Feb 27 IC Keynote Speaker: Professor Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Professor Sharma will draw from her decade of ethnographic research on Black residents that frames her forthcoming book, Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke University Press). In this talk, she analyzes how centering the Islands' Black residents interrupts Asian-Hawaiian-haole (White) framings of settler colonialism to illustrate the centrality of race to our analysis of this paradigm within the context of military occupation. Her work addresses two questions: What does the Pacific offer people of African descent? And how does the racial lens Black transplants bring to the islands expand our understanding of racism and inequality in this Pacific site?