History in the Making Volume 11 Article 14 January 2018 Western-Constructed Narratives of Hawai’i Megan Medeiros CSUSB Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/history-in-the-making Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, History of the Pacific Islands Commons, and the Public History Commons Recommended Citation Medeiros, Megan (2018) "Western-Constructed Narratives of Hawai’i," History in the Making: Vol. 11 , Article 14. Available at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/history-in-the-making/vol11/iss1/14 This Public History is brought to you for free and open access by the History at CSUSB ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in History in the Making by an authorized editor of CSUSB ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Western-Constructed Narratives of Hawai’i By Megan Medeiros What comes to mind when you hear someone talking about Hawai’i? Perhaps, you envision an idyllic tropical locale filled with beautiful landscapes and sundrenched beaches just waiting to welcome you to a summer-time escape from reality? Or maybe you think of a secluded island, where play comes before work and people exude a carefree “aloha spirit”? In reality, Hawai’i is simultaneously neither and so much more. The widely held public conception of Hawai’i as a mystical tropical paradise is a misleading construction concocted by Westerners who possessed, at best, ephemeral and, at worst, completely fabricated conceptions of daily life within the Hawaiian Archipelago. How did this happen? How did such manifestly inaccurate representations of Hawai’i come to dominate popular perceptions of the islands and its people? The best way to understand this process is to apply the principles of “othering” put forth by renowned scholar Edward Said in his most famous work, Orientalism.