Hawaii
OH THE FRUSTRATION. Last year I slogged Julia Flynn Siler’s exhausting Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America's First Imperial Adventure, which despite stretching on for five hundred deadeningly detailed pages fails to answer a number of the basic questions it raises.
And I could have been reading Sarah Vowell’s new book, Unfamiliar Fishes, instead! It’s also about the America’s imperial adventure in Hawaii (first imperial adventure? What was all of North America, chop suey?), and covers the same territory as Siler’s book in half as many pages, with twice as many laughs and ten times the clarity and honesty. I felt far better oriented in Hawaiian society in Vowell's svelte two-hundred page book than I ever did in Siler's.
It’s not that Siler is dishonest, precisely, but she’s very selective in what she tells the reader. For instance, Siler spends a couple hundred pages pussyfooting around the fact that Hawaii’s penultimate king failed at kinging. Vowell comes right out and says that he was greedy and dishonest, and his petty cons played right into expansionist’s hands.
Vowell also notes that traditional Hawaiian society was stratified on the basis of blood lineage - a fact Siler also mentions - but Siler does not go on to tell us that this meant that the children of royal brother/sister marriages were the highest rank of all. A pretty big omission, given that brother/sister marriages were, oh, central to the traditional Hawaiian concept of royalty, at least till the 1830s when they petered out under missionary influence.
It’s like Siler was afraid that if she presented traditional Hawaiian mores as quite as different from ours (and, in this particular case, repugnant to ours) as they actually were, we would all throw up our hands and cry, “Well, those crazy kids deserved to be conquered, then!”
Doubtless there are people who will say that, but they’re only going to say it louder and with more conviction if they find out about the incestuous child-marriages from somewhere else. “Siler realized that if we knew about the incestuous child-marriages, she could not feasibly argue that the US’s illegal annexation of the sovereign nation of Hawaii was immoral! Never mind that those marriages ceased fifty years before annexation! They clearly tainted native Hawaiian rule FOREVERMORE!”
If Siler wants to make an anti-imperialist argument against the annexation of Hawaii, as she clearly does, then her job is to argue that imperialism is bad even if the people you’re conquering have (or used to have) royal incestuous child-marriages. If your anti-imperialist case depends on lying to people - if, indeed, any argument you plan to make requires lying - then that’s a sign that it’s time to sit down and rethink the moral underpinnings of your anti-imperialism, because it clearly is not structurally sound.
So, yeah. Read Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes! It’s much more informative and infinitely more entertaining than Lost Kingdom! (Still not quite as good as Vowell's earlier Assassination Vacation, but after all, that's setting an impossible standard.)
And I could have been reading Sarah Vowell’s new book, Unfamiliar Fishes, instead! It’s also about the America’s imperial adventure in Hawaii (first imperial adventure? What was all of North America, chop suey?), and covers the same territory as Siler’s book in half as many pages, with twice as many laughs and ten times the clarity and honesty. I felt far better oriented in Hawaiian society in Vowell's svelte two-hundred page book than I ever did in Siler's.
It’s not that Siler is dishonest, precisely, but she’s very selective in what she tells the reader. For instance, Siler spends a couple hundred pages pussyfooting around the fact that Hawaii’s penultimate king failed at kinging. Vowell comes right out and says that he was greedy and dishonest, and his petty cons played right into expansionist’s hands.
Vowell also notes that traditional Hawaiian society was stratified on the basis of blood lineage - a fact Siler also mentions - but Siler does not go on to tell us that this meant that the children of royal brother/sister marriages were the highest rank of all. A pretty big omission, given that brother/sister marriages were, oh, central to the traditional Hawaiian concept of royalty, at least till the 1830s when they petered out under missionary influence.
It’s like Siler was afraid that if she presented traditional Hawaiian mores as quite as different from ours (and, in this particular case, repugnant to ours) as they actually were, we would all throw up our hands and cry, “Well, those crazy kids deserved to be conquered, then!”
Doubtless there are people who will say that, but they’re only going to say it louder and with more conviction if they find out about the incestuous child-marriages from somewhere else. “Siler realized that if we knew about the incestuous child-marriages, she could not feasibly argue that the US’s illegal annexation of the sovereign nation of Hawaii was immoral! Never mind that those marriages ceased fifty years before annexation! They clearly tainted native Hawaiian rule FOREVERMORE!”
If Siler wants to make an anti-imperialist argument against the annexation of Hawaii, as she clearly does, then her job is to argue that imperialism is bad even if the people you’re conquering have (or used to have) royal incestuous child-marriages. If your anti-imperialist case depends on lying to people - if, indeed, any argument you plan to make requires lying - then that’s a sign that it’s time to sit down and rethink the moral underpinnings of your anti-imperialism, because it clearly is not structurally sound.
So, yeah. Read Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes! It’s much more informative and infinitely more entertaining than Lost Kingdom! (Still not quite as good as Vowell's earlier Assassination Vacation, but after all, that's setting an impossible standard.)