Borders and Boundaries

Dr. Kamanamaikalani Beamer

Dr. Kamanamaikalani Beamer is an associate professor at the Center for Hawaiian Studies in the Hui ‘Āina Momona Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with a joint appointment in the Richardson School of Law and the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge. Previous to this role Dr. Beamer was the president and chief executive officer of The Kohala Center. Beamer’s research on governance, land tenure, and Hawaiian resource management, as well as his prior work as the director of ‘Āina-Based Education at Kamehameha Schools, prepared him for his continuing service as a director of Stanford University’s First Nations Futures Institute, a resource management development program for indigenous leaders developed by Stanford, Kamehameha Schools, and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu in New Zealand. Beamer has revitalized and maintained lo‘i kalo (taro ponds), providing him and his children opportunities to mālama ‘āina, deepen connections with cultural traditions and derive leadership lessons from the land. In 2013 he was nominated and confirmed to a four-year appointment on Hawai‘i’s State Commission on Water Resource Management and was reconfirmed in 2017 for an additional four-year term.   In addition to numerous academic publications, in 2014 Beamer published No Mākou ka Mana: Liberating the Nation, which received multiple awards including the Samuel M. Kamakau Book of the Year Award from the Hawai‘i Book Publishing Association.

Dr. Reece Jones

Reece Jones is a Professor of Geography at UH-Manoa and author of the books Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (2016) and Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (2012). He is the Forum and Review editor for the journal Geopolitics. His work has been published in many media outlets including The Guardian and The New York Times.

Dr. Jade Higa

Jade Higa received her PhD from Duquesne University and is currently lecturing in the English Department at the University of Hawaii. She is interested in the intersection of eighteenth-century literature and queer studies. Her 2014 book chapter entitled “My Lover, My Son: Gothic Contagion and Maternal Sexuality in Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother” is part of a collection called Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1630-1830 co-edited by Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr. And her article, “Charlotte Charke’s Gun: Queering Material Culture and Gender Performance," appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830. Her current projects include an article entitled "Queer Possibilities in Mansfield Park" and a book-length study entitled In Between: Bisexuality, Performance, and Women in Eighteenth-Century England.

Dr. Nandita Sharma

Nandita Sharma is an Associate Professor of Racism, Migration and Transnationalism in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her research interests address themes of human migration, migrant labour, national state power, ideologies of racism and nationalism, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. Sharma is an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements and those struggling for the commons. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Home Rule: The Partition Between Natives and Migrants in the Postcolonial New World Order (Duke University Press).

Transcript of Introduction by Dr Britton Elliott Brooks

Aloha kākou and good evening, and happy International Women’s Day.

My name is Dr. Britton Brooks, and I am a Lecturer in Medieval British Literature here at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. I am also the founder and director of Converging Epistemologies.

In short, we seek here to recognize that the world is complex, layered, interdependent, and that if we are to address the issues of our contemporary world, we must bring together our different ways of knowing, our epistemologies. We seek to join with ways of knowing outside of the academy, for just as we bring a variety of skills and approaches, so to do all of you. Only when brought together in productive dialogue and action, can we find new answers to the difficulties we all face.

  Our theme tonight is Borders and Boundaries—between countries, peoples, languages, genders, elements, animals, and identities. As humans we are delineators, distinguishing this from that, categorizing for the sake of knowing. This is sea and that is land; yet lines such as these are, in many ways, artificial, and often more porous, blurred, then we let on.

  We ourselves exemplify this. I am white, male, father, overeducated scholar of British literature; yet I was raised here, nurtured by the Koʻolau streams, taught by the sea, instructed by my hānai tūtū from Miloliʻi. I spoke pidgin with friends, prescriptive English with teachers. Each piece delineated, each piece part of the whole; lines blurred, porous.

  More broadly we carve up islands and continents with black ink and declare this patch mine, that patch yours; yet walk to the edge, straddle the divide and you will find the dirt is the same, the flowers are the same, and the roots of trees transgress our line, back and forth. The earth shrugs off our easy distinctions.

  We encode information in phoneme, syntax, tone, gesticulation, breathing out meaning as our ears drink it in. Yet my words are not your words; does this divide us? Unite us? What would happen if I learned yours and you learned mine? Yet language is more than just a mechanism for conveying information; it is a culture, an identity. Its structure and form echo with the lives of our ancestors; their decisions, failures, successes, and journeys. Monolingual, bilingual, second language speaker; unite or divide?

  We often create binaries: dark and light; male and female; child and adult; heterosexual and homosexual; animal and human. Yet where are the lines? What distinguishes human and animal? Do we not eat, breed, seek shelter, safety, so that our genes may continue? Where is the line between male and female? Are the lines helpful, damaging, necessary?

  And so tonight, our esteemed panel will do just that. Interrogate borders and boundaries, for our current moment is filled with division. We stand so often apart, our lines firmly inscribed around us, and peer out, judging, fearing, clinging to the familiar. Together, in this space, let us seek something better.