Seeing Conquest: Colliding Histories and the Cultural Politics of Hawai'i Statehood.

Abstract

Situated in comparative ethnic studies, American studies, and cultural history, this dissertation offers a kind of “history of the present,” a genealogy of the complex interplay between different Asian American groups, Native Hawaiians and whites within historical moments of interaction shaped by opposing versions of history. Current historical scholarship narrates Hawai‘i statehood as a domestic civil rights victory that united Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians in defeating a notion of American citizenship that was linked exclusively to whiteness. As such, scholarship that examines tensions between Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians within a framework of “settler colonialism” have been called ahistorical, arguing that tensions between these groups are products of an indigenous Hawaiian nationalism that emerged in the 1990s. Yet the fact that many Native Hawaiians (and their supporters) opposed statehood, citing the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom as well as growing tensions with Asian Americans, is nearly all but forgotten. Such lapses in present memory were deliberate actions of the past as the state agencies responsible for shaping and normalizing public support for annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959—the Hawaiian Bureau of Information (1892-1893), the Hawaii Equal Rights Commission (1935-1946) and Hawaii Statehood Commission (1947-1959)—actually repressed and misrepresented Native Hawaiian opposition. Examining a range of cultural productions read through the theories and practices of cultural studies, and historicized by archival research, this project looks at the process by which statehood became normalized. The project looks at a range of state sanctioned opinion campaigns illuminating the theatricality of the state. It also examines cultural productions that are seemingly autonomous from the state (such as political cartoons, films, and novels). Taken together, they act as representational maps of particular moments in which gendered representations of U.S. racism, settler colonialism, and orientalism intersected to create a space for citizen-subjects to imagine an emerging U.S. empire. This project also examines cultural productions and actions that denaturalize U.S. narrations in Hawai‘i. By examining the frequency of these anomalous histories, we become better equipped to challenge dominant characterizations of Hawaiians embracing statehood and instead, write transformative and more dynamic histories of Hawai‘i statehood.