Strangers in Our Own Land

As I first developed in a book on the reception and transmedia histories of Disney’s racist Song of the South (1946), my research interests focus on the ways in which audience formations and industrial practices inform the historical reception of populist 20th Century American media, with particular attention to the cultural politics of racial identity, affect and nostalgia.

My current project, Strangers in Our Own Land: Images of Hawai’i, Racial Utopia, and Leisure Culture in American Media, 1935-1970, will involve constructing a historical narrative of media representations of Hawai’i during this period, focusing closely on how the military presence, industrial promotional strategies, and mediated images of racial identity and consumerist nostalgia served as key reading strategies for a wide range of mainland audiences through the decades.

My dissertation, A Frown Upside Down/ The Affective, Cultural and Convergence Histories of Disney’s Song of the South, originally set out to document how “convergence culture” has a longer and more ambivalent history than often suggested. This research used the fascinating and disturbing history of Disney’s most notorious film to explore how media audiences and industries negotiated the persistence of offensive racial representations through decades of participatory culture, careful repurposing and shifting cultural politics. First released in 1946, Song is most famous today for its Oscar-winning song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Although it broke modest technological ground for mixing live-action and animation, the film was rejected by critics and audiences for its anachronistic post-WWII representations of idyllic Southern plantations and subservient African-Americans.

Yet Disney continued to re-release the film periodically until 1986, while also heavily repurposing the transmediated property—children’s books, television episodes, records, VHS tapes, theme park rides and so forth. Thus, Song’s cult following intensified during the US’s “White Backlash” in the late 1960s and 1970s, and Reaganism in the 1980s, becoming a huge box office draw late in its recirculation. Today, Song maintains a small, passionate, fan base online, despite Disney’s own refusal to re-release it to theatres, or on domestic home video formats, for over twenty years. My dissertation offered a specific history of how participatory culture, transmedia platforms and industrial shifts played a key role in the interaction with, resistance to, or complicity in, the ugly resilience of racist imagery in American media.

Continuing this interest in the cultural politics of populist 20th Century American media, my next project focuses on images of Hawai’i from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s. During this period, Hawai’i’s symbolic role in US films, books, and television shows, spoke to a powerful set of historical and cultural issues, for a specific generation of American audiences, and which incorporated, transcended, and even contradicted, the islands’ assumed role as an image of escapism. Strangers in Our Own Land will document Hawai’i’s popularity with mainland audiences through the analytical lens involving several interrelated contexts: representations of the islands pre- and post-Statehood; the practices of companies such as Dole Pineapple, United Airlines and others invested in tourist promotion of Hawai’i; images and memories of US combat and military life in the Pacific; complicated attitudes towards understanding native Hawaiian history; alternating narratives of racial tension and utopia; and the promotion and modeling of an emergent middle-class leisure culture.

Beginning with the construction of an emergent leisure culture in films such as Waikiki Wedding and Honolulu in the late 1930s, followed by the mediation of WWII and its institutionalized legacy through the 1940s and 1950s (From Here to Eternity), and culminating in the islands’ remarkable popularity in the 1960s (Elvis films and albums, Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer, CBS’s original Hawaii Five-O, James Michener’s Hawaii), Hawai’i maintained a prominent and distinctive place in the American media during the mid-20th Century, which has yet to be explored. My emphasis on how audiences and American media negotiated representations of nostalgia, leisure and war will complement the historical work done in such books as Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist: A Theory of the Leisure Class (California, 1999), Jane Desmond’s Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago, 2001), Judy Rohrer’s Haoles in Hawai’i (Hawaii, 2010) and Brian Ireland’s The US Military in Hawai’i (Palgrave, 2011). The focus will be a historical-materialist reception study that examines audience responses through various periodicals and cultural contexts—with particular attention to how these texts and audiences negotiated issues of consumerism, memory and nostalgia, race and the construction of whiteness, and the imperialist presence of US military and industry in Hawai’i.

So much of Hawai’i’s popularity stems initially from America’s participation in WWII, as well as conflicts in Korea and Southeast Asia. Numerous titles—Operation Bikini (1963), From Here to Eternity (1953), In Harm’s Way (1961)—situated images of Hawai’i in relation to combat. While many of these texts reinforced a imperialist impulse, the texts themselves negotiated representations and memories of the US’s participation in Pacific combat in sometimes ambivalent ways. Yet, even before Pearl Harbor, the plantation owners and white civilian elites in Hawai’i were dedicated to rebranding the territory from sugar industries to a major tourism destination. Thus, a second context is the industrial history of the Islands’ promotion, and the emergence of Hawai’i in relation to an American leisure culture, rooted in part in a post-war middle class and the sudden availability of affordable airfare. Finally, a particularly crucial theme is the representation of inter-racial relationships in these texts. Despite a disturbing history of US colonialism and racial tension (such as the Massey Murder in 1931), Hawai’i’s image historically was a place which embraced multiculturalism and racial diversity outside the prejudices of the mainland. This symbolism became re-appropriated in media of the late 1950s and 1960s as a metaphor for the mainland’s own negotiation of racial politics during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.