Book Cover
E-book
Author Buck, Elizabeth Bentzel

Title Paradise remade : the politics of culture and history in Hawaiʻi / Elizabeth Buck
Published Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1993

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 242 pages) : illustrations
Contents Chapter One: Introduction; Chapter Two: Thinking about Hawaiian History; Chapter Three: Hawai'i before Contact with the West; Chapter Four: Western Penetration and Structural Transformation; Chapter Five: Transformations in Ideological Representations: Chant and Hula; Chapter Six: Transformations in Language and Power; Chapter Seven: Contending Representations of Hawaiian Culture; Notes; Glossary; Index
Summary This is a book about the politics of competing cultures and myths in a colonized nation. Relying on Althusserian Marxist theory, Elizabeth Buck considers the transformation of Hawaiian culture, with a focus on the indigenous population rather than on the colonizers. In Paradise Remade, the author reframes Hawaiian history, focusing on how Hawaii's established religious, social, political, and economic relationships have changed in the past two hundred years as a result of Western imperialism. This account of the politics of island culture and history is particularly timely in light of current Hawaiian demands for sovereignty one hundred years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893. Drawing on a wide range of critical theories of social structure and change, language and discourse, and practices of representation, Buck examines the social transformation of Hawaii from a complex hierarchical, oral society to an American state dominated by corporate tourism and its myths of paradise. She pays particular attention to how contemporary Hawaiians are challenging the use of their traditions as the basis for exoticized entertainments by establishing new institutions such as hula halau (schools) and the annual hula competition of the Merrie Monarch Festival to recover their history and culture. Buck demonstrates that sacred chants and hula were an integral part of Hawaiian social life; as the repository of the people's historical memory, chant and hula practices played a vital role in maintaining the links between religious, political, and economic relationships. As colonizers concentrated on transforming the economic and political organization of the islands and missionaries undertook conversion to Christianity, the suppression of these cultural practices became a key element in establishing European dominance. Tracing the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been variously constructed by Western explorers, New England missionaries, the tourist industry, ethnomusicologists, and contemporary Hawaiians, Buck offers a fascinating "rereading" of Hawaiian history
Analysis Acculturation Case studies
Hawaii Historiography
Hawaiians History
Hawaiians Social life and customs
Hula (Dance)
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-226) and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Hawaiians -- Social life and customs
Hawaiians -- History
Acculturation -- Case studies
Hula (Dance)
HISTORY.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
Acculturation
Hawaiians
Hawaiians -- Social life and customs
Historiography
Hula (Dance)
Kulturwandel
Sozialer Wandel
Cultuurverandering.
SUBJECT Hawaii -- Historiography
Subject Hawaii
Hawaii
Genre/Form Case studies
History
Case studies.
Études de cas.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 92000310
ISBN 9781439906088
1439906084
9780877229780
0877229783