"They Will Eat Us Up": Remembering Hawai'i

Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. By Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio. University of Hawai'i Press, 2002

Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law. By Sally Engle Merry. Princeton University Press, 2000

Culture and Educational Policy in Hawai'i: The Silencing of Native Voices. By Maenette K. P. Benham and Ronald H. Heck Lawrence Erlbaum. Associates, 1998

Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. By Rob Wilson. Duke University Press, 2000

Since the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s, scholarship about Hawai'i has been increasingly multivocal, contestatory, and partisan. Despite the state's ongoing media campaign to present Hawai'i as the "aloha state," leftist scholarship (informed or not about divisions within the islands) has visited Hawai'i with an assortment of agendas, moving in nominal alliance with progressive Hawai'i-based scholarship.¹ Hawai'i has been taken up by students of globalism (local-regional-global interfaces), for whom the interests and realities of people in Hawai'i are often abstract or theoretical; Asian Americanists, for whom the conditions of Hawaiians or non-Asian settler groups remain secondary; critics of American empirebuilding and national self-imagining, who link Hawai'i with Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines (just to mention nations theUS occupied in 1898) while concentrating on US imperialist policies; Hawai'i-based commentators on Hawai'i's cultural movements, who are often engaged in what Rodney Morales describes as a "contentious multiculturalism" specific to Hawai'i and without much wider context; and revisionist historians, who critically reinterpret the broad trajectories of history in Hawai'i.

This review considers three volumes in the revisionist vein— written from the different disciplinary perspectives and authorial positions of Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio (Hawaiian history), Sally Engle Merry (anthropology and law), and Maenette K. P. Benham andRonald H. Heck (education)—and concludes by looking at onetransdisciplinary (cultural studies) work, by Rob Wilson, who dares to imagine ways in which the strengths of the contemporary movements mentioned above might be productively affiliated within a common oppositional project, without the exclusionary limitations of each. Although many fine recent books could havebeen chosen, these four works retell a story about which most Americans remain in denial. Overlaps among the works, or whatseems repetitious in Hawai'i-based scholarship and political rhetoric, presuppose national ignorance or amnesia and can be read as canny insistence that historical facts be recited until acknowledged in ways that effect material redress.

Prior to the resurgence of politicized indigenous writing in the 1970s, allied as it often was with "local"-settler antidevelopment writing influenced by continental Civil Rights and ethnic studies movements, historical scholarship about Hawai'i was largely an area studies that focused on the transformation of the islands over one or more of three time periods: from Captain James Cook's discovery of the islands (1778) through the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani (1893);² from the annexation of the islands (1898) to the "admission" of Hawai'i as a US state (1959); from statehood forward. Narrations of the nineteenth-century history emphasized Hawai'i's political and cultural restructuring (civilizing) as a result of haole ("white") influence; studies of the territorial period charted social transformation as part of an assimilative project of Americanization; studies of the poststatehood period focused on ways in which Hawai'i functioned as a beacon for both postwar global restructuring and American multiculturalism. Volumes in this vein, such as Ralph Kuykendall's and Lawrence Fuchs's histories, not surprisingly represented the sociopolitical values of their times.³

In addition to being powerful reminders that Hawai'i is not unproblematically, legitimately, or irreversibly part of "America," the works under review here share a commitment to Hawai'i and an immersion in Hawai'i's political and cultural history that in too many works about Hawai'i remains gestural. Further, as suggested above, they embody an illustrative range of approaches and self-positionings...