Angela
L. Robinson, a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA, analyzes the
affective relationship of colonialism and sovereignty in the Pacific Islands
with special attention to the role of queer Indigenous performance. Drawing upon work of such feminist Indigenous scholars as Mishuana Goeman, Dian Million, and Teresia Teaiwa, her
project locates the production of national settler affect in Hawai'i and New
Zealand and extends the materiality of archival evidence to the affective
structures of colonial governance that respond to Indigenous movements for
self-determination in the Pacific Islands. 
To rethink the common sense of the
nation-state, Angela examines performance and ritual as
critical sites of intervention that offer potentially radical visions of
Indigenous futurity and survivance. In her current work on Maori performance
artist Cat Ruka’s Playing Savage (2009),
she argues that Ruka aurally and visually challenges the affective residue of
colonialism, while gesturing toward alternative practices of Indigenous sovereignty
that do not replicate colonial legacies of exclusion, heteronormativity, and the
politics of recognition. Angela recently presented her research on Cat Ruka’s Playing Savage at the 2014 American
Studies Association conference, and her reviews appear in Journal of Pacific History and American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
–Dana M. Linda
Dana M. Linda is a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA.
