Miller-Davenport, S. (2017) 'A Montage of Minorities': Hawai‘i Tourism and the Commodification of Racial Tolerance, 1959-1978. Historical Journal, 60 (3). pp. 817-842. ISSN 0018-246X
Abstract
This article studies the Hawai‘i tourism industry's efforts to market Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise where positive racial experiences could be bought and sold. With jet travel arriving in Hawai‘i the same year as statehood, the tourism industry, aided by the new state government, exploited Hawai‘i's newfound prominence, luring planeloads of American tourists who thronged its beaches, hotels, and cultural spectacles. Tourism helped turn racial tolerance into a saleable, if intangible, commodity. Marketers invited mainlanders to partake in the islands’ celebrated ‘Aloha Spirit’: an elusive vision of social harmony said to be the defining feature of the Hawai‘i vacation. By attending ethnic festivals, eating exotic food, and interacting with locals, visitors might even bring some Aloha Spirit home with them. Hawai‘i's society thus became not only a site of consumption, but an object of consumption itself. What such utopian ideas obscured was that the broader construction of Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise was part of state efforts both to transform Hawai‘i's economy and to promote US influence in the Pacific. While the limited historiography on multi-culturalism situates its emergence in grassroots protest, this article argues for the elite origins of the multi-cultural ideal, which served the interests of both business and US foreign policy.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Cambridge University Press 2017. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Historical Journal. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of History (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 02 Nov 2015 14:25 |
Last Modified: | 07 Jul 2023 15:27 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0018246X16000364 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:90885 |