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New Year’s Eve, 1934. While Honolulu celebrates with champagne and fireworks, someone is making away with the Bishop Museum’s portrait of King Kalakaua and its curator. A series of brutal murders follows, and an unlikely pair, newspaper reporter Mina Beckwith and visiting playwright Ned Manusia, find themselves investigating a twisted trail of clues in an attempt to recover the painting and uncover the killer. Honolulu in the 1930s is a unique (and volatile) mix of the provincial and the urban, East and West, islander and mainlander. Mina and Ned, both of Polynesian descent, confront the complexities and contradictions of Island life as their investigation takes them into the heart of Ho...
Hawaii Nei brings together three plays by one of Hawaii's finest playwrights. A compassionate portrait of early nineteenth- century Hawaii, "The Conversion of Kaahumanu" charts the lives of five women during the traumatic, transforming events that followed Western contact. Set in post-World War II Hawaii, "Emmalehua" tells the story of a young Hawaiian woman struggling to preserve a cherished cultural heritage in a world eager to forget the past and embrace the new American dream. Through history, humor, and a whodunnit plot, the past and present collide in "Ola Na Iwi," which explores the issues surrounding the treatment of indigenous human remains.
Winner of the Native American Literature Symposium's Beatrice Medicine Award for Published Monograph The first extensive study of contemporary Hawaiian literature, Finding Meaning examines kaona, the practice of hiding and finding meaning, for its profound connectivity. Through kaona, author Brandy Nalani McDougall affirms the tremendous power of Indigenous stories and genealogies to give lasting meaning to decolonization movements.
When a weekend of horseback rides and beachcombing at the old Haleiwa Hotel turns deadly, Mina Beckwith and Ned Manusia are on the case. The unlikely pair—she a journalist, he a playwright—find themselves once again on the trail of a killer in 1930s Honolulu, where sugar barons cavort at their beachfront mansions while unrest among the working class grows. Their investigation places them in the midst of hot-headed union organizers and the crème de la crème of Honolulu society as well as the riffraff of the city’s backstreets. Familiar characters from Ned and Mina’s previous adventure, Murder Casts a Shadow, return to lend a hand in another thoroughly entertaining whodunnit from author and playwright Victoria Kneubuhl. Praise for the first Mina Beckwith and Ned Manusia mystery: “Agatha-Christie-in-the-tropics. . . . A tightly plotted novel, crackling dialog, and in Mina and Ned, a pair of intelligent and likable sleuths (think Nick and Nora without the alcoholism and veiled disdain). Murder Casts a Shadow shows the promising beginnings of what one hopes will become a new series.” —Honolulu Weekly
Navigating Islands: Plays from the Pacific brings together three plays by distinguished playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl. The islands of Sāmoa—often called the “Navigator Islands” on nineteenth-century maps of the Pacific—emerge to the fore, fully dimensional, in this dynamic collection. Of both Hawaiian and Sāmoan ancestry, Kneubuhl spent formative years in the islands as a young adult. Her love of Sāmoa, its culture and its people, is woven into the fabric of every scene. In the front matter of this book, fans of the author’s theatrical productions, media work, and novels will be pleased to learn about her creative process and her broad influence on Pacific literature and s...
In this volume, Dana Naone Hall articulates, through essays, testimony, public talks, writings, interviews, and poetry, her 30 years of activism surrounding Native Hawaiian rights to traditional lands- including advocating for burial preservation, which ultimately led to the birth of the Hawaiian burial movement and the creation of state laws to protect remains and establish island burial councils.
This first major collection of contemporary Native American writing for the theatre ranges from the groundbreaking work of Body Indian to the experimental performance style of Spiderwoman Theater. Contains: Indian Radio Days by LeAnne Howe and Roxy Gordon (Choctaw) The Story of Susannah by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (Hawaiian) Body Indian by Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa) The Woman Who was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance by Diane Glancy (Cherokee) Power Pipes by Spiderwoman Theater (Kuna/Rappahannock) Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth by Drew Hayden Tayler (Ojibway) The Independence of Eddie Rose by Willam S. Yellow Robe, Jr. (Assiniboine/Nakota) The volume includes an introduction by the editor, Mimi Gisolfi D'Aponte, Professor of Theatre at CUNY, and an epilogue by Elizabeth Theobald, director of the Manshantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut.
This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modem and contemporary women's writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA , and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women's writing and women's experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement...
The field of transnational American studies is going through a paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific. This volume demonstrates a critical method of engaging the Asian Pacific: the chapters present alternative narratives that negotiate American dominance and exceptionalism by analyzing the experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders from the vast region, including those from the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Hawaii, Guam, and other archipelagos. Contributors make use of materials from “oceanic archives,” retrieving what has seemingly been lost, forgotten, or downplayed inside and outside state-bound archives, state legal preoccupations, and state prioritized project...