At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawai'i's multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The "edu-tainment" spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawai'i few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawai'i. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with festival organizers and participants, this innovative cross-disciplinary study uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Intersecting the fields of museum studies, folklore studies, Hawaiian studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and American studies, American Aloha supplies a nuanced analysis of how the carefully crafted staging of Hawai'i's cultural diversity was used to serve a national narrative of utopian multiculturalism--one that collapsed social inequities and tensions, masked colonial history, and subordinated indigenous politics--while empowering Hawai'i's traditional artists and providing a model for cultural tourism that has had long-lasting effects. Heather Diamond deftly positions the 1989 program within a history of institutional intervention in the traditional arts of Hawai'i's ethnic groups as well as in relation to local cultural revivals and the tourist industry. By tracing the planning, fieldwork, site design, performance, and aftermath stages of the program, she examines theuneven processes through which local culture is transformed into national culture and raises questions about the stakes involved in cultural tourism for both culture bearers and culture brokers.
Paying particular attention to hula performances that toured throughout the U.S. beginning in the late nineteenth century, Adria L. Imada investigates the role of hula in the American colonization of Hawai'i.
In Aloha America, Imada focuses on the years between the 1890s and the 1960s, examining little-known performances and films before turning to the present-day reappropriation of hula by the Hawaiian self-determination movement.
William R. Castle , son of missionaries Samuel and Mary Tenney Castle , demanded that the printers of the document be ... The Pacific Commercial Advertiser , at this time owned by Kalākaua's close associate , Walter Murray Gibson ...
The triumphant true story of the native Hawaiian cowboys who crossed the Pacific to shock America at the 1908 world rodeo championships Oregon Book Award winner * An NPR Best Book of the Year * Pacific Northwest Book Award finalist * A ...
When the tropical paradise of Kauai, Hawaii, fails to impress her cousin from New York City, ten-year-old Kanani wonders why nothing seems to make her happy.
In Remembering Our Intimacies, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio centers in on the personal and embodied articulations of aloha ʻāina to detangle it from the effects of colonialism and occupation.
Jane rethinks her engagement to a wealthy tycoon back home in Texas.
This book examines Obama's decisions as an adult and as president and shows how they are linked to the culture of Hawai'i and Obama's multicultural life as a child.
Before nine-year-old Nanea can prove that she's ready for more responsibility, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, the naval base where her father works!
Reporting from Schofield Barracks in central Oahu, the Chicago Defender claimed: “Many race theorists would get quite a start if one day they could look in on this army post, where soldiers of all racial extractions and religions live, ...