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Reading Hawaiian Shakespeare: Indigenous Residue Haunting Settler Colonial Racism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2019
Abstract
As scholarly work on race in Shakespeare studies continues to develop, this article examines how important insights from critical Indigenous studies can help us to refine and enhance this work to more fully see historical moments at which Shakespeare's works have been appropriated in response to the oppression of settler colonialism. Taking an 1893 political cartoon from a New York newspaper as a representation of settler violence against Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i, this essay traces the uses of Banquo's ghost in Hawaiian newspapers as a figure that haunts the racializing elimination of Native rule.
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References
1 On this date, a “junta” self-styled the “Committee of Safety” prevented Queen Lili‘uokalani from promulgating a new constitution which would have replaced the current kingdom constitution, one her brother King Kalākaua had been physically forced to sign and promulgate in 1887. That so-called “Bayonet Constitution” was drawn up by many of the same men who comprised the Overthrow junta, and it curtailed monarchical powers, placed governing powers in the hands of the legislature and king's cabinet, extended voting rights to citizens of foreign countries, and restricted the franchise to men who owned Hawaiian land. Kuykendall, Ralph S., The Hawaiian Kingdom, Volume III, The Kalakaua Dynasty, 1874–1893 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1967), chapters 20, 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Patrick Wolfe, “Comparing Colonial and Racial Regimes” (CASAR Lecture, 23 April 2013), YouTube, uploaded by American University of Beirut, 17 June 2013, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwj5bcLG8ic, 20:20–21:30.
3 Ibid. See also Wolfe, Patrick, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, 4 (2006), 387–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Iyko Day addresses Wolfe's work and black studies in “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies, 1, 2 (2015), 102–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Wolfe, “Comparing,”20:38–21:20.
5 Erickson, Peter and Hall, Kim F., “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 67, 1 (2016), 1–13, 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 E.g. Moreton-Robinson's, Aileen The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar might be read with Little, Arthur L. Jr.’s “Re-historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 67, 1 (2016), 84–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See Viswanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
8 George Kanuha's Hawaiian-language translations of the Lambs’ prose adaptations of Shakespeare (Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, and A Winter's Tale) were published serially in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa from 1 Dec. 1866 through 9 March 1867.
9 Thompson, Ayanna, “What Is a ‘Weyward’ Macbeth?”, in Newstok, Scott and Thompson, Ayanna, eds., Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Daily Bulletin, 17 Jan. 1893, 3.
11 The US minister to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, John L. Stevens, officially asked Captain Wiltse to land the marines on 16 Jan. 1893. This decision was made without Congressional or presidential approval.
12 Daily Bulletin, 21 June 1893, 2.
13 Swift, Lindsay, ed., The Great Debate between Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 26Google Scholar.
14 Washington., Booker T. “The South as an Opening for a black American's desire to govern Career,” in The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume II, 1860–89, ed. Harlan, Louis R. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 439–51, 450, 440Google Scholar. Washington's speech does not escape white settler colonialism and its programs of Native elimination. If black citizens’ ownership of southern land is secured through white possessive terms – the Lockean admixture of labor with soil – then such liberatory citizenship shall be forever haunted by the ghosts of Native sovereignty and land title that “will not down.”
15 Wells, Ida B., “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Our Day, 11, 65 (May 1893), 333–47Google Scholar.
16 See John E. Bush's 1880 editorial in Ka Leo o Ka Lahui and the Honorable George Glendon's May 1880 address to the Hawaiian Legislative Assembly, printed in Hawaiian in Ko Hawaii Pae Aina.