Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018, vi, 226 pp. (Tables, graph.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6988-5.
These essays respond to older scholarship that sees ethnicity as the motivating analytical lens for understanding Hawai‘i, and as the editors indicate in their introduction, thereby explore Hawai‘i’s contemporary race relations. Changing demographics and shifting racialization of particular groups have led to this “new” understanding of race. The contributors go “beyond” such work as Jonathan Okamura’s Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i (2008) and other dominant discussions of Hawai‘i that highlight the islands’ multiracial harmony due to its high rate of intermarriage and mixed-race population. Beyond Ethnicity’s “new politics of race” traces racial histories obscured or marginalized, including that of blacks, Micronesians, and Latinx, in contrast to the more robust body of literature which focuses on the group dynamics of Native Hawaiians and plantation workers and their descendants (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and Filipino).
The volume seeks to debunk the common misperception that Hawai‘i is best understood as a melting pot of different ethnicities. Instead, the editors contend that race is key to understanding Hawai‘i because the logic of race is what makes Hawai‘i a settler possession of the United States, and the racialization of Native Hawaiians is informed by the racial projects of the genocide of indigenous people in the US, chattel slavery, the black-white binary, and the exclusion of Asian and Latinx alien others.
A crucial part of this volume’s success is its selection of essays, which work to challenge racial tensions around anti-blackness and Micronesian discrimination in Hawai‘i. The diversity of the collection’s contributors also highlights its interdisciplinary breadth, as authors constitute several fields, including history, gender studies, ethnic studies, American studies, media studies, education, and literature, as well as pieces from practicing professionals in social work, advocacy, and law. What follows is a brief outline of the major highlights and connections between essays that will serve to illustrate the collection’s value.
The collection’s most important contribution is furthering the scholarship on understudied groups in Hawai‘i, such as Micronesians, blacks, and Latinx. As a way of reflecting this commitment, the volume opens and ends with the subject of Micronesians, a group that has long-faced discriminatory policies. Ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui offers “E Micronesia,” a poem that responds to Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s “Tell Them.” Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem describes the everyday hatred against Micronesians, and ho‘omanawanui’s poem delves into the hurt caused by US empire and colonial dispossession in the Pacific despite the cultural ties that link Micronesians and Hawaiians. Joakim Peter, Wayne Chung Tanaka, and Aiko Yamashiro’s essay on healthcare policy provides context for the discrimination Micronesians face in finding medical care, and suggests recalling the shared history of seafaring as a hopeful way forward. Nitasha Tamar Sharma and Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. build on their previous work regarding black Hawaiians through ethnography and the rhetorical analysis of the so-called Latinx “threat” in Hawai‘i, respectively. Both recover a 200-year history of blacks and Latinx in Hawai‘i, from black men on whaling ships and Mexican vaqueros, or cowboys, in the nineteenth century. Sharma argues that black thinkers contributed to the development of ethnic and Hawaiian studies and Guevarra discusses the growth of the Latinx population and shows how racist thought towards Mexicans as undocumented threats was imported from the continent. Christopher Joseph Lopa adds to the discussion on blackness in Hawai‘i from his experience as a black Samoan man, and his proposal for a cultural mentorship program for black youth.
The contributors also invite new ways of looking at previous work on ethnicity, race, and multiculturalism in Hawai‘i. Through an analysis of the social scientific construction of the Polynesian race, Maile Arvin establishes that Native Hawaiians were designated almost white. However, since Native Hawaiians were seen as degenerates unable to properly care for land, whites were able to possess Hawai‘i. Arvin shows that this logic works even in films such as Cloud Atlas (2012), which obscure Hawai‘i as a colonized and militarized place. Camilla Fojas continues this discussion by examining mixed-race multicultural Hollywood films of the 1980s and 1990s, claiming that Hollywood is unable to imagine multi-raciality, depicting mono-racial mixed-race characters who end up telling the familiar story of racial harmony between visitor-settlers and Native Hawaiians. Disrupting this myth of multicultural harmony, Roderick N. Labrador’s essay on local humour considers Hawai‘i’s humour as racial hazing. Often disparaging groups with the excuse that we all joke about other ethnic groups because we all get along, ideologically supports racial hierarchies inherent in settler colonialism. Building on his work on the production of local identity, John P. Rosa posits that local identity must be place-based while being conscious of the history of race in Hawai‘i. From a white perspective, Paul Spickard takes up what it means to be a local haole. He does so tentatively and with the reminder that white privilege in Hawai‘i stems from colonial dispossession and a history of racial and class inequity. A question for all haole to carefully consider is whether whites are on the side of Hawai‘i’s people or its colonizers. Gary Okihiro concludes the collection with context of Hawai‘i’s place in world history.
Distinct from the other contributors, Jonathan Okamura’s essay not only builds on his book, Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i, but makes the case that ethnicity should still be the dominant paradigm to understand Hawai‘i’s society because Hawai‘i’s groups self-select into ethnic categories based on cultural differences. However, he explains that anti-haole violence such as the Deedy-Elderts case in 2013, in which a white US State Department agent killed a Native Hawaiian man, is an exception to his argument. Although this essay stands in tension with the others in the volume, it adds an important counterpoint and consideration for why race or ethnicity matters when understanding Hawai‘i.
Overall, this volume fulfils a need for scholarship on understudied racial politics and would serve well in ethnic studies courses. It emphasizes the need for race as an analytic because only looking at ethnicity can obscure settler logics of indigenous dispossession and the migrant labour that contributes to this disenfranchisement.
Kara Hisatake
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA