Island World: A History of Hawai'i and the United States

by Gary Y. Okihiro

Overview

Brilliantly mixing geology, folklore, music, cultural commentary, and history, Gary Y. Okihiro overturns the customary narrative in which the United States acts upon and dominates Hawai'i. Instead, Island World depicts the islands' press against the continent, endowing America's story with fresh meaning. Okihiro's reconsidered history reveals Hawaiians fighting in the Civil War, sailing on nineteenth-century New England ships, and living in pre-gold rush California. He points to Hawai'i's lingering effect on twentieth-century American culture—from surfboards, hula, sports, and films, to art, imagination, and racial perspectives—even as the islands themselves succumb slowly to the continental United States. In placing Hawai'i at the center of the national story, Island World rejects the premise that continents comprise "natural" states while islands are "tiny spaces," without significance, to be acted upon by continents. An astonishingly compact tour de force, this book not only revises the way we think about islands, oceans, and continents, it also recasts the way we write about space and time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520261679
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/11/2008
Series:	California World History Library , #8
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.68(w) x 7.78(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. His most recent books are Common Ground: Reimagining American History and Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, with Linda Gordon.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Regions of Fire
2. Oceania's Expanse
3. Pagan Priest
4. Schooling for Subservience
5. Hawaiian Diaspora
6. Poetry in Motion
7. Islands and Continents

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"All will come away intrigued and enlightened."—Publishers Weekly

"A startling perspective and a compelling one."—Wall Street Journal

Editorial Reviews

A startling perspective and a compelling one.

Wall Street Journal - John Whitehead

Most histories relegate Hawai'i to a peripheral role in American culture, presenting it as an isolated cluster of self-contained spaces. Gary Y. Okhiro's Island World offers a radically different view, an image of a gravitational pull that gradually draws the islands into the assimilation of statehood. Okhiro's heterodox view and his imaginative research make this chronicle a refreshing reassessment of a far-off place.