Event Date
This presentation examines Tongan race, gender, and sexualities produced through a colonial phenomenon that I term as “March of Surrender.” The March of Surrender highlights the quintessential objective of “white terror” in the Pacific Island nation of Tonga and here in California--the desecration of the Sacred. I redefine “white terror” as a racialized violence aimed to produce colonial systems of kinships and social relationalities by surveilling colonial institutions of gender, sexualities, and families. This new status quo is produced as well as maintained through the normalization of violence against the bodies of Tongan women and girls. Correspondingly, I argue, the scope of white terror is inextricably tied to the expropriation of the Tongan natural world, the fonua (land and mother earth) to the Moana (spacialities of deep ocean). These cosmologies are often delineated as Feminine and located at the core of what we defined as the Sacred.
Register here: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJElcOiqrD4tE9ZIsYjk5uc1MRf94BPK2bku
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu (PhD) is a Tongan (Pacific Islander) scholar and storyteller. She is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at University California, Davis and will be an Assistant Professor at University California, Santa Cruz in 2023.