Centering Hawai'i: Lessons on and beyond United States Empire

Abstract

Centering Hawai'i:Lessons on and beyond United States Empire Hōkūlani K. Aikau (bio) Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism. By J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 275 pages. $95.68 (cloth). $26.95 (paper). Return to Kahiki: Native Hawaiians in Oceania. By Kealani Cook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 255 pages. $49.99 (cloth). $29.99 (paper). Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood. By Dean Itsuji Saranillio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 282 pages. 100.22 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1993, Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease coedited the collection Cultures of United States Imperialism, a seven-hundred-page volume calling for a shift in American studies toward sustained analysis of US Empire. Kaplan identifies "three salient absences" in the academic study of American Empire and American Exceptionalism, which, she argues, contribute to an "ongoing pattern of denial across several disciplines: the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism."1 The three books under review are excellent examples of contemporary scholarship that heeds Kaplan's call. Their methodological, historical, and analytic breadth illuminates the complex and enduring forces and cultural dimensions of US imperialism. These authors go even further by demonstrating how indigeneity as an analytic category is central to understanding settler colonialism. Just as Kaplan and Pease identify "an ideological disjuncture" in the very foundations of the discipline, at a panel during the 2015 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Robert Warrior reminded the audience that another cognitive gap persists. American studies' ongoing articulation of whiteness with national culture has resulted in the persistent marginalization of Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) within the field. Warrior's [End Page 867] content analysis of the ASA program from 1998 to 2014 found that topics focused on settler colonial studies significantly outnumbered those that featured NAIS topics. The exception was when NAIS scholars were on the program committee or serving as ASA president. Warrior's findings suggest that twenty years on from the publication of Cultures of US Imperialism the cognitive gap persists and has expanded. These three books fill this cognitive gap by centering indigeneity as an analytic and demonstrate how NAIS is essential to any analysis of US Empire and settler colonialism. Another cognitive gap that Native Pacific cultural studies scholars have highlighted is the absence of Oceania from the study of American national culture and politics. As the Chamorro scholar Keith Camacho explained in 2011, Oceania "[plays] a vital role in the making and unmaking of the American empire from the late nineteenth century to the present."2 "Oceanizing American Studies," Greg Dvorak's contribution to the special issue of American Quarterly that inaugurated the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa as the new home of the flagship journal for the ASA, reiterates the need for American studies to center Oceania in research on US imperialism and settler colonialism.3 These three books provide illustrative examples of what can be learned about American Empire, specifically, and coloniality and imperialism generally when Hawai'i is centered methodologically and theoretically. Each book is an exemplar of how NAIS scholars offer analytic tools and methodological insights about American nationalism and US Empire from the viewpoint of those on the front lines of decolonization and anti-imperialism. In a time when the United States is yet again grappling with disease, racism, and antidemocratic legislation, these texts provide crystal clear evidence that this is not new or unexpected. Rather, when the history of US imperialism and settler colonialism in Oceania and Hawai'i are placed at the center of analysis, we learn that "democracy" has been a rallying cry of white supremacy, capitalist greed, and heteropatriarchy all along. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's book chronologically bookends the historical periods addressed in these three books. As she explains, "Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty … seeks to demonstrate how white American notions of property title, state sovereignty, and normative gender and sexuality become intimately imbricated in aspirations for Hawaiian liberation and in...