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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface | “Statehood Sucks”
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction | Colliding Futures of Hawai‘i Statehood
- Chapter 1 | A Future Wish: Hawai‘i at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition
- Chapter 2 | The Courage to Speak: Disrupting Haole Hegemony at the 1937 Congressional Statehood Hearings
- Chapter 3 | “Something Indefinable Would Be Lost”: The Unruly Kamokila and Go for Broke!
- Chapter 4 | The Propaganda of Occupation: Statehood and the Cold War
- Chapter 5 | Alternative Futures beyond the Settler State
- Conclusion | Scenes of Resurgence: Slow Violence and Slow Resistance
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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