Abstract
A professor of English at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Cristina Bacchilega explores how newcomers to Hawaii, mainly Americans, reworked Hawaiian mo'olelo (narratives and stories) to suit their own agendas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She finds that, “dmost crucially, it was the budding tourist industry of the territory of Hawai'i that motivated, shaped, and sustained the production of legendary Hawai'i especially for the benefit of American tourists and potential settlers” (p. 5). Bacchilega also explains how some native Hawaiians countered that tendency and resisted efforts to revise their culture. In chapter 1, Bacchilega situates her work in the fields of folklore and literary studies. She then writes approvingly in chapter 2 about how Anne Kapulani Landgraf used photographs (well reproduced in Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place) in her 1994 book, Nā Wahi Pana'o Ko'olau Poko: Legenday Places of Ko'olau Poko, along with Hawaiian and English texts, “to create an artistic and cultural landmark that engages Native Hawaiian tradition in the present” (p. 29). In chapter 3, by way of contrast, Bacchilega looks backward in time at how many non-Hawaiians popularized and changed Hawaiian mo'olelo as part of their broad campaign to alter the American public's ideas about the Hawaiian Islands around the time of annexation (1898), an effort that marginalized native Hawaiians. In arguably the most valuable section of her study, Bacchilega shows in chapter 4 how some native Hawaiians fought efforts to erase their culture. She focuses on the written texts and photographs comprising Emma Nukuina's Hawaii: Its People, Their Legends (1904). In her final chapter, Bacchilega connects the past with the present by investigating how supernatural legends (ghost stories) have been depicted in Hawaii.
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