Oceanic Literacy: A Politics and an Ethics

Chapter 2 articulates what an oceanic literacy might look, feel, smell, and taste like. This chapter describes the rhythms within oceanic literacy, and how Hawaiian songs, art, and poetry connect with these rhythms. The body also engages and experiences the ebb and flow of ke kai through the enactments of he’e nalu (surfing), lawai’a (fishing), and ho’okele (navigation). Oceanic literacy becomes a political and ethical way a reading and writing in the wind, land, and sea, because it involves non-linear movements in-between spaces and times that create a specifically Kanaka worldview and epistemology.