Unsustainable Empire

Unsustainable Empire

Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood

  • Author: Saranillio, Dean Itsuji
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9781478000624
  • eISBN Pdf: 9781478002291
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2018
  • Month: November
  • Pages: 312
  • Language: English
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
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • Q
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • U
    • V
    • W
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