Displacing Natives

Rating:
Summary: Splendid study, making Hawai'i resonate with wit and concern
Review: "Displacing Natives" is a splendid study, making Hawai'i resonate with wit and concern, by tracking how the "rhetoric of demonization" was followed by a "rhetoric of preservation" that, in both historical instances and rhetorical tropes, worked to displace the Hawaiian Natives and their prior mythologies of place and nation. The wry chapter on the Hollywood movies of "safe savagery" makes an important and lasting contribution to the semiotics of imagining Hawai'i. This book would be of value to all students of Hawaiian literature and culture, and to scholars of Pacific native cultural studies as well. When transnational cultural and postcolonial studies turn to work up the Pacific (when the heck would that be?), this fine book will be here waiting, despite the poor marketing tactics or the lack of market flash.