Endurance of Difference: Insights from Contemporary Native Hawaiian Media

Abstract

Anthropological discussions of difference entail the question of how alterity persists—how counterhegemonic projects are sustained. This article examines Native Hawaiian media practices that subvert hegemonic imaginaries of Hawaiʻi as paradise, critiquing the political cosmology of liberalist settler colonialism, while also maintaining Indigenous alternatives of being in the world. While Indigenous peoples are indeed constituted by capital and settler relations, how does a measure of the alterity of subjects and their worlds endure—resisting commensuration amid entanglement? By examining the stories of a number of contemporary Native Hawaiian filmmakers, their works, and collaborative projects, this article argues that the maintenance of difference be read through sovereignty, and that modes of “endurance,” “resurgence,” or “survivance” emerge from Indigenous understandings of genealogical being and its capacity to make and sustain persons and worlds. In examining the question of how different subjects and their worlds endure, the grounds for persistence are an important part of the social picture.