Lani Teves
Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Previously, I was at the University of Oregon.
I teach and write about contemporary indigenous performativity and queerness in Oceania and Native North America. My Ph.D. is from the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan with an emphasis in Native Pacific Cultural Studies and Performance Studies.
My research explores the ways in which Indigeneity is performed and lived. In particular, I am invested in articulating the strategies Native Hawaiian artists employ to narrate indigenous connections to place and cultural belonging. My book, “Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance” (Critical Indigeneities Series, UNC Press 2018) provides an account of the worldmaking power of Native Hawaiian performance. I examine how Native Hawaiians employ performance to survive occupation, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Weaving together ethnography, post-colonial, and performance theory, I look between and across the spaces where Native Hawaiians perform the routines of everyday life; the overlooked zones of the Hawaiian undercommons (punk clubs, drag shows, hip hop venues); and the officially sanctioned domains of Hawai’i culture industries (ghost tours, regional theatre, and film).
A key theme in my research is the multi-layered and contradictory ways that Hawaiian gender and sexuality are negotiated through cultural performance and how acts of resistance often unwittingly collude with heteropatriarchy and liberal multiculturalism. I focus on the performance of Indigeneity in particular environments—from the homestead to the nightclub—and how Native peoples create meaning and community in these spaces. Rather than romanticize a pre-modern “authentic” Indigenous subject, I conceptualize Indigeneity as a performative process, offering Native studies a critique of Indigenous performativity and bringing to Performance studies an approach the critiques the practices knowledge production, the logics of settler-colonialism, and the politics of recognition.
I am a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral and Dissertation Fellowships. I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale University during AY16-17. I received my MA and BA from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. I am Kanaka 'Ōiwi born and raised in Hawai'i.
Supervisors: Sarita See, Andrea Smith, Vicente Diaz, Amy Stillman, and Evelyn Alsultany
I teach and write about contemporary indigenous performativity and queerness in Oceania and Native North America. My Ph.D. is from the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan with an emphasis in Native Pacific Cultural Studies and Performance Studies.
My research explores the ways in which Indigeneity is performed and lived. In particular, I am invested in articulating the strategies Native Hawaiian artists employ to narrate indigenous connections to place and cultural belonging. My book, “Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance” (Critical Indigeneities Series, UNC Press 2018) provides an account of the worldmaking power of Native Hawaiian performance. I examine how Native Hawaiians employ performance to survive occupation, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Weaving together ethnography, post-colonial, and performance theory, I look between and across the spaces where Native Hawaiians perform the routines of everyday life; the overlooked zones of the Hawaiian undercommons (punk clubs, drag shows, hip hop venues); and the officially sanctioned domains of Hawai’i culture industries (ghost tours, regional theatre, and film).
A key theme in my research is the multi-layered and contradictory ways that Hawaiian gender and sexuality are negotiated through cultural performance and how acts of resistance often unwittingly collude with heteropatriarchy and liberal multiculturalism. I focus on the performance of Indigeneity in particular environments—from the homestead to the nightclub—and how Native peoples create meaning and community in these spaces. Rather than romanticize a pre-modern “authentic” Indigenous subject, I conceptualize Indigeneity as a performative process, offering Native studies a critique of Indigenous performativity and bringing to Performance studies an approach the critiques the practices knowledge production, the logics of settler-colonialism, and the politics of recognition.
I am a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral and Dissertation Fellowships. I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale University during AY16-17. I received my MA and BA from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. I am Kanaka 'Ōiwi born and raised in Hawai'i.
Supervisors: Sarita See, Andrea Smith, Vicente Diaz, Amy Stillman, and Evelyn Alsultany
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