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Island World: A History of Hawai'i and the United States, by Gary Y Okihiro
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Brilliantly mixing geology, folklore, music, cultural commentary, and history, Gary Y. Okihiro overturns the customary narrative in which the United States acts upon and dominates Hawai'i. Instead, Island World depicts the islands' press against the continent, endowing America's story with fresh meaning. Okihiro's reconsidered history reveals Hawaiians fighting in the Civil War, sailing on nineteenth-century New England ships, and living in pre-gold rush California. He points to Hawai'i's lingering effect on twentieth-century American culture—from surfboards, hula, sports, and films, to art, imagination, and racial perspectives—even as the islands themselves succumb slowly to the continental United States. In placing Hawai'i at the center of the national story, Island World rejects the premise that continents comprise "natural" states while islands are "tiny spaces," without significance, to be acted upon by continents. An astonishingly compact tour de force, this book not only revises the way we think about islands, oceans, and continents, it also recasts the way we write about space and time.
- Sales Rank: #2240761 in Books
- Published on: 2008-08-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.00" w x 6.00" l, 1.31 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 328 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In the first volume of a projected trilogy, Okihiro, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia, largely succeeds in a radical approach to historiography as applied to Hawaii. He defies the standard linear progression and view of humans as subjects with volition without regard for the agencies of other life-forms.... Okihiro combines human history, natural history and mythic Hawaiian folklore with interpretations of how Hawaiian cultural artifacts (such as surfboards) infiltrated American culture and vice versa. He likewise depicts the lives of Hawaiians who wound up in North America, either by choice or involuntarily. In young islanders taken to be Westernized at special schools, Okihiro sees a parallel to similar cultural cleansing (or schooling for subservience) of Native Americans. He also narrates the slow decimation of the rich and varied Hawaiian musical tradition reduced to clichés, à la Don Ho. Thus, Okihiro places the story of Hawaii in direct and constant relation to the story of the United States. Some readers may find this eclectic mix of facts hard to follow and synthesize, but all will come away intrigued and enlightened. 57 b&w photos, 6 maps. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
No man is an island, and apparently no island is, either. Okihiro’s concise yet far-reaching cultural history of the Hawaiian Islands traces the vast influence the archipelago has exerted on the world from the dawn of geologic time to the present. As migrations of cultures settled on and embarked from the islands, the fragile balance of human and environmental ecology was impacted in ways both minuscule and monumental. Rather than a chronological unfolding of events in sequence, however, Okihiro places essential elements of Hawaii’s formation and development in context, chronicling how such diverse phenomena as warfare and religion, education and surfing, monarchies and music were affected by dominant world events. From the discovery of Eastern trade routes to the advent of motion pictures to the repercussions of the Civil War and the influx of leisure-class travel, Okihiro relates Hawaii’s past by profiling a diverse cast of characters whose guidance and direction forever altered the way the world would view these geographically remote islands vis-a-vis the community of nations. Ed: s/b vis-à-vis (w/ accent), but have Production add it. --Carol Haggas
Review
"All will come away intrigued and enlightened."--"Publishers Weekly"
"A startling perspective and a compelling one."--"Wall Street Journal"
"A startling perspective and a compelling one."--John Whitehead"Wall Street Journal" (10/17/2008)
A startling perspective and a compelling one. --John Whitehead"Wall Street Journal" (10/17/2008)"
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Fresh and Welcome Perspective
By Rocco
Often, when historians analyze the history of what we label an "island," we analyze the impact of continental political forces upon the island and its culture. Gary Okihiro has taken the opposite approach in his book Island World. The people of the Hawaiian Islands brought historical and cultural meanings to the U.S. In contrast to the "civilized" Western view of the world, which divides the Earth into continents and seeks to manipulate the meanings and functions of nature through science, the Polynesian peoples of the Pacific, in Okihiro's estimation, were (are) one with nature and their water civilization. For the peoples of the Pacific, history and geography do not occur within the Western imaginary confines of the continent and nation-state. Rather, all lands upon the Earth are, in a sense, islands, moving upon and connected with the massive plates that create the Earth's crust. Thus, Okihiro presents a multi-faced, fluid approach to world history, through the lens of the Hawaiian people, where cultures impact other cultures regardless of Westernized conceptions of geographic location. Okihiro analyzes these cultural exchanges through stories of religion, music, gender, film, education, travel, war and literature.
Okihiro's opening chapter provides a poetic, organic and feminine view of the land and sea that is Hawai'i. Earth is power to be revered and worshiped in Hawaiian social existence, as Hawaiians view themselves as a product of their environment, of volcanic birth. The Pele story, Okihiro claims, shows that "the volcanic fire-queen," like the Polynesian people of the Pacific, was unfettered by notions of time and space. Rather, Hawaiians, like their Polynesian descendants, lived in "a land not rooted and anchored to one spot, but [a land] that floated free" (22). Moreover, the peoples of the Pacific, coming to life and living in a volcanic geography, had indigenous roots that few cultures or peoples on Earth could relate to. As Okihiro shows for the remainder of his tome, such an existence and history had (has) much to offer U.S. culture and society. However, Western society sought to engage the feminine origins of Hawaii and its people with the masculine approach of imperialism.
Polynesian culture, specifically Hawaiian culture, clashed with white, Christian European and American paternalistic values and ambitions. Foreign visitors viewed the Hawaiian Islands themselves in the framework of Western scientific rationalizations rather than Hawaiian cultural realities. For example, volcanoes held religious, metaphoric life meanings for Hawaiians while Europeans typically saw only natural beauty through the lens of science. One American painter describes the Crater of Kilauea as one "I shall always think of as a piece of a dead world" (39). In another example, Okihiro characterizes the American bombing of Mauna Loa to divert its lava flow as "an assault against and desecration of the sacred earth, the gods and ancestors, and the Hawaiians" (41).
Okihiro provides numerous examples of the cultural exchange emanating from Hawaii toward the U.S. Surfing, a center of Hawaiian social and religious life, had a profound impact not only on American social life, but also upon its film and music industries. Hawaiian music was highly sought after in the 1920's U.S. and influenced blues and country music as well. Hawaiians served with U.S. forces during the War of 1812 and with Union forces during the American Civil War. Hawaiians were also actively engaged in gold mining and speculation in California after 1848. In essence, "the island acted upon and moved the continent" (211).
Perhaps most important are Okihiro's depictions and perceptions of U.S. missionary culture, race and gender in relation to Hawaiians. The Second Great Awakening initiated a creation of and large flow of missionary societies that sought to "civilize heathen societies." Although abolitionism and temperance found their roots in this religious movement, the movement itself still contained racial and gender driven motivations, as Okihiroi makes clear in his analysis of the missionary, "educational" work of Samuel Armstrong. Hawaiian citizens and immigrants were often treated in the same light as Native and Black Americans. White Americans were often chastised for or forbidden from miscegenation. Moreover, schools were created to assimilate non-white cultures, and hence eviscerate their indigenous identities.
This social movement coincided with the expansion of the U.S. marketplace in a westward trajectory, with capitalist entrepreneurs seeking to monopolize the fur and sugar trade across the Pacific. By the late 19th century, social constructs of manliness that had emasculated Native American societies throughout the century, sought to emasculate non-white, indigenous peoples, including Hawaiians (and islands themselves), across the Pacific while simultaneously proving white manliness through imperialization. This was, indeed, the so-called "White Man's Burden."
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
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