American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Hawai'i's most renowned song, "Aloha 'Oe," was composed by Queen Lili'uokalani before she was deposed by missionary settlers. Circulating in the cultural imaginary since the late nineteenth century, "Aloha 'Oe" was transformed from a love song into a dirge that erased the sovereign rights of Lili'uokalani in and beyond Hawai'i. This article theorizes "settler colonial nostalgia" as a gendered material and symbolic process of effecting indigenous displacement and expropriation. Providing an alibi for settler society and its beneficiaries, performances of the song center settler subjects as nostalgic witnesses to, rather than participants in, the loss of the Hawaiian kingdom. Yet the politics of melancholy prove unstable, as Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and islander musicians continue to resignify "Aloha 'Oe" as performances that sustain Native counter-hegemonies.