Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl - Böcker

Hawai'i Nei brings together three plays by one of Hawai'i's finest playwrights. A compassionate portrait of early nineteenth-century Hawai'i, ""The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu"" charts the lives of five women during the traumatic, transforming events that followed Western contact. Set in post-World War II Hawai'i, ""Emmalehua"" tells the story of a young Hawaiian woman struggling to preserve a cherished cultural heritage in a world eager to forget the past and embrace the new American dream. Through history, humor, and a whodunnit plot, the past and present collide in ""Ola Na Iwi,"" which explores the issues surrounding the treatment of indigenous human remains.

New Year's Eve, 1934. While Honolulu celebrates with champagne and fireworks, someone is making away with the Bishop Museum's portrait of King Kalakaua and its curator. A series of brutal murders follows, and an unlikely pair, newspaper reporter Mina Beckwith and visiting playwright Ned Manusia, find themselves investigating a twisted trail of clues in an attempt to recover the painting and uncover the killer.Honolulu in the 1930s is a unique (and volatile) mix of the provincial and the urban, East and West, islander and mainlander. Mina and Ned, both of Polynesian descent, confront the complexities and contradictions of Island life as their investigation takes them into the heart of Honolulu society and close-knit local families, whose intricate histories and relationships will have a direct impact on future lives and events. A lively cast of characters aids Mina and Ned in their search for answers: Cecily Chang, an antiques and explosives expert, steers them through Chinatown's back alleys; Hinano Kahana, a hula chanter and dancer, brings Ned closer to solving an ancient riddle; Mina's grandmother, Hannah, helps them unlock a secret from the past.Prewar Honolulu comes to life in this thoroughly entertaining mystery that evokes a colorful bygone era.

Hawaii Nei brings together three plays by one of Hawaii's finest playwrights. A compassionate portrait of early nineteenth- century Hawaii, ""The Conversion of Kaahumanu"" charts the lives of five women during the traumatic, transforming events that followed Western contact. Set in post-World War II Hawaii, ""Emmalehua"" tells the story of a young Hawaiian woman struggling to preserve a cherished cultural heritage in a world eager to forget the past and embrace the new American dream. Through history, humor, and a whodunnit plot, the past and present collide in ""Ola Na Iwi,"" which explores the issues surrounding the treatment of indigenous human remains.

Navigating Islands: Plays from the Pacific brings together three plays by distinguished playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl. The islands of Sāmoa—often called the "Navigator Islands" on nineteenth century maps of the Pacific—emerge to the fore, fully dimensional, in this dynamic collection. Of both Hawaiian and Sāmoan ancestry, Kneubuhl spent formative years in the islands as a young adult. Her love of Sāmoa, its culture and its people, is woven into the fabric of every scene. In the front matter of this book, fans of the author’s theatrical productions, media work, and novels will be pleased to learn about her creative process and her broad influence on Pacific literature and storytelling.Two of the plays are set at Vailima, Sāmoa, the former home of Robert Louis Stevenson and his family. Aitu Fafine portrays the final days of Stevenson’s life in an unusual historical fantasy. Through myth and stage magic, the play examines the demonization of women, an author’s role in shaping social attitudes, and the timeless power of story. Fanny and Belle explores the mother-daughter relationship of Fanny Stevenson and her daughter Belle Strong, two intrepid bohemian women who defied the coventions of their time and lived daring and adventurous lives.Set in American Sāmoa in the early twentieth century, The Holiday of Rain reimagines Somerset Maugham’s visit to Pago Pago when he wrote his famous short story "Rain." While the play is a satirical romp that includes time travel, mistaken identities, and a play within a play, it thematically reviews the portrayal of Polynesian women by Western writers, and the fictionalization Pacific places and people of color to suit perceived Western audience demands.All three plays scrutinize how non-Polynesians interact with Polynesians when attempting to navigate through the subtleties of island life.They also ask readers and viewers to think about how the outside world’s impressions of Polynesians were shaped by the perceptions and stories of foreigners. Perhaps the plays’ most compelling connections involve women as they fight to achieve individuality in the face of unfair expectations, negative societal projections, and historical misrepresentations of female characters in literature.

An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific brings together fifty writers and artists from across Moananuiākea working in myriad genres across media, ranging from oral narratives and traditional wonder tales to creative writing as well as visual artwork and scholarly essays. Collectively, this anthology features the fantastic as present-day Indigenous Pacific world-building that looks to the past in creating alternative futures, and in so doing reimagines relationships between peoples, environments, deities, nonhuman relatives, history, dreams, and storytelling. Wonder is activated by curiosity, humility in the face of mystery, and engagement with possibilities. We see wonder and the fantastic as general modes of expression that arenot confined to realism. As such, the fantastic encompasses fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, fabulation, horror, fairy tale, utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction. We include Black, feminist, and queer futurisms, Indigenous wonderworks, Hawaiian moʻolelo kamahaʻo and moʻolelo āiwaiwa, Sāmoan fāgogo, and other non-mimetic genres from specific cultures, because we recognize that their refusal to adopt restrictive Euro-American definitions of reality is whatinspires and enables the fantastic to flourish.As artistic, intellectual, and culturally based expressions that encode and embody Indigenous knowledge, the multimodal moʻolelo in this collection upend monolithic, often exoticizing, and demeaning stereotypes of the Pacific and situate themselves in conversation with critical understandings of the global fantastic, Indigenous futurities, social justice, and decolonial and activist storytelling.In this collection, Oceanic ideas and images surround and connect to Hawaiʻi, which is for the three coeditors, a piko (center); at the same time, navigating both juxtaposition and association, the collection seeks to articulate pilina (relationships) across genres, locations, time, and media and to celebrate the multiplicity and relationality of the fantastic in Oceania.