UC Riverside

Galaxies like Islands, Islands like Galaxies: Envisioning Futurity in Seascape Technologies examines Indigenous Futurisms as a political and aesthetic movement that bridges art-forms (literature, performance, comics, media) to combat “settler futurity.” Indigenous conceptions of temporality, contact, alternative worlds, apocalypse, and revolution are all themes/tenets of Indigenous Futurism and can be expressed artistically through multimedia forms. My project's methodology is defined by its engagement with moʻolelo, Kānaka Maoli storytelling. Moʻolelo as methodology envisions alternative futures that are liberated from a colonial matrix and challenge western epistemological conceptions of temporal progress. This dissertation features Native artists creating projects of cultural expression that reimagine uses for technology that are not predicated upon continued modes of capitalism and settler logics. Therefore, I develop a theoretical framework that employs anti-colonial/decolonial future-making actions and discourses or “futurities,” at the intersections between Indigenous aesthetics and science and technology studies. I engage spatio-temporal Kānaka frameworks by outlining the sections of my dissertation not in chapters—but in wā. The term Wā or Ta-Va (space-time) resonates throughout Oceania and is similar but different between cultures. In the Native Hawaiian context, wā means period of time, epoch, era, time, occasion, season, or age. It can also mean space, interval, or as between objects or time. Material, ephemeral, and affective registers are engaged: it can be thought of as the space between things or a rolling interval. Wā speaks to complex temporal overlays between engaging the space of the past, present, and future within this dissertation. As sea-voyaging in Oceanic cultures is central to life, I am outlining my chapters as wā as to signify movement between ideas—like traversing between mini-theoretical islands of thought. Similar to how the ocean is complex with immense depth and secret go-ons beneath the surface, I use the theoretical concept of wā to understand and critically unpack the theories, art, and ideas within this dissertation.