Hollywood's Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War by Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett. (review)

The problematic politics surrounding the acquisition of Hawaii and the South Pacific territories administered by the United States are often far removed from the mainland's national imagination. Instead, hula dancers, tiki bars, aloha shirts, romantic Waikiki beach sunsets, and other paradise fantasies more readily come to mind. Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett's Hollywood's Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War reminds us of where many of these images originated: popular cinema. Surveying a rich array of films set on these islands, from the beginning of film history to as recently as 2011, Konzett reveals how Hollywood has constructed a mythology of the islands, one steeped in containment, substitution, and appropriation, to configure natives as dependent, settlers as dominant, and Pacific traditions as "phantom mirages of Hollywood fantasies" (7).

Few have provided such a deep dive into Hawaii's cinematic history. While others have examined the United States' island territories and their related pop culture artifacts or offered meticulous catalogs and critical histories of Hawaii-based film and television productions, Konzett's is one of the first projects to thoroughly analyze the cinematic rhetoric of Hawaii and the Pacific.¹ In doing so, Konzett identifies two recurring themes: amnesia and militarization. As she notes, "The former is rooted in escapist fantasy and white melodrama, negating any historical accountability of the United States toward its quasi-colony of Hawaii," while the latter "view[s] Hawaii as a battleground for global conflicts and the maintenance of geopolitical dominance via military power" (217).

These themes are explored in three expansive chapters, organized chronologically. The first covers early shorts made on the islands, as well as South Seas fantasy films produced throughout the 1920s and 1930s. While the early semidocumentary films emphasize US economic expansion into the islands, as well as fetishizing and appropriating native customs, the South Seas fantasy films center on nostalgic narratives of first contact with the natives. White missionaries, traders, or beachcombers seeking respite from civilization encounter the nonwhite Other, and through the relationships that form (romantic or otherwise), white superiority is reaffirmed and Eurocentric or American imperialism reinforced. Konzett also highlights the role of the South Pacific plantation in such films as Victor Fleming's Hula (1927) and musicals such as Waikiki Wedding (Frank Tuttle, 1937) and Honolulu (Edward Buzzell, 1939). Through them, Konzett sees the problematic mainland southern plantation and post–Civil War race relations reimagined in a (at the time) less controversial imperialist context, one that conveniently ignores the multiethnic and multiracial reality of the islands and replaces it with a simplistic racial binary of happily subservient natives and masterful whites.

Chapter 2 focuses on World War II films, particularly John Ford's documentaries, the rise of the combat genre film, and B movies featuring yellowface. Here, Konzett focuses on "World War II Orientalism," a cinematic containment strategy that paradoxically reinforces an imperialist agenda while embracing a multicultural and multiethnic reality. Heavily influenced by the Office of War Information's censoring of overtly racist content, films of this era, such as Ford's The Battle of Midway (1943) and the combat film Bataan (Tay Garnet, 1943), foreground racially diverse troops working alongside one another, reimagining the military as a progressive institution of democracy (and ignoring its long racist history). The B movies produced at this time, conversely, feature white actors in yellowface, resulting in a representation of the Other that is "deliberately improbable and grotesque to bring the enemy at once into closer contact with the American and ridicule him by making him appear merely as a diminished form of the American" (129).

In the third chapter, Konzett looks at postwar films in which South Seas fantasy and combat films are updated in light of the United States' new role as an international superpower. As she notes, Hollywood now was tasked with mourning the nation's lost soldiers, memorializing pivotal World War II battles, and promoting a new military readiness (137–38). In this era, a "Cold War...