By Staff Reports
(Honolulu)– The Spring 2013 Faculty Lecture Series begins with a lecture by Brandy Nālani McDougall, assistant professor of Indigenous Studies in the American Studies Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her presentation, Gathering in the Dark and Putting Down Roots, will examine the compositional practice of kaona, or “hidden meaning,” and how kaona continues in contemporary Kānaka Maoli literature. The lecture will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, in Hamilton Library 301.
By focusing on the work of Haunani-Kay Trask, Māhealani Perez-Wendt, Victoria Nālani Kneubuhl and other writers, McDougall examines contemporary kaona references to Papahānaumoku, Wākea, and Hāloanaka, and how their employed kaona emphasizes the genealogical relationship Kānaka Maoli have to the land, implicit political and cultural claims to sovereignty, and the filial responsibility Kānaka Maoli have to enact these claims.
Born and raised on Maui, McDougall is of Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiʻi, Maui, Oʻahu and Kauaʻi lineages), Chinese and Scottish descent. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai (Kuleana ʻŌiwi Press 2008), the co-founder of Ala Press and Kahuaomānoa Press, and the co-star of an amplified poetry album, Undercurrent (Hawaiʻi Dub Machine 2011). In 2012 she was awarded the national College Composition and Composition Convention Richard Braddock Award for a critical article on Kaona and Hawaiian Rhetoric that she co-wrote with Georganne Nordstrom. Her scholarship and poems have been published in journals and anthologies throughout Hawaiʻi, the Pacific and Turtle Island.
The Faculty Lecture Series is presented by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education, the Office of Research Relations and UH Mānoa Library.