Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood by Dean Itsuji Saranillio (review)

DEAN ITSUJI SARANILLIO’S highly anticipated book, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood, provides needed correction to the dominant narrative that statehood for Hawai‘i was both legal and inevitable. Working from an expansive archive starting from the 1890s, Saranillio highlights the colossal efforts and resources necessary to manufacture consent in Hawai‘i, in Washington, D.C., and everywhere in between in the leadup to the statehood vote in 1959. Statehood was not evidence of Hawai‘i’s multiracial democracy but a triumph of the ruling class, the settler state, and U.S. imperialism. Saranillio argues persuasively that statehood was but one example of U.S. empire’s “fail forward” strategy of managing economic crises through land theft and native dispossession (202).

The book begins with a captivating account of Kānaka ‘Ōiwi and their allies interrupting the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of statehood at the state capitol in 2009. Forbidden from carrying signs, protestors (including the author) wore black shirts with large letters spelling “Fake State, History of Theft.” As a Filipino and Japanese settler ally from Maui, Saranillio writes with genuine respect for the Hawaiian independence movement and for Kanaka ‘Ōiwi scholar-activists working hard to set the record straight. In late 2018, Saranillio addressed a packed audience at the state archives, a testament to how needed this intervention is in Hawai‘i today.

Saranillio is a uniquely gifted scholar who knows how to articulate Hawai‘i’s history with the larger project of U.S. colonialism in North America, across the Pacific, and globally. He never loses track of the fact that Hawaiian resistance occurs alongside movements for Native and Black liberation in North America and movements for decolonization in the Global South. Part of the problem, he notes, is how terms like “multiculturalism” and “decolonization” were cynically manipulated to further U.S. interests in Hawai‘i:

Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state played a key role in expanding empire; the Cold War liberal multiculturalism that Hawai‘i became an example of allowed for such acts of imperialism to be recoded in the language of decolonization. Arguing Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state to be a “success” with “independence,” [territorial Governor William] Quinn referenced Cold War hotspots such as the Republic of Congo and the Philippines, saying that the industrial revolution, capitalism, and democracy all bring economic stability and are a “must” for newly decolonized nations. Quinn made these statements despite the fact that U.S. statehood occurred in Hawai‘i not because of stability, but because of numerous rounds of economic depressions strung together through a fail-forward logic that viewed incorporation as a resolution to economic crisis or expansion.

(202)

In the particularly riveting fourth chapter, “The Propaganda of Occupation: Statehood and the Cold War,” Saranillio interrogates the work of Edward Bernays, the infamous New York public relations executive hired by University of Hawai‘i to bring corporate know-how to the cause of selling state-hood. In Propaganda, Bernays writes: “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country” (133). Although a fervent Cold Warrior, Bernays was adept at co-opting the language of popular resistance against the “Big Five” corporate oligarchy to enlist working-class support for statehood.

As sobering as this account is, Saranillio also features the ingenuity of Kānaka Maoli (and settler allies) whose vociferous opposition to statehood has been systematically suppressed. Among these are Alice “Kamokila” Campbell, a sophisticated and historically savvy rhetorician whose wealth allowed her to speak out against the corporate and government elite in ways forbidden to the working class; and Sammy Amalu, a queer trickster in every sense of the term who was imprisoned for impersonating a hotel and real estate tycoon, in effect giving Kānaka Maoli the last laugh by lampooning the obscene land grabs of the tourist industry that consolidated poststatehood.

The book is instructive for its...