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Christine Skwiot, Adria L. Imada. Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1542–1543, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1542
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Aloha America explores how hula facilitated and disrupted the U.S. colonial and military incorporation of Hawai‘i. Hula circuits, the wildly popular tours of native, often mixed-race Hawaiian women who danced at international expositions, luaus, military bases, nightclubs, and theaters around the Pacific and Atlantic, made hula and Hawai‘i synonymous. Adria L. Imada analyzes the interplay between “the stagecraft of imperial hospitality,” which “eroded the distinction between conquest and consent as it insisted on affective bonds between colonizer and colonized” (p. 11), and the Hawaiian hula professionals who negotiated colonialism and commodification “as self-aware agents, brokers, and political actors” and developed “counter-colonial” practices that “disorganize[d] empire” (p. 17). As hula fostered what Imada calls an “imagined intimacy” between Hawai‘i and the United States, its practitioners crafted a cosmopolitan native modernity that helped the Hawaiian nation and people navigate formal colonial rule. She argues that hula performers and promoters were neither “wholly complicit” with nor “unproblematically resistant” to capitalism and colonialism (p. 262). Nor should their sexualized bodies and work be read, as Haunani-Kay Trask once did, as engaged in cultural prostitution. Hula professionals have advanced colonial and counter-colonial agendas since the overthrow of the Hawaiian nation in 1893.
