Event overview
A lecture by Vernadette Gonzalez
Overdetermined as a tropical paradise for those on holiday, Hawai‘i’s present-day struggles with colonialism, military occupation, Native Hawaiian marginalization, food sovereignty, environmental degradation and problems of sustainability are often elided in favor of an exotic postcard image. Guidebooks, travel narratives, and fictional fare continue to circulate and keep popular these narratives of Hawaiʻi as the world’s tropical playground.
The Detours project takes seriously the power of form, and the reading practices and publics produced by these texts, which manifest the fantasy of the exotic island destination for the collective consumption of tourists. In 2019, Duke University Press published Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i, a volume aimed at re-visioning the genre of the guidebook by curating alternative narrations of the islands alongside and against tourism. Detours deliberately perverts the guidebook to produce alternative narratives, tours, itineraries, mappings and images of the islands of Hawai‘i.
The presentation will describe the project and the political and intellectual foundations upon which it is based, the work of curating the contributions, and the vision and ethical responsibilities that guided it. The book has since become the anchor for a series with Duke UP with volumes in development including Palestine, Guam, Singapore, Okinawa, Korea, Puerto Rico and the San Francisco Bay Area. As the series stretches to think through and operationalize decolonialism across these distinct locales, editorial teams must consider how the term might inflect differently with occupation, militarism, and settler colonialism.
Vernadette Gonzalez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of research include studies of tourism and militarism, transnational cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies with a focus on Asia and the Pacific. She is the author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (2013), Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (2021), and coeditor, with Hōkūlani K. Aikau, of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i (2019) and of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (forthcoming 2024), with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong (2024). She is sometimes at work on a book about hospitality and its discontents.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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30 Nov 2023 | 5:15pm - 7:00pm |
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