Possessing Polynesia: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania by Maile Arvin (review)

Maile Arvin’s Possessing Polynesia: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania is a refreshing approach to settler colonial, Pacific Islands, and gender studies. Arvin is willing to broach the subject of anti-Blackness within Oceania among Pacific Islanders and challenge Polynesian exceptionalism, topics that few Pacific Island scholars are willing to address. In this way, her work comes into conversation with scholars such as Teresia Teaiwa, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tracey Banivanua-Mar, and Aileen Moreton Robinson. Arvin also discusses heteropatriarchy as a central component of settler colonialism and applies an Indigenous feminist framework to her analysis, setting her work apart from previous settler colonial texts. Although Possessing Polynesia primarily centers on Hawai‘i and is not universally applicable throughout Oceania, it opens a dialogue within Oceania scholarship that has been long overdue. The book is divided into two parts: “The Polynesian Problem: Scientific Production of the ‘Almost White’ Polynesian Race” (35–124) and “Regenerative Refusals: Confronting Contemporary Legacies in Hawai‘i and Oceania” (125–239).

Throughout the work, Arvin attempts to disentangle the very insidious and racist logics of the social sciences, such as eugenics, anthropometry, and social Darwinism, as they have been applied not just to Polynesia but throughout Oceania. Arvin also interrogates white explorers’ creation of Polynesia and of the Polynesian and their need to place Polynesians in proximity to whiteness—to make them a distant Aryan ancestor to justify white settlers’ “natural” possession of Polynesian lands. She introduces the ways in which Polynesians themselves have internalized these discourses in order to create racial hierarchies throughout Oceania. Arvin’s central theme throughout each chapter is the “logic of possession through whiteness.” She states, this “logic is possession through (not by whiteness) because whiteness is not an agent in and of itself” (65).

Arvin opens the book with the question “What is a Polynesian?” (1). Establishing from the outset that Polynesia is “a settler, scientific project” and not a place (5). The first section focuses on the anthropological “Polynesian Problem” (35) and European explorers’ and white social scientists’ need to racially map Oceania, marking so-called Polynesians as almost white and closer to civilized while simultaneously marking so-called Melanesians as distinctly Black and savage. Throughout this first section, Arvin engages with the nineteenth-century racial theories of the Aryan Polynesian (50) and the belief that Polynesians descended from Aryans or the ancient Greeks or Romans, as promoted by Abraham Fornander (54) and Edward Treager (56). Arvin also discusses how King David Kalākaua utilized these racial theories and conducted his own studies as a tool to promote and maintain Hawaiian nationalism and sovereignty, rather than ascribing to anti-Blackness. However, Arvin also goes on to point out that “undoubtably Kalākaua and other Native Hawaiians did internalize many ideas about their own racial superiority” (63). This was evident in Kalākaua’s attempt to use Hawai‘i as a model for a Samoan confederacy, as Hawaiian delegates to Sāmoa clearly viewed “themselves as superior to Sāmoans because they believed ‘that Hawai‘i had the greatest na‘auao of Polynesian peoples,’ meaning that they had achieved the most progress in mastering Euro/American political structures” (63). However, without a deeper understanding of the political relationship between Hawaiians and Samoans prior to Western contact, it is hard to know to what extent European racial theories influenced Hawaiian ideas of superiority over Samoans or served to enhance an already embedded sense of superiority through genealogy held by Hawaiians. In either case, Arvin’s willingness to name examples of Polynesian exceptionalism is vital to understanding relationships among the peoples of Oceania today and how those relationships were formed.

Arvin concludes the first section by explaining to the reader the ways in which Hawaiians are often framed as conditionally white and how anthropological theories...