If you are thinking of visiting my homeland, please don’t. We don’t want or need any more tourists, and we certainly don’t like them. If you want to help our cause, pass this message on to your friends. Thank you.

“Lovely Hula Lands” by Haunani Kay-Trask

Recently, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) announced that it will be convening its 2026 annual conference in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.

The call for proposals describes Hawai‘i as a “space, place, and time through which to collectively reflect on, respond to, and reckon with settler colonial and U.S. imperial desires and designs that continue to shape everyday life and futures.” So far, neither the participants nor the conveners appear to see a contradiction between the theme of the conference and its very material and environmental impact, in which hundreds of primarily North American scholars and their families will flock to a place that is actively under U.S. colonial military occupation.

Academic conferences are integral to the global tourism industry, which reinforces colonial relations by normalizing the notion that every place is open to all people, regardless of the desires of the people who make their homes there. While this piece focuses on the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2026 conference in Hawai‘i, the lessons derived from our critique are by no means limited to this specific instance. We are against colonial conferencing everywhere.

As Native Hawaiian activist and poet Haunani-Kay Trask observes:

Tourists flock to my Native land for escape, but they are escaping into a state of mind while participating in the destruction of a host people in a Native place.

This essay by Trask, written in 1991, decries what she calls “corporate tourism” and its degrading effects on Native Hawaiians in material, spiritual, physical, psychological, and economic terms. “Burdened with the commodification of our culture and exploitation of our people,” she writes, “Hawaiians exist in an occupied country whose hostage people are forced to witness—and for many, to participate in—their own collective humiliation as tourist artifacts for the First World.”

Academic conferences are a prime example of the kind of corporate tourism that Trask critiques. They provide academics, who spend the majority of the year in offices and classrooms, with the opportunity to “get away,” encounter friendly locals, enjoy the nice weather and beaches, go out for drinks and brunch with their colleagues. After the conference is over, they return to their home campuses encouraged, perhaps, by the meaningful connections with “locals” they were able to forge during their stay, to serve as inspiration for their next monograph.

Nick Mitchell writes with searing clarity on the way that academia maintains a punitive structure of discipline and control by blurring the distinction between the formal and the informal, work and leisure. Using the example of “summer vacation,” supposedly a period when school is out and the academic employee, at least on paper, is meant to be “off the clock,” Mitchell points out how in practice it is anything but. Instead, summer is the time when the academic is expected to get down to the “real” work — the “productive” labor — of research, which they have had to put off all year because they are too occupied with teaching — the repetitive “reproductive” labor which merely maintains the social life of the university. The gendered connotations of productive vs. reproductive labor, of course, line up all too perfectly with the clearly greater value that the university system assigns to research over teaching.

In that sense, the “conference self” is an extension of the “summertime self” whose neoliberal logic Mitchell defines so clearly. “Never are we more of it than when we think we’re outside of it,” they write. “What appears as vacation…takes the form of the university’s disavowal of the very work it demands of its workers…the virtue that academia refers to as ‘productivity’ could not exist if not for summertime, where dispersal outside of the collective workspace and a relative reduction in teaching and service individualizes the injunction to be productive.” In other words, academia imagines research and writing as both the exterior to the service (teaching) component of the job, but also as the source of the academic’s individualized distinction, the expression of their “true self.”

Mitchell’s analysis explains the curious blend of “work” and “vacation” that the academic conference embodies. The academic is taking a vacation to Hawaii—but not really, because they are also presenting a paper on their research. In other words, they are taking a vacation under the guise of going to work. Thus, while in one sense the academic views the conference site as an “escape” (read: vacation) from “work” (the feminized drudgery and repetitive reproductive labor of teaching), in fact they are merely entering into a different kind of work—the masculine, productive work of “research” that is ironically only made possible via the informal networks that exist beyond the formal boundaries of the workplace, or university campus.

In a workplace governed by peer review, reputation, letters of recommendation, etc., informal relations are work relations. In a workplace that occasionally hews to the idea that the formal is oppressively normative, the informal spaces—the conference bar, the comradely cadre—become celebrated spaces of resistant sociality. When we regard our corners of the academy as hard-won spaces of refuge…we don’t worry too much about reproducing the dynamics of that other informal network of white, male, heteronormative dominance—the old boys’ club.

Hence, it is in the informal networks, temporalities, and spaces of academia, such as summer vacation, conference sites, social clubs and bars, where real power is consolidated, even as it is disavowed under the guise of informality. This is the same paradoxical logic, of course, that allows an academic conference to claim they are gathering to discuss the latest research on settler colonialism, even as they engage in settler colonialism in order to do so.

Notably, academic associations such as AAAS that position themselves as committed to “social justice” often provide their conference attendees with opportunities to engage with Indigenous scholars, community activists, and local vendors. These vague gestures toward “community engagement” are implicit promises to attendees that their invitation has been secured in advance, and that any ethical concerns they might have about their presence there are resolved in exchange for the price of registration. They allow the scholar-tourist1 to reassure themselves that what they are doing is categorically different from what actual tourists do when they voraciously consume the native.

This, too, harkens back to Mitchell’s observation that academic research which purports to be “political” or create “political change” (but never in a way that threatens the actual structures of the academy) becomes merely a “will to branding” that makes of everyone an “entrepreneur of the self.”

Sometimes, the earnest confidence that our scholarly output can, or must, or should, create political change is one of the most novel promotional mechanisms we have. The idea that “good” politics adds value to work speaks to how much the political has become a professional formation.

In academia, the “personal is political” and the “political is professional.”

And yet, despite the psychic acrobatics that justify the convening of an academic conference in Hawaii as somehow “benefiting the natives” (who must be so grateful for all the decolonial scholarship being written about them), it is impossible to understand this as anything but colonial complicity. To attend the 2026 AAAS conference is to partake in the ongoing process of Indigenous dispossession while using “decolonial scholarship” as a cover for such violence.

In addition to contributing to Indigenous dispossession locally, however, the 2026 AAAS conference also appears to provide a distraction or escape from colonial genocides occurring elsewhere, most notably in Palestine: shockingly, the call for this year’s papers does not mention the word “Palestine” even once. This is in stark contrast to last year’s conference, when AAAS proudly boasted of its status as the first academic organization to pass a BDS resolution, and called on the field of Asian American Studies to return to Edward Said’s Orientalism as its foundational text.

In a piece titled “The BDS Ceiling,” the Palestinian organization Within Our Lifetime argues that BDS is “a tool in a toolbox, not the toolbox itself.” In other words, BDS is but one tactic among many in service of a larger strategy to dismantle Zionism, rather than an achievement in and of itself that signifies some sort of victory. Instead, BDS must be thought of as a mere starting point, the bare minimum (the floor, rather than the ceiling) in a protracted, ongoing struggle to liberate the university from the clutches of Zionist, imperialist knowledge.

In that sense, AAAS’s self-congratulatory posturing about the passage of a BDS resolution should give us pause. What does such posturing allow AAAS, and other academic associations that cloak themselves in the mantle of “social justice,” to deflect from, such that the very next year, they feel comfortable enough to make no mention of Palestine at all? In the second year of the accelerated U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine, the death toll now verges on 1,000,000, the weapons shipments from the United States flow to Israel unabated, and domestic repression against the Palestine solidarity movement has skyrocketed. Yet evidently for academic associations such as AAAS, the genocide in Palestine is over – or at least, no longer of scholarly interest.

As Steve Salaita warned us in December 2023, “social justice academe,” made up of structures, institutions, and individuals, is “where resistance goes for processing and beautification after it has been completed.” The AAAS’s amnesia about Palestine, it seems, coincides all too well with its decision to host their annual conference in Hawai‘i. Both gestures should be understood as parallel modes of normalization — both of academia’s colonial theft of Indigenous people’s lands, as well as their knowledge.

On the website, the venue for the AAAS conference in Hawai‘i is listed only with a cryptic address: “2005 Kalia Road.” However, a cursory search reveals this to be none other than the 22-acre “Hilton Hawaiian Village” which occupies prime beachfront property in Waikīkī. It is no hyperbole to say that the construction of this property in particular was one of the main catalysts responsible for rendering Waikīkī into one of the world’s largest tourist centers during the postwar period, inaugurating the massive displacement and dispossession of Native Hawaiians. The Hilton Hawaiian Village, originally called the Hawaiian Village Hotel, was conceived and financed in 1954 by Henry J. Kaiser, the same industrialist tycoon who founded the Kaiser Permanente insurance company. Along with developer Fritz Burns, Kaiser purchased 16 acres of Native Hawaiian land, which was subsequently sold to Conrad Hilton, the founder of the Hilton Hotels chain, in 1961.

The multinational corporations these men headed contributed to the U.S. empire’s consolidation of its hegemonic position in the Pacific, Asia, and the Middle East, profiting from the deployment of bulldozers, land surveyors, bankers, miners, developers, soldiers, and researchers who together carried out the systemic genocide of Indigenous peoples in Hawaii.

Kaiser also acquired the property now located on Kālia Road through his collaboration with Elizabeth Farrington, a delegate who represented the Territory of Hawai‘i to the U.S. House of Representatives during the passage of Bill H.R. 6631 in August 1955. This bill, which President Eisenhower signed into law, gave permission to designated officials of the Territory to enter into negotiations for the sale, exchange, or leasing of 6.5 acres of tidelands along and adjacent to Waikīkī Beach. The point of H.R. 6631, endorsed by the U.S. Army engineers who testified to its necessity in Congress, was to allow Kaiser and other land developers to acquire littoral rights to the shoreline, part of which became the Hawaiian Village Hotel’s beachfront property.

In a stunning act of cultural appropriation, Kaiser renamed part of the area he acquired through the passage of H.R. 6631 “Kahanamoku Beach and Lagoon,” after the Hawaiian surfer and olympian Duke Kahanamoku. The Hawaiian Village Hotel opened its doors that year in 1955. Its first advertising campaign set the tone for the exoticizing theme that Hawaiian Village Hotel would subsequently adopt in their bid to attract Hollywood actors, Kaiser employees, and middle-class mainland U.S. visitors with slogans such as “Go Native with elegance!”

<The front cover of Western Hotel’s 1959 pamphlet advertising the Hawaiian Village Hotel>

The land dispossession that were jump-started and financed by the hyper-development of the Waikīkī beachfront in the 1950s and 60s was not solely attributable to Henry J. Kaiser or to Elizabeth Farrington and the Republican Party. As Trask writes about elsewhere, a multi-ethnic coalition of old and new imperialists, such as Joseph Dillingham, Herbert Horita, and Clarence Ching, also joined in the land grab. According to Noel J. Kent, each of these men eventually came to preside over multinational corporations whose scale far surpassed that of the “Big Five” businesses which had monopolized land, wealth, and political influence during the first half of the 20th century.

It was the tourism industry which jump-started the boom in land development in Hawai‘i during the postwar period, making it possible for these new, multinational corporations headed in many cases by Asian American men, to amass tens of thousands of acres of Hawaiian land. Their rapacious development projects, often pursued under the guise of providing “affordable housing” or single-family homes to residents, devastated rural Hawaiian communities who struggled to keep up with the rising costs of living and tax burdens that accompanied what eventually became billions of dollars worth of land acquisitions by Japanese investors.

The alliance between the tourism industry and land developers that Kaiser and other capitalists initiated during the 1950’s and 60’s in turn paved the way for contemporary billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and coincidentally one of the leading actors in the current genocide against Palestinians, to transform the islands into their own private getaways. Zuckerberg currently holds over 2,300 acres of property on Kaua‘i. This property, which includes the area near Pila‘a Beach, is a sacred burial ground to Native Hawaiian communities. To this day, development of this land continues with little to no oversight by the state.

Zuckerberg is not the only one. Fellow billionaires such as Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, and David Duffield have also monopolized Hawiian land to the detriment of Native Hawaiian communities they displaced, something that gained negative media attention during the devastating fires on Maui in 2023. As a recent study by MauiWES shows, Maui residents, in particular the poor and uninsured, continue to struggle with their physical and mental health in the aftermath of the fires, even as billionaires and hotel owners (who are often one and the same) carry on with the work of rebuilding their massive properties.

Meanwhile, the largest billionaire landowner in the Hawaiian Islands, Larry Ellison, co-founder of the software company Oracle, is directly funding and arming the zionist entity’s genocide against Palestinians. He owns 97% of the land on Lāna‘i, on which he has built Sensei Lāna‘i, a Four Seasons Resort.

Academia has played an outsized role in the expansion of corporate tourism in Hawai‘i. During the postwar period, the state extended funding to the University of Hawai‘i to build academic departments and schools that could support the tourism and land development-led penetration into other parts of the Pacific and Asia. The University became the center for tourism studies, Asian studies, as well as military research and development, signing hundreds of contracts worth over $20 million with the U.S. military during the late 1960s.

While recent scholarly debates in Asian American studies have introduced terms such as Asian settler colonialism to critique the way that people of Asian descent have been complicit in the project of U.S. settler colonialism, objection to their professional association’s decision to hold its annual conference where the postwar dispossession of Hawaiian people and the ruination of their islands’ waters, lands, and coral all began has been entirely lacking.

We call on scholars to boycott this conference not only because of its egregious complicity in the settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession it purports to gather scholars to discuss, but also because it legitimates the business-as-usual mentality that has led most academics to continue researching and teaching in the very institutions that are producing the bombs killing Palestinians every day.

Academic conferences, especially those that require travel, are also an inaccessible way to share knowledge and research. The cost of the flight, especially for graduate students, adjuncts and other contingent academic workers; the disregard for the sick and disabled who may not wish to spend 2-3 days among hundreds of unmasked individuals; and the professional hierarchies that are reinforced through the promotion of an aggressive culture of “networking” that only rewards those who self-promote, are not only impediments to the sharing of knowledge—they contribute to the further consolidation and siloing of information among a privileged few.

Instead, we invite those scholars who have decided to divest from the academic conference circuit once and for all to join us in building more liberatory formations by taking one or all of the following actions.

• Donate funds that you would have spent on a room at the Hilton Hawaiian Village or your genocide-funding airbnb to the Sameer Project, a mutual aid organization run by Palestinians in diaspora to provide life-saving aid to Palestinians in Gaza through our Life Funds for Gaza campaign.

• Propose a workshop to share your knowledge and research with an audience who is invested in Palestinian survival and liberation, rather than waking up at 8am to read your conference paper in front of a handful of disgruntled scholars drinking lukewarm cups of bad coffee, who probably don’t give a shit about your research anyway and whose main contribution will be a “question that is more of a comment.”

• Gather your friends and colleagues to run a reading group. You can choose any of the fantastic books in our curated online bookstore, which donates all proceeds to Palestinians in Gaza. Don’t see anything of interest? Suggest a book to add to our list.

• If you’re teaching a course, create a course page through our website and direct your students to buy their books through us. All proceeds are donated to Palestinians in Gaza.

• Show your solidarity with political prisoners from our movement. Sign and share the mitigation letter for Tarek Bazrouk, donate to legal funds for Leqaa Kordia, Casey Goonan, and Jakhi McCray or organize a workshop or class to raise funds on their behalf.

Replicate and proliferate whatever is useful from our model and discard the rest. Refuse the impulse to carry on as usual or hide behind settler innocence. Reject what Isam al Khatib calls the conditional solidarity of Western activism.

Abolish the university, fire to the prisons!