• DOI:10.1353/dis.2001.0001
• Corpus ID: 143489394

Sudden Rush: Na Mele Paleoleo (Hawaiian Rap) as Liberatory Discourse

@article{Akindes2001SuddenRN,
  title={Sudden Rush: Na Mele Paleoleo (Hawaiian Rap) as Liberatory Discourse},
  author={Fay Yokomizo Akindes},
  journal={Discourse},
  year={2001},
  volume={23},
  pages={82 - 98}
}

• F. Akindes
• Published 1 January 2001
• Education
• Discourse

Silencing the Native Hawaiian language was one of the loudest violations of human rights by U.S. American colonizers in Hawai’i. Within a period of a hundred years, Hawai’i was transformed from a place where nearly every Hawaiian person spoke Hawaiian to one where less than a thousand people spoke their mother tongue (Kimura 74). The American colonizers understood the centrality and power of language for a people and imposed English as the official language for business and education in Hawai’i. They forbade the speaking of Hawaiian and, therefore, externalized the livedexperience of Hawaiians who were forced to see the world through the lens of the colonizer. As Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo says, “Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others” (16). Muting the Hawaiian language and imposing the language of the colonizer was a means of controlling the minds of the colonized. By speaking English, Hawaiians were functioning within the discourse, which positioned them as inferior to the haole and created alienation, a condition “of seeing oneself from outside oneself as if one was