Reading Joan Didion Taught Me How to Not Write About Hawaiʻi
Didion depicts Hawaiʻi as a place that exists solely in the white American imagination, and, because of this, her journalism is a fiction.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Slouching
The White Album
Slouching
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Slouching
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in HawaiʻiSlouching Towards Bethlehem
From a Native DaughterThe Wretched of the Earth
me
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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary ImaginationFrom Here to Eternity
about
about
When we try to make our writing about something, as Didion does, these themes and theses colonize our characters and the places we write, imposing a meaning onto them that they often did not ask for and that, in many instances, is harmful to them.
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Originally from Honolulu, Hawai`i, Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole writer and educator. She has an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, and elsewhere.
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