Aloha made: the circulation of empire, plastic, and the visceral in Bishop Museum’s “Unreal Hawai‘i”

Abstract

This article analyzes an exhibition at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, HI titled Unreal Hawai‘i: Hawai‘i in the Pacific Imagination. The exhibition juxtaposes tiki kitsch and appropriative print culture about Hawai‘i against a large mural by Kānaka Maoli artists depicting the Kumulipo creation story and the struggle against colonization. I use this exhibition, in particular its depictions of hula, to consider kitsch objectification of Pacific Islanders that is articulated through modes of white and Asian settler colonialism. I offer the concept of borderwork to theorize how various curated and unintentional juxtapositions within the exhibition are not just the sites where colonial encounter flattens difference, but where meaning is dialectically formed. In particular, I argue that the materiality of plastic, glass, and viscera negotiate a border as they circulate in the colonial imaginary, the Pacific Ocean, and in the exhibition, producing a moral hierarchy of materiality that is expressed through a racial grammar. Finally, I close read the multiple appearances of hula dancer and former Aloha Maid, Pualani Mossman Avon, in the exhibition to consider how her corporeality contests and exceeds its own kitschification.