Curating a decolonial guide: The detours project

Abstract

This essay meditates on the archipelagic sensibilities and knowledge that provide the foundation for the Detours project, an edited collection that subverts the guidebook authorship and authority about the islands of Hawai'i. It braids the political history of the islands with the intellectual genealogies of postcolonial feminists writing about islands that generated the project's conceptualisation. These political energies and formations of knowledge are reflected in the substance of the art, poetry, and essays that are curated in the collection. The essay outlines the ethical dimensions of the project and the process of turning away from the guidebook genre toward a book that guides readers to decolonisation-a template and archive of place-based work and representations aimed at achieving ea (life, breath, sovereignty) for the Native Hawaiian people and the Hawaiian Islands. Finally, the essay ends with a reflection on the kinds of responsibilities that island knowledges place on people who visit or live upon them, offering a relationship of reciprocity in place of extraction.