She joins Yale from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology.
Sarah Dimick is Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University. She is a literary scholar working in the environmental humanities. Her research and teaching, based in global Anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, focus on literary portrayals of climate change and environmental justice.
Rebecca Hogue is a 2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center. She writes about empire, militarization, and the environment in the Pacific Islands and Oceania.
This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability
About the Series
The Environment Forum at the Mahindra Center is convened by Robin Kelsey, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University and Sarah Dimick, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.