Bound in Place
This chapter analyzes what it looks like when aloha comes home from the Hawaiian diaspora. I perform a close reading of a short story in the book, This is Paradise (2012). In the past fifteen years, the number of Kānaka Maoli living outside of Hawaiʻi has increased forty percent, thus creating a division between on-island Kānaka Maoli and those living in the diaspora. This division is exacerbated by a growing cultural nationalist movement that prioritizes land-based forms of Indigeneity. Focusing on the story, “The Old Paniolo Way” to provide a close reading of the quotidian spaces where our cultural performances and interactions support a more inclusive sense of belonging that is not landlocked or tied to touristic visions of Hawaiianness. These spaces are contingent on and maintained through performing aloha and other forms of community recognition. Rather than emphasize an eventual homecoming as the solution to the diaspora, these stories offer an opportunity to animate the kinship networks and Indigenous understandings of place, history, and time that are performed in the diaspora.