(Anti-)Imperial Intimacies: Tracing the Settler Colonial Ties That Bind Iran and Hawaiʻi

I use the telling and retelling of my grandmother’s unconventional migration journey – from Iran to the U.S. by way of Hawaiʻi – as an entrypoint to uncovering historical connections between Iran and Hawaiʻi. My grandparents’ migration experience invites us (1) to decenter the Global North and instead consider how sugar plantations link Iran and Hawaiʻi, and (2) to rethink dominant narratives of Iranian diaspora and diasporic subject formation and instead highlight relational formations of race and solidarity. Intimacy is both a theoretical framework and methodological tool to explore an array of archival sources and music by Hawaiʻi-based, diasporic Iranian artist Illnomadic.