Hawai′i Is My Haven

“Highlighting the place of Hawai‘i as a site for analyzing the most pressing cultural, political, and economic currents facing our world, Nitasha Tamar Sharma provides a unique and nuanced view into the complex flows of Islander life while creating new spaces for Black and multiracial voices that are all too frequently silenced. This much-needed work makes an important contribution to theorizing race and indigeneity together in American studies, ethnic studies, African American studies, and Native and Indigenous studies.” - Ty P. Kawika Tengan, author of Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i

“This is an elegantly written, trenchantly argued, and persuasively rendered ethnography of African Americans in Hawai‘i. It is simultaneously a landmark pointing the way to how the United States itself may evolve in the twenty-first century as it comes to resemble, racially and ethnically, the vibrant fiftieth state.” - Gerald Horne, author of The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War

"Hawai?i Is My Haven is an ambitious and original work of scholarship. By focusing on an oft-overlooked demographic, it creates a fuller, more accurate picture of Hawaii’s history." - Eric Stinton, Honolulu Civil Beat

"This book will be of interest to scholars of Pacific settlement histories, transnational and ethnocultural identities, colonialism, and indigenous activism. For those teaching Pacific studies courses, this volume adds a new dimension to Hawaiian histories of migration, settler colonization, and multiculturalism, as well as current alignments in social justice movements." - Michelle Ladwig Williams, Pacific Affairs

"This is an interesting and important work for scholars in the fields [of Native and Indigenous studies, mixed-race
studies, African American studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.] But for Hawaiian scholars and/or activists invested in a more pono future for Hawai‘i, this book is required reading." - Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Native American and Indigenous Studies

"By combining theoretical frameworks with fieldwork interviews, Sharma’s Hawai‘i Is My Haven successfully places the overlooked Black experience in the Pacific at the center of the racial, cultural, and political discussions of Hawai‘i and the United States." - Bohan Zhang, Journal of American Ethnic History