Kanaka Maoli and Black Liberation - A Conversation with Kelema Moses (UCSD) and Ainsley LeSure (Brown University)

In her Winter 2023 talk Competing Sovereignties: Kanaka Maoli Land Struggles in the 1970s BSP Faculty Fellow KELEMA MOSES introduced her work in progress in which she examines Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) land struggles during the 1970s through an analysis of Kōkua Hawai‘i, an activist group formed to protest mass housing evictions of poor, long-term residents of Kalama Valley by the Bishop Estate. Professor Moses detailed how Kōkua Hawai‘i’s engagement with the Black Power movement and their bold interpretation of the Black Panther aesthetic ruptured the racial triangulation of white-Hawaiian-Asian that, for decades, functioned to displace Kānaka from the ‘āina (land; that which feeds). On May 24, Africana Studies and Political Science Professor AINSLEY LESURE joins Professor Moses to continue the conversation on this work. She specializes in political theory with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, social justice, and democratic theory. Her current book project, tentatively titled, Locating Racism in the World: Toward an Anti-Racist Reality, reconceptualizes racism in the post-Civil Rights era. Specifically, it calls for a shift away from framing post-Civil Rights racism as either unconscious or institutional and toward a worldly phenomenological account of racism that theorizes the relationship between its individual and collective determinants. Questions and conversation will follow the engagement between Professors Moses and LeSure.

RSVP by Sunday, May 21 by visiting bit.ly/bsp-moses-lesure

Wednesday, May 24, 2023 | 11:30AM - 1:00PM (PST)
Public Engagement Building (PEB) 721