Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism.

In this deeply engaging book, J. Kehaulani Kauanui unpacks paradoxes inherent in past and contemporary assertions of Hawaiian sovereignty. According to Kauanui, in the process of forming itself as an independent nation, before U.S. colonization, the Hawaiian Kingdom modeled itself after Western nations and enacted its own "colonial biopolitics" in relation to Hawaiians. By discussing diverse groups of people - Christian-identified kingdom nationalists, those in support of federal recognition, and people like herself who refuse these two state-centered options for Hawaiian sovereignty - Kauanui succeeds in showing that the Hawaiian's struggle is not simply between the monolithic "colonized" and the colonizer (the US settler state). [Extracted from the article]