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

On 2 July 2021, county officials declared a water shortage in upcountry Maui and prohibited residents from using water for nonessential activities like washing cars or watering lawns, with fines of up to us$500 for violating regulations. Meanwhile, about eight thousand visitors were flying to Maui daily, often staying in hotels with high water demands for pools and golf courses (see "'Water fiasco' on Maui Leaves Residents Feeling Mistreated, Unfairly Targeted," by Chelsea Davis, Hawaii News Now, 11 July 2021). This diversion of life-sustaining resources away from residents to tourists, from people for profit, is exemplary of the extractive tourism industry in Hawai'i. As Native Hawaiians like myself and longtime residents witnessed yet another surge in overtourism, made especially overwhelming by the covid-19 pandemic, many wondered: How did we get here? What can we do? Dean Itsuji Saranillio's Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood, although focused primarily on statehood rather than tourism, balances an honest confrontation with the past with radical hope for alternative futures to address many of these questions for our time.

In this work, Saranillio examines the history of Hawai'i's statehood, beginning with the overthrow and illegal annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and 1898. As Saranillio details in the introduction, these acts were both orchestrated by the US-backed Provisional Government, made up of the descendants of white American missionaries whose economic and political power in the Islands was based on their monopoly of the sugar and pineapple industries. In turn, their own descendants, particularly those of the "Big Five" (five agencies who dominated the agricultural industry and general economy in Hawai'i), facilitated multiple pushes for statehood during the Great Depression and in the post–World War II and Cold War eras. This resulted in the admission of Hawai'i as a state in 1959.

The Big Five's insistence on further incorporation into the United States has been attributed primarily to private capital interests, first through the expansion of the agricultural industries, and later through the establishment of the tourism industry. Resistance to Hawai'i statehood had multiple proponents with differing motives. For many Kanaka 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiians) and Hawai'i residents, resistance was rooted in the desire to regain sovereignty as an independent nation. On the part of the US federal government, resistance was cemented in racism and anticommunism as Hawai'i had a majority nonwhite population (largely due to the influx of Asian laborers for the agricultural industry in the nineteenth century) with a powerful labor organization.

Saranillio, who critically selfidentifies as a Filipino and Japanese settler raised in Kahului, Maui, contests the prevailing narratives that depict statehood as a civil rights victory or as an event Kanaka 'Ōiwi passively accepted. In addition to government documents, newspaper articles, and conventional archival texts, the author uses a diversity of other sources, including images, ephemera, and accounts depicting exhibits at world's fairs, propaganda films, political cartoons, and the story of a million-dollar hoax, to reveal an alternative history of Hawai'i statehood, settler colonialism, capitalism, and liberal multiculturalism.

The agency and resistance of marginalized communities, namely Kanaka 'Ōiwi and the nonwhite working class, are fundamental to Saranillio's history of Hawai'i statehood. From the 1937 and 1946 congressional hearings for statehood to Cold War era propaganda campaigns for statehood, Kanaka 'Ōiwi and the working class resisted every Big Five push for statehood. Saranillio responsibly highlights the agency and humanity of prominent figures—such as Alice Kamokila Campbell, a Kanaka 'Ōiwi elite who staunchly opposed statehood—while also reckoning with the ways these figures may have also caused harm. For instance, although Kamokila contributed much to the...