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.

About the Author
Dean Itsuji Saranillio is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

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] is instructive for its truly intersectional analysis of white and Asian settler colonialisms, U.S. imperialism, and heteropatriarchy, as well as many exciting passages on Hawai'i's militant labor movement.... The book is an urgent call to expose the web of lies that empire is built on so we can build truly sustainable futures that respect Indigenous values, land, and leadership."
-- Kim Compoc * Native American and Indigenous Studies *
"Perhaps Saranillio's most significant contribution is his rigorous theoretical analysis of settler colonialism and capitalism. . . . The most hopeful aspects of Saranillio's work are the alternative futures made possible by a fuller understanding of Hawai'i's complex history. Such messaging is both necessarily encouraging and eminently useful for intellectuals employing decolonial methodologies-particularly those in settler-colonial contexts-and all those who seek a decolonized Hawai'i." -- Shannon Pomaika'i Hennessey * The Contemporary Pacific *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478000839
Author Dean Itsuji Saranillio
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 454g