For many of us, Hawai’i evokes images of paradise, of relaxation and escape, of honeymoons and welcoming natives offering hospitality with leis and luaus. In this book, Bacchilega brilliantly unpacks these images, examining their construction and their impact on native Hawaiian culture. She focuses on mo’olelo, a term that has frequently been translated as “legends,” but in Hawaiian tradition refers to a type of text--stories, sequences of stories, or better yet, a fragment of a story--but also to the understanding that the “whole story” includes the teller and the audience, and their place within the history being retold. The seemingly innocent translations of these mo’olelo, as well as other portrayals of Hawai’i, have ultimately colonized the Hawaiian people both literally and figuratively. Bacchilega explores the nuances of these representations of Hawai’i and how those representations have been utilized, both intentionally and unintentionally, to construct an imaginary Hawai’i that served the interests of outsiders, businesses, and tourists. In doing so, she attempts to reclaim Hawai’i for the Hawaiians by giving native readings of these texts and by drawing attention to the damage that has been done.
Bacchilega is not a native of Hawai’i. She is adamant that the reader understand her own status within the culture and that she is not trying to speak as a native, but as an outsider attempting to recognize, and in a way translate, the native perspective. She also acknowledges that there is not one native perspective, but many, and that there can be contradictory voices. She attempts, however, to identify an overarching Hawaiian ethos and aesthetic that underlies the logic of the “legends” of the islands. This logic, which is based on a particular understanding of place, is then expressed in other forms, such as photography and autobiography. It is also used in resistance to external political, economic, and cultural forces.
Bacchilega’s stance as an outsider underlies the organization of her book. She describes her own confusions over the meanings of mo’olelo, identifying the questions that spoke to her and the processes she followed looking for answers. This transparency of purpose and organization demonstrates recognition of her own potential for misinterpretation and for unintended implications of her scholarship. It also grounds her theorizing in “real questions,” keeping the reader cognizant of the purpose of academic theories as lens for interpretation.
Her methodology and analysis draw primarily from folklore and narrative studies, translation studies, and post-colonial theory. She demonstrates connections between these disciplines, pointing out their usefulness but also challenging them to recognize their own possible roles as colonizers/in colonizing places such as Hawai’i. For example, she approaches tradition as an on-going “process of cultural construction” (1) as accepted by most contemporary academically-trained folklorists, but she explores how those processes have been shaped by issues of power--political annexation of Hawai’i, business interests of corporations, recreational interests of tourists. She also weaves together seemingly unconnected subjects--photographs, autobiographies, ghost tales, tourism brochures, state rights and national politics--erasing some of the usual borders drawn between disciplines.
The book is organized into five chapters, each tackling sets of texts that either contribute to the construction of “legendary Hawai’i” or offer resistance to that construction. She uses language to deconstruct and reconstruct the meanings of commonplace terms, in the same way that she draws attention to alternative meanings hidden in the native readings of commonplace localities and narratives. This tends to disrupt the flow of the writing, which is part of her point. Readers are forced to review sentences and terms, causing them to “re-view” their meanings.
Chapter 1, “Introduction,” gives an overview of the immediate questions addressed as well as the disciplines used to answer them. The second chapter, “Hawai’i’s Storied Places: Learning from Anne Kapulani Landgraf’s ‘Hawaiian View,’” analyzes photographs of Hawai’i, particularly sacred places and how the framing of the photograph interprets it for the audience in a subtle form of colonialism. She focuses on a 1994 book by a Hawaiian photographer, Ana Kapulani Landgraf, comparing it to photographs taken by non-Hawaiians. In a fascinating deconstruction of the philosophical approach represented in this framing, she demonstrates that a famous 1865 photograph of Diamondhead presents “Nature [as] an object of conquest or an opportunity for profit.” A manmade and non-Hawaiian object tends to be used to give a sense of size, but actually can be read as organizing nature according to that object. Similarly, photographs of temples tend to have a non-Hawaiian posing in front—suggesting that the sacred site is a matter of curiosity, not respect. In contrast, Landgraf presents these sacred places in their own terms and from the perspective of a native.
Chapter 3, “The Production of Legendary Hawai’i: Out of Place Stories I,” explores the ways in which tourism in Hawaii exploited the central place of mo’olelo and narratives about “storied places” (wahi pana). Bacchilega points out that a legendary place from a tourist’s perspective is one that is exotic. Rather than presenting these narratives as a means to understanding or appreciating the culture, tourism frames them as illustrations of the otherness of Hawai’i.
Bacchilega recognizes that Hawaiian culture is not homogeneous but has responded to its “translation” in varied ways. In chapter 4, “Emma Nakuina’s Hawaii: Its People, Their Legends: Out of Place Stories II,” she juxtaposes the promotional literature advocating Hawai’i as a tourist attraction with a book published in 1904 by a Hawaiian woman, Emma Nakuina. Hawaii: Its People, Their Legends was an “autoethnographic intervention” translating a native perspective for non-natives. The author was bi-cultural and of Hawaiian royalty, giving her access to education in both the European and Hawaiian worlds. Bacchilega demonstrates the ways in which she resisted the pro-annexation political movement of the day by offering a Hawaiian perspective. Her photographs of Hawaiian individuals, for example, showed them clothed in modern dress instead of stereotypic costuming. Similarly, the stories themselves are not presented as “fairy-tales” or fantasies but as narratives meaningful to present-day Hawaiians that powerfully connect them to place.
The final chapter, “Stories in Place: Dynamics of Translation and Re-Cognition,” examines three subjects usually perceived as aspects of official and popular culture. In the mid-1800s, there were an unusually large number of Hawaiian language newspapers. Native Hawaiians used this technology to translate their oral mo’olelo traditions into print, preserving them and opening them up for public discussion and commentary. Such translation reflected pride in their culture and represented creative resistance. Once English became the official language, however, the mo’olelo were translated as “legends,” dismissing their power and significance within the culture. Similarly, a tradition of narratives about ghosts has been trivialized as simply entertainment. Bacchilega takes to task one prolific writer for mining this cultural form for his own creative and profit-making uses. Scholars are not off the hook, either, having trivialized it by interpreting it as localization of popular horror tales. Arguing that these tales are “narrative performances of epistemological and social struggles,” Bacchilega uses one tale, “Morgan’s Corner,” and a dispute among her students to demonstrate her point—and also why it matters. This is perhaps one of the most powerful chapters in the book. By grounding the issues in her own classroom experiences, she moves beyond a treatise on theory to demonstrate how these particular theoretical lenses can help in understanding the reactions of the two students.
Legendary Hawai’i is insightful, provocative, and thought-provoking. It forcefully illuminates the implications of tourism on a culture, and the ways in which seemingly simple transactions, such as a tourist brochure to bring tourists and dollars to the island, can work in insidious ways to actually undermine the very people it seems to be celebrating. Bacchilega does an excellent job of demonstrating that these efforts are representative of a larger project of othering Hawai’i’s people and places for the benefit of outsiders. By drawing attention to the strategies being used, Bacchilega places the power to assert meaning back in the hands of the Hawaiian people.
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[Review length: 1322 words • Review posted on February 16, 2009]