California World History Library
2 primary works
Book 8
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.
Book 10
Plucked from tropical America, the pineapple was brought to European tables and hothouses before it was conveyed back to the tropics, where it came to dominate U.S. and world markets. Pineapple Culture is a dazzling history of the world's tropical and temperate zones told through the pineapple's illustrative career. Following Gary Y. Okihiro's enthusiastically received Island World: A History of Hawaii and the United States, Pineapple Culture continues to upend conventional ideas about history, space, and time with its provocative vision. At the center of the story is the thoroughly modern tale of Dole's "Hawaiian" pineapple, which, from its island periphery, infiltrated the white, middle-class homes of the continental United States. The transit of the pineapple brilliantly illuminates the history and geography of empires--their creations and accumulations; the circuits of knowledge, capital, labor, goods, and the cultures that characterize them; and their assumed power to name, classify, and rule over alien lands, peoples, and resources.