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America Goes Hawaiian: The Influence of Pacific Island Culture on the Mainland by
How did Hawaiian and Polynesian culture come to dramatically alter American music, fashion and decor, as well as ideas about race, in less than a century? It began with mainland hula and musical performances in the late 19th century, rose dramatically as millions shipped to Hawaii during the Pacific War, then made big leap with the advent of low-cost air travel. By the end of the 1950s, mainlanders were hosting tiki parties, listening to exotic music, lazing on rattan furniture in Hawaiian shirts and, of course, surfing. Increasingly, they were marrying people outside of their own racial groups as well. The author describes how this cultural conquest came about and the people and events that led to it.
Belonging on an Island: birds, extinction, and evolution in Hawaiʻi by
No detailed description available for "Belonging on an Island".
Detours: a decolonial guide to Hawai'i by
In this brilliant reinvention of the travel guide, artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai'i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai'i's culture, complex history, and the effects of colonialism.
Queen Ka'ahumanu of Hawaii: A Biography by
King Kamehameha the Great had 30 wives. Ka'ahumanu (c.1768-1832) was his favorite. Descended from Oceanian voyagers, she grew up in a society completely isolated from the rest of the world, her life enmeshed in dynastic wars and constrained by an elaborate system of taboos. In 1778, she was shocked by the arrival of alien ships, followed by an influx of foreigners. In their wake came devastating epidemics. Seizing power after the King's death, Ka'ahumanu overturned those taboos and guided her nation through revolutionary change, crucial to the Hawaiian Islands' unification. Through sicknesses, romances, infidelities, murders, rebellions, pardons, travels, missionary work, and more, her story challenges many beliefs about American history, Christianity, and gender. Further, it has implications for current debates about immigration, sexuality, and religious diversity. Drawing on seldom-analyzed French and Russian sources, this biography covers neglected aspects of Ka'ahumanu's life. The many spouses and lovers she and Kamehameha had, the roles played by Central Europeans, African-Americans, Catholics and Unitarians in her realm, and struggles with religious pluralism are all included.
Unsustainable Empire: alternative histories of Hawaiʻi statehood by
In Unsustainable Empire Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai'i's admission as a U.S. state. Hawai'i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai'i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio tracks these disparate stories by marshaling a variety of unexpected genres and archives: exhibits at world's fairs, political cartoons, propaganda films, a multimillion-dollar hoax on Hawai'i's tourism industry, water struggles, and stories of hauntings, among others. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity and persuasive force about historically and ethically complex issues, Unsustainable Empire provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai'i's admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to U.S. empire are urgently needed.
Death Rites and Hawaiian Royalty: funerary practices in the Kamehameha and Kalākaua dynasties, 1819/1953 by
The bones of Hawaii's King Kamehameha the Great were hidden at night in a secret location. In contrast, his successor Kamehameha III had a half-mile-long funeral procession to the Royal Tomb watched by thousands. Drawing on missionary journals, government publications and Hawaiian and English language newspapers, this book describes changes in funerary practices for Hawaiian royalty and details the observance of each royal death beginning with that of Kamehameha in 1819. Funeral observances of Western royalty provided an extravagant model for their Hawaiian counterparts yet many indigenous practices endured. Mourners no longer knocked out their teeth or tattooed their tongues but mass wailing, feather standards and funeral dirges continued well into the 20th century. Dozens of historic drawings and photographs provide rare glimpses of the obsequies of the Kamehameha and Kalakaua dynasties. Descriptions of the burial sites provide locations of the final resting places of Hawaii's royalty.
Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography: Hula, Navigation, and Oratory by
Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography Practices are a compilation of intimate, interactive, and integrative processes that present place as "experienced space," situate mapping in the environment, and encode spatial knowledge into bodily memory via repetitive recitations and other habitual practices, such as hula. Kanaka Hawai'i cartography is similar to Western cartography in that it provides a shorthand system of understanding spatial phenomenon, but distinctive in that it places emphasis on multisensual cognitive abilities and multidimensional symbolic interrelationships, and privileges performance as a primary mode of communication. Book jacket.
Kika Kila: how the Hawaiian steel guitar changed the sound of modern music by
Since the nineteenth century, the distinct tones of k&299;k&257; kila, the Hawaiian steel guitar, have defined the island sound. Here historian and steel guitarist John W. Troutman offers the instrument's definitive history, from its discovery by a young Hawaiian royalist named Joseph Kekuku to its revolutionary influence on American and world music. During the early twentieth century, Hawaiian musicians traveled the globe, from tent shows in the Mississippi Delta, where they shaped the new sounds of country and the blues, to regal theaters and vaudeville stages in New York, Berlin, Kolkata, and beyond. In the process, Hawaiian guitarists recast the role of the guitar in modern life. But as Troutman explains, by the 1970s the instrument's embrace and adoption overseas also worked to challenge its cultural legitimacy in the eyes of a new generation of Hawaiian musicians. As a consequence, the indigenous instrument nearly disappeared in its homeland. Using rich musical and historical sources, including interviews with musicians and their descendants, Troutman provides the complete story of how this Native Hawaiian instrument transformed not only American music but the sounds of modern music throughout the world.
Nation Within: the history of the American occupation of Hawai'i by
Nation Within is the complex history of the events between the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893 and its annexation to the United States in 1898. Highlighting the native Hawaiians' resistance during that five year span, Tom Coffman shows why occupying Hawaiʻi was crucial to American imperial ambitions.
The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: reconstructing native Hawaiian intellectual history by
In The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen Noenoe K. Silva reconstructs the indigenous intellectual history of a culture where--using Western standards--none is presumed to exist. Silva examines the work of two lesser-known Hawaiian writers--Joseph Ho'ona'auao Kānepu'u (1824-ca. 1885) and Joseph Moku'ōhai Poepoe (1852-1913)--to show how the rich intellectual history preserved in Hawaiian-language newspapers is key to understanding Native Hawaiian epistemology and ontology. In their newspaper articles, geographical surveys, biographies, historical narratives, translations, literatures, political and economic analyses, and poetic works, Kānepu'u and Poepoe created a record of Hawaiian cultural history and thought in order to transmit ancestral knowledge to future generations. Celebrating indigenous intellectual agency in the midst of US imperialism, The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen is a call for the further restoration of native Hawaiian intellectual history to help ground contemporary Hawaiian thought, culture, and governance.
