Picturing Hawai'i: The “Ideal” Native and the Origins of Tourism, 1880–1915

Colonialism and Carceral Motherhood

“…Growing more marginalized by a capitalist plantation economy which largely excluded them, Native Hawaiians dominated the ranks of the lower classes. Native Hawaiian women, when imagined at all by Whites, evoked the erotic native seductress, an identity only enhanced as tourism grounded in ideas of the "friendly" (and alluring) native took hold in the United States and beyond (Desmond, 1999). Hawaiian cultural capital, with its metaphors of aloha, reciprocity, and respect, was frankly overpowered in a social field dominated by Western institutions that prioritize individualist values and materialist ideologies (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992;Trask, 1993).…”

Visual Methods and Methodologies

“…It is also paralleled by other visual techniques where tourism brought the discourses of modernity, primitivism, visualism, and anthropology together with the commodification of new colonial possessions, such as Hawai"i, as pleasure zones (Desmond 1999). The entanglement of the two scopic regimes of colonialism and tourism can be seen in a visual economy where photography is an incitement to a sort of interrogative vision (Bourdieu 1990) which drives an accumulatory economy of experience (Sontag 1977).…”

Beyond Ethnicity, Into Equality

“…A typical feature of 'local theatre' is the use of pidgin, intermixed with some Hawai'ian, and the islands as a setting for the plot (Carroll 2000). Given Hawai'i's highly commercialized entertainment industry that is structured around a profitable Western tourist gaze of 'happy natives' (Desmond 1999), the production and performance of local plays has larger sociopolitical and cultural implications.…”