Brown Bag Biography: Kristiana Kahakauwila

October 29, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Zoom Add to Calendar

Meeting ID: 914 7320 9610
The historical fiction writer conjures not just the past but also the haunting continuity of the past into the present. This talk focuses on one location in my novel-in-progress, a fictionalized female seminary based on the real Maunaolu Female Seminary of Maui. Moving from research into re-imagining, I meditate on the multiple hauntings of the post- annexation moment—the spectre of the overthrow, the exhaustion of the soil, the scattering of indigenous identity—and how the historical novel not only makes sense of that past but also offers a speculative reconstruction of space as a gesture toward a revitalized future.

Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of kanaka maoli, German, and Norwegian descent. An assistant professor in UH Manoa’s English Department, she has previously taught creative writing at Western Washington University and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a 2015-16 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Her book This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth 2013) takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawaii, and she is now at work on a historical novel set on the island of Maui.


Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Zoë Sprott, (808) 956-3774, gabiog@hawaii.edu, http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/

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