Adria L. Imada’s Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire “examines U.S. imperial interests in Hawai‘i through the circulation of hula” (pg. 5). Imada argues that performers “deployed kaona [veiled language] as a cultural and political resource in their colonial performances and travels; it served as a productive disguise for subtle and more dramatic political critiques and struggles against colonial incorporation” (pg. 18-19). Imada uses a large cache of personal records and mementos from traveling hula dancers throughout the twentieth century. Chief among these are the scrapbooks and private collections of Kini Kapahukulaokamāmalu. Additionally, she draws upon the work and theories of Edward Said, James C. Scott, and Michel Foucault.
Deploying the tools of cultural history in examining the early colonial period, Imada writes, “Culture was the terrain on which politics were argued, for Americans sympathetic to the U.S. annexationist cause treated Hawaiian cultural practices as indisputable empirical evidence of the political failures and inherent deficiency of Hawaiians” (pg. 30). Of the Hawaiian response, Imada writes, “Hula ku‘i serves as an apt metaphor for the imaginative responses to change by Hawaiian performers. They were not passive recipients of Western ideas and products, but were flexible innovators who appropriated what they desired from the outside and blended it with the familiar to arrive at something novel and unexpected” (pg. 45). As a subversive cultural product, “The hula’s affiliation with sensational dime-museum and vaudeville fare helped to camouflage the inherently political content of the dance: a hidden transcript or kaona (veiled meaning) of the public script. Performing sacred and secular hula in tourist venues may have been a productive outlet for po‘e hula that had been under surveillance from missionary sons” (pg. 73). Hawaiian performers maintained these anti-colonial themes during the period of annexation, even with non-Hawaiian influences in their work. Imada writes, “Hybridized forms of Hawaiian popular music after the overthrow were critical to public and hidden transcripts of resistance to U.S. colonization” (pg. 124). In this way, “Hawaiians were incorporated into an expanding U.S. empire, but insisted on crafting paths for themselves as metropolitan pioneers” (pg. 151). Even after tourism became the dominant industry, “Hawaiian cultural practices were highly politicized, for whoever brokered the presentation of Hawaiian culture influenced Hawai‘i's political and economic future” (pg. 154). The role of tourism cemented colonial images of Hawai‘i as a willing maiden for white tourists and officials, opening up the role of gender in imperialism.
With her focus on female performers, Imada spends a great deal of time examining gender roles. She writes, “Hula was an intercultural strategy and a way for women practitioners to navigate between multiple worlds and positions” (pg. 31). In terms of tourism, Imada writes, “The idea of Hawai‘i as a site of hospitality was owed to the already robust cultural imaginary produced during fifty years of hula’s circulation in the United States, but World War II activated this idea fully” (pg. 219). The government-organized hula performers represented one part of the sexualized entertainment available to soldiers (the other being legalized brothels staffed primarily by white women from the mainland) (pg. 221). Of these performers, Imada concludes, “At the same time Hawaiians were interpellated by the state as hosts, they were also working as critics, archivists, and producers of their own extensive collections. Through a reading of these alternative, if not oppositional, archives, hula performers can be seen reappropriated the militouristic [military tourism] gaze through their use and circulation of photographs” (pg. 250). Looking at modern hula, Imada writes, “Rather than altogether rejecting tourism, these performers savvily negotiate the seeming contradiction between Native self-determination and their participation in a market-oriented economy that has commodified their land, bodies, and cultural practices” (pg. 262). ( )