A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

uniqueness. Hawaii’s history of sovereignty and colonization along with its ‘insularity’
can account for much of this difference. In his 1980 book Fairly Lucky You Live Hawaii!
Cultural Pluralism in the 50 th State, Richard Rapson assesses the islands’ situation as
follows:
Hawaii thus resembles in its past and in its present a Third World society, once
non-Western, then conquered by the West, then trying to reclaim its original
heritages and identities. But there is a crucial difference: this society has joined
the West by becoming part of the United States. Its localism faces a more complex
task than merely reconciling science and a non-Western legacy. For Hawaii has a
multiplicity of such legacies and, further, it is a part of American society
containing a large and ever-growing resident population of Americans from the
continental United States. Hawaii also carries the full paraphernalia of that
society, from McDonald’s stands to satellite television to a range of powerfully-
equipped U.S. military bases and personnel. 40
Anyone familiar with island shorelines and beaches knows that they are not permanent boundaries. They
are forever shifting under the influence of winds and waves, especially storm waves.
George Hu’eu Sanford Kanahele – Ku Kanaka – Stand Tall: A Search for Hawaiian Values 41
2. Theories and Methods: Navigational Instruments
The theoretical basis and analytical tools that inform this study, the warp and the woof of
its grid, so to speak, are first the recognition that culture means a ‘whole way of life’ as
taken from the cultural studies project of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and their
followers, which allows for the inference of data from various disciplines, such as
popular culture, island politics, newspaper clippings, or statistics, to contextualize and
situate the literature under scrutiny as part of Hawaiian as well as American culture. This
in turn should lay bare the hegemonic discourses at work as well as resistance to, mimicry
of, and subversion of them. Second, this study employs the idea of postcolonialism as a
40 Richard L. Rapson, Fairly Lucky You Live Hawaii! Cultural Pluralism in the 50 th State, Lanham 1980: 2.
41 George Hu’eu Sanford Kanahele, Ku Kanaka – Stand Tall: A Search for Hawaiian Values, Honolulu
1986: 191.
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