Colonial Apprehension

Throughout the twentieth century, various forms of American popular culture appropriated Hawaiian culture and integrated it into everyday American life. This appropriation, historian Leah M. Kuragano argues, normalized perceptions of American belonging in Hawai'i and, in turn, Hawai'i’s imagined belonging to America. Analyzing phenomena such as California surf culture, the American tiki bar, and the police procedural television program Hawaii Five-O, Kuragano unravels the process of popular American knowledge-making about Hawai'i, what she names “colonial apprehension.” This framework illuminates how popular culture disseminated certain fantasies and myths that became perceived as truths over time, unwittingly implicating everyday American consumers in US settler colonialism.

Drawing on multiple meanings of the word “apprehension”—comprehension, containment, possession, anxiety—Kuragano asserts that apprehension gradually generated, enforced, and normalized ideas about Hawai'i to sustain public support for US occupation into the present day. Her eye-opening critique of the “settler-Hawaiianization” of American culture brings into focus the imagined Hawai'i that settlers have come to believe is unquestionably American. Colonial Apprehension challenges settlers to confront and reject colonial knowledge and advocates for alternative practices of radical knowledge-making that invigorate a politics of settler alliance with Kanaka Maoli struggles against US occupation.