About the Book
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.