[PAST EVENT] The Fail-Forward Logic of Settler Colonialism: Statehood and Hawai’i

September 20, 2019
12pm - 1pm
Location
Boswell Hall (formerly Morton Hall), Room 321
100 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Hawaii
Hawaii

Hawai’i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai’i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely nonwhite territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio shows statehood was neither the expansion of US democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a US nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. Saranillio provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai’i's admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to US empire are urgently needed.