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.

Book Information
ISBN 9781478000624
Author Dean Itsuji Saranillio
Format Hardback
Page Count 312
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 567g