Marata Tamaira - Visual Sovereignty and Indigenous Countervisuality

April 24, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Mānoa Campus, John Burns Hall 3121/3125, East-West Center

“Visual Sovereignty and Indigenous Countervisuality: Picturing Contemporary Kanaka Maoli Art Practice in Hawai‘i” presented by Marata Tamaira, PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Marata Tamaira will present her current research, which investigates how Kānaka Maoli have vigorously contested US colonialism in Hawai‘i and have resolutely defended and affirmed their sovereignty through political, cultural, and artistic means. Tamaira examines how, in response to the large-scale dispossession of their ancestral properties and the expropriation of their political independence through foreign domination, contemporary Native Hawaiian artists use the visual arts as a tool to assert their socio-political aspirations and disrupt the colonial status quo by representing themselves on their own terms. Here, the visual arts function as an abstract expression of Native power. For the purpose of this study, she uses the term “indigenous countervisuality” to describe the kind of indigenous artistic interventions Native Hawaiians make in this regard. Although politics and art have long been entwined in the work of contemporary Native Hawaiian artists, a sustained scholarly enquiry has been conspicuously absent. Given this oversight, Tamaira’s presentation will offer a critical understanding of the political impetus behind Native Hawaiian visual arts practice, particularly as it relates to expressions of Native sovereignty in the context of ongoing colonialism under the United States. Marata Tamaira hails from Aotearoa/New Zealand and has genealogical ties with the central North Island tribe of Ngāti Tūwharetoa. In 2006 she received a BA in Anthropology from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and in 2009 was awarded an MA in Pacific Islands studies, also from the University of Hawai‘i. In 2010 she edited the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies graduate-student publication The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific.


Ticket Information
Free and open to the public

Event Sponsor
Center for Pacific Islands Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Katherine Higgins, 956-2652, khiggins@hawaii.edu

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