Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Dean Itsuji Saranillio
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Weight: 0.431kg
ISBN: 9781478000839
ISBN 10: 147800083
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 21 December 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
[Unsustainable Empire is] a very powerful book with which to teach about what it means to work across social movements. -- Jaskiran Dhillon * Edge Effects * Unsustainable Empire adds to scholarship on American nation-building, settler colonialism, statehood histories, and public relations politics and propaganda. The book should be a welcome addition to introductory-level history courses that deal with American empire or history and memory. -- Julie Hawks * Journal of American Culture *
Unsustainable Empire adds to scholarship on American nation-building, settler colonialism, statehood histories, and public relations politics and propaganda. The book should be a welcome addition to introductory-level history courses that deal with American empire or history and memory. -- Julie Hawks * Journal of American Culture * [Unsustainable Empire is] a very powerful book with which to teach about what it means to work across social movements. -- Jaskiran Dhillon * Edge Effects *
Author Information
Dean Itsuji Saranillio is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.
