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Feeney, Paulette. "Aloha and Allegiance: Imagining America’s Paradise," American Studies, University of Hawaii, December 2009. Advisor: Mari Yoshihara
Paradise of the Pacific, a Hawaii newspaper launched in 1888, played an important role in disseminating the idea of an American Hawaii. Although a Native Hawaiian monarch, Kalkaua, had been elected to the throne in 1874, and a radically revised constitutional government imposed on the King in 1887, the imperial appetites of Euroamericans in the Kingdom of Hawaii were still not satisfied. Missionary-descended wealthy landowners who controlled Hawaii’s sugar plantations and related commerce had a republican American, capitalist outlook on the future of the islands. Working to attract new tourists and investors, Paradise promoted a vision of Hawaii as a place of great natural scenery whose indigenous people accepted Christianity and other western influences that “much improved” civil society. With a recent treaty ceding Pearl Harbor to the United States, Paradise also assured America that Hawaii was safe, both from foreign aggression and a so-called “barbaric throne.”
Paradise of the Pacific’s Hawaii was firmly within legacies of Euroamerican colonial travel writing. As the publication surveyed Hawaii’s landscape, it used the rhetoric of western economic progress, science, art, and literature to claim authority over the terrain. With the Kanaka Maoli population declining due to disease and infertility, intermarriage of white men with Kanaka women, and the post-Mhele land system enabling consolidation of wealth, outsiders increasingly influenced Hawaii government, leading it toward modern statehood. Appearing at the close of the nineteenth century, Paradise visualized race, class, ethnic, and gender relations of white dominance for tourists and prospective settlers. Its portrayals of the U.S. military privileged the men in uniforms who led its own hierarchy, tying the interests of the plantation oligarchy to American foreign policy. The publication helped to legitimize the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and illegal U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898. Reborn as a modern magazine in 1900, Paradise of the Pacific presented the new Territory of Hawaii as a peaceful, modern, and increasingly American place. Through achievement of statehood in 1959 and until its demise in 1966, the magazine maintained an elite vision of Hawaii as America’s special tropical paradise.
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