Second Hapa Tales blurb is in! Very moved by this praise from Indigenous Okinawan author Annmaria Shimabuku:
Hapa Tales examines the entanglements of Asian American mixed race and settler colonialism. It shows how mixed-race people, suspending in a state of liminality, can too easily succumb to a desire for a “hapa” piece of the American pie. Instead of allowing this vulnerability to be used as a lever of exploitation, Chang develops a method of listening in everyday life that tunes into what Native Hawaiians have been saying all along.
Annmaria is a scholar at the crossroads of Okinawan literature, postcolonial Japanese studies, and literary/political theory. She publishes in both English and Japanese to engage both sides of the Pacific simultaneously. Erasure of Native Hawaiians is something I discuss at length in Hapa Tales. Similarly, Okinawans are internationally-recognized Indigenous peoples often subsumed and disappeared under the umbrella of “Japanese.” Annmaria looks at this phenomenon in-depth in her new book Alegal: Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life (out this November).