Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood

by Dean Itsuji Saranillio

In Unsustainable Empire Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio tracks these disparate stories by marshaling a variety of unexpected genres and archives: exhibits at world's fairs, political cartoons, propaganda films, a multimillion-dollar hoax on Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, water struggles, and stories of hauntings, among others. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity and persuasive force about historically and ethically complex issues, Unsustainable Empire provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai‘i’s admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to U.S. empire are urgently needed.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Academic

312 pages, Paperback

Published December 21, 2018

Reviews

[Karen Kohoutek · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent study of the important points in history that led to Hawai'i becoming a state, connected to the post-statehood and the present day, with both interesting (and mostly too little-known) historical information, and incisive analysis. The main thesis is on the tendency of capitalism to "fail forward," so when it's at a crisis point, nearing financial collapse, it moves against new markets and new territory to sustain itself, conquering not from strength, but motivated by weakness. The time periods during which the Hawaiian traditional government was overthrown by U.S. troops, the drive for annexation, and the push for statehood all provide evidence for this pattern.

A whole bunch of interesting historians, sociologists, and philosophers get cited along the way, pointing me toward concepts with relevance for this subject and, by extension, other things in the modern world. One intriguing factoid was on the racist logic of imperialism, one element of which was the distinction between "culture" and "civilization." Civilization, pre-assumed to be Western, was defined by some contemporary thinkers as the ability to take a wide view of other lands and peoples, assuming their superiority (which is how they could appropriate other people's culture with confidence and enjoyment). A "culture" was seen as local, fragile, and easily threatened by differences, represented by the idea of a primitive tribe whose lifestyle doesn't survive the encounter with a dominant group. While this is mainly inaccurate as far as the so-called primitives is concerned, it DOES describe pretty well the descendants of those one-time conquerors, who so often now have limited worldviews which are deeply threatened by any culture that differs from them. And as with "Aloha Betrayed," it also describes the creative ways that the out-gunned Hawaiian natives have resisted and kept alive as much of their traditions as possible.

[Gregory Pōmaika’i Gushiken · Rating 5 out of 5]

NYU Professor of American Studies Dean Itsuji Saranillio looks to the question of power, capitalism, and multicultural settler colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands in Unsustainable Empire. Through his discussion of Hawaiʻi statehood, Saranillio exposes the submerged perspectives of individual subaltern actors such as Kamokila Campbell and Sammy Amalu, to elucidate that there remains much discussion around what it means to fail, to refuse, and to live under U.S. occupation in Hawaiʻi. Generatively, Saranillio contends that capitalism and settler colonialism fails forward, absorbing territories to sustain its unsustainable practices of imperialism. Saranillio also contends that two dominant analyses of the American presence in Hawaiʻi, occupation and settler colonialism, though largely thought to be in opposition to one another, are co-consitutive. As Saranillio contends “if occupation answers the ʻwhatʻ question...then settler colonialism answers the ʻhowʻ question” (9). In other words, where settler colonialism is the method of normalizing statehood, occupation, and overthrow, occupation names the relationship Hawaiʻi has to the United States. Although this statement is largely simple, it opens a host of inquiries, particularly, for me, the question of how has settler colonialism normalized occupation becomes key and pressing, a question answered largely by Saranillioʻs text. Some questions that arise in the text as primary research questions are: How would considering the ways in which “recovering and examining the frequency of… “secret histories” (8) such as those embodied by Kamokila Campbell and Sammy Amalu shift our perspective in the history of Hawai’i statehood from Kānaka Maoli as passive objects in settler colonialism to makers of history change our understanding of the current occupation of Hawaiʻi? In other words, what methodological implications does viewing individual actors in a historical analysis of statehood not as a historical event but as a locus shift our thinking about Native agency? A secondary question that arises is How would viewing Hawaiʻi statehood as a project that “has facilitated and normalized projects of empire” (29) through multiculturalism change the ways in which we understand empire and the decolonization needed to end it as relational? By questioning the multicultural roots of Hawaiʻi statehood, such as the prevalence of Japanese-American hegemony in post-WWII era Hawaiʻi, Saranillio demonstrates that while there is a plethora of “colliding histories” between Japanese American settlers, Kānaka Maoli, and other racialized groups in Hawaiʻi, there remains a relational resurgence based on relationality to come. Such questions help us refocus our attention away from the broader narrative of statehood, progressivism, and American expansion in the Pacific to the ways in which settler colonialism and occupation are co-consitutive process that have been resisted by Kānaka Maoli and our allies throughout the history of statehood.

Methodologically, Unsustainable Empire builds off of an “archive formation of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi scholars who write about Kanaka ‘Ōiwi resistance against U.S. occupation in the nineteenth century” to “offer sources in the twentieth century that reveal Kanaka ‘Ōiwi and non- Native opposition to the admission of Hawai‘i as a U.S. state and cite this same history of occupation in the process” (7). Through a historical analysis of Hawaiʻi statehood, this text analyzes the actions of individuals to illustrate the ways in which the cannon formation of Hawaiian nationalist literature––that largely asserts that Hawaiʻi is illegally occupied by the United States, that Hawaiians have always resisted occupation––have been formed. These individuals, whose “engagement with such culturally grounded politics is critical, as many of these individuals went beyond criticizing imperial violence and aimed to preserve, protect, and enact ‘Ōiwi alternatives to the settler state” (8), participated in projects of world making an making alternative futures beyond the settler state, though these actions were largely “secret histories” (7).

One particular locus through which Saranillio utilizes this method that is of interest to me is Sammy Amalu. Putting into conversation the ideas of the queer art of failure (Halberstam) and the notion of the trickster (Deloria), Saranillio reads Amaluʻs biography Sammy Amalu: prince, pauper or phony? Critically, thinking through the ephemera of queer failure and capitalist expansion (as manifested in his citation of an article that compares Amaluʻs “failed” hoax to the successful development of Hawaii Kai). Whereas, as Saranillio postulates, racial capitalism and settler colonialism "fails forward" (9), the figure of the trickster that Amalu embodies cannot be simply reduced to that of failure or success. Instead, such hoaxes tell us more intimately, through the outrage and the confusion in our reactions, of the ways in which empire is necessarily about failing forward, that Amaluʻs tricks are less destructive than they are indicative of what it means to live under an American occupation of Hawaiʻi.

[Wissenville · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent resource for making sense of the movement toward statehood, a topic which, despite its everyday existence and consequences, is rarely understood as an event in the historical sense but rather as inevitable, foreclosed possibly from annexation. As someone who grew up hearing and embodying the multi-cultural mythology of contemporary, all the sections of this book shed light on historical figures and moments so rarely discussed that I have never heard of most of the actors of the pro-statehood and anti-statehood movement. Also, mind-blowing that Edward Bernays, the father of public relations and the patron-saint of manufacturing consent, essentially constructed the ideology that underpins Hawai'i.

I highly recommend this book to not only Kanaka and non-Kanaka Hawai'i residents and diaspora but anyone interested in Hawaiian history, (Racial) Capitalism, American political history, settler colonialism studies, Cold war politics, and Labour history. Like Hawai'i, this book is a complex critique of a place that has failed to deal comprehensively with its history. It's only through recognizing the trials of history and its many victims that any form of justice can come about.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being against statehood for American territories is an idea that sounds pretty bad when stated bluntly, but this book does a really good job at spelling out why statehood for Hawaii was not done for the benefit of the natives living there, and rather to bolster capital. The author made this history incredibly digestible, highlighting the small crucial moments that led to the controversy of statehood. Perfect blend of imperial history and political analysis, along with a leftist reading on how liberal multiculturalism is often actually used as a tool by colonial powers to further their settlements.

P.S. James Michener is always at the scene of a crime.

[S.S.]

DNF @ 16%

The writings is a bit too academic for my brain to process right now. Might come back to this in the future.

[Mills College Library]

996.904 S2435 2018