Institution: Kapi‘olani Community College;

Location: Honolulu, Hawai‘i

Participant: Kelli Nakamura

Year: 2016

Course Summary

This course revises traditional understandings of American history and examines issues of race, gender, and class in understanding the histories and contemporary experiences of Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders to foster greater multi-cultural respect and understanding. Using multidisciplinary approaches (literary/historical analysis of primary and secondary sources), students will explore early encounters between whites, Native Hawaiians, and later Asians that would ultimately transform these societies and historical understandings of each group. This course will cover key events in American and Hawaiian history such as overseas exploration, colonization, migration, and war, and reexamine traditional historical accounts to include voices of women, minorities, and indigenous authors.

(Lectures, Readings, and Assignments with a “native voice” are highlighted)

Week #1: Race and Privilege

Readings
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994.
The Value of Hawai‘i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future. ed. Craig Howes and Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio. Honolulu: Published for the Biographical Research Center by the University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will be introduced to the major themes explored by the authors that they will read in this course. Issues of race, gender, and class are critical issues in understanding the histories of Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders whose experiences are intersected in Hawai‘i.

Week #2: Race, Gender, Capitalism and Class

Readings
Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i. ed. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. (Native Voice)
Johnson, Allan G. Privilege, Power, and Difference. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See the Correspondence through Work in Women’s Studies.” Massachusetts: Wellesley College, [1989].
Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i. University of Hawai'i Press: Honolulu, 1993. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will investigate issues of race, gender, and class in understanding the histories and contemporary experiences of Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders to foster greater multi-cultural respect and understanding.

Week #3: American Missionaries in Hawai‘i

Readings
Grimshaw, Patricia. Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989.
Silva, Noenoe. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Using multidisciplinary approaches (literary/historical analysis of primary and secondary sources), students will explore early encounters between whites, Native Hawaiians, and later Asians that would ultimately transform these societies and historical understandings of each group.

Week #4: The Politics of Historical Memory and Images of Women and Men in the Pacific

Readings
Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. ed. Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Stannard, David E. “Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myth.” Journal of American Studies 25: 3 (Dec., 1991): 381-417.

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will investigate the implications of eroticism, exoticism, and the political and military colonization of the Pacific and how this affects contemporary portrayals and understandings of Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders.

Week #5: American Colonization of Hawai‘i

Readings
Silva, Noenoe. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will explore the activities that Kānaka Maoli participated in during their vigorous and organized opposition to the annexation of their nation by the United States reading scholarship that is based upon Hawaiian language sources. Students will also learn about the Japanese response to the overthrow.

Week #6: Asian Migration to Hawai‘i

Readings
Fan, Carol. “Asian Women in Hawai'i: Migration, Family, Work, and Identity.” NWSA Journal 8:1 (Spring 1996): 70-84. (Native Voice)
Nakamura, Kelli Y. “Yeiko Mizobe So and the Domestic Abuse of Japanese Picture Brides.” Amerasia 36:1 (2010): 1-32. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will examine some of the challenges Asian women faced in constructing a new identity in multicultural/multiethnic Hawai‘i.

Week #7: Asian Women and Labor

Readings
Video: Picture Bride (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will watch the movie Picture Bride (1995) and analyze gender and race relations on the plantations (the relationship between Japanese men and women, among Japanese women, and between Japanese women and other races).

Week #8: Midterm Examination

Week #9: Plantation Labor and Resistance

Readings
Okihiro, Gary. Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. (Native Voice)
Takaki, Ronald T. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. Boston; London: Little, Brown and Co., 2000. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will study the transformation of labor practices in Hawai‘i with the arrival of Asian migrants and their encounters with different racial groups (whites, Native Hawaiians) that led to new strategies of resistance.

Week #10: World War II: Race War

Readings
Takaki, Ronald T. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. Boston; London: Little, Brown and Co., 2000. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
World War II marks a critical event in the lives of people in the Pacific and Asia. Students will explore the unique experiences of Japanese Americans who were a product of both America and Japan and who participated in this war.

Week #11: World War II Hawai‘i

Readings
Bailey, Beth and David Farber. “The ‘Double-V’ Campaign in World War II Hawai‘i: African Americans, Racial Ideology, and Federal Power.” Journal of Social History 26:4 (Summer 1993): 817-844.
Bailey, Beth and David Farber. The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
An Era of Change: Oral Histories of Civilians in World War II Hawai‘i. [Honolulu] Center for Oral History, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, [1994]. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will examine how the arrival of new ethnic groups (poor whites, African Americans) with the military buildup of Hawai‘i radically transformed race relations between Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders who also responded in unique ways to these newcomers in the Islands.

Week #12: Women’s Issues in the Present

Readings
Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American Women. ed. Asian Women United of California. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will explore the spread of the practice of mail-order brides that continues to occur in Hawai‘i and involve predominantly Asian females. A guest speaker from Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery (PASS) will present information regarding human trafficking that is relevant to people in Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and Asia.

Week #13: Polynesian Masculinities and Performance

Readings
Tengan, Ty Kāwika. Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. (Native Voice)
Tengan, Ty Kāwika. “(En)gendering Colonialism: Masculinities in Hawai‘i and Aotearoa” Cultural Values 6: 3 (July 2002): 239-256. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will examine the intersection of Polynesian masculinities that have often become defined by images in sports.

Week #14: Images of Women and Men in the Pacific (Con’d)

Readings
Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i. ed. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students will explore what images the media promotes of Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Hawaiians and its implications for these cultures and societies.

Week #15: Contemporary Issues of Race, Class, and Gender in Hawai‘i

Readings
Must address one or more of the readings above and include native voices. (Native Voice)

Notes (Including Hallmarks)
Students must address a contemporary topic utilizing native voices that a.) reflects the intersection of Asian and/or Pacific Island cultures with Native Hawaiian culture b.) promotes the cultural perspectives, values and world view rooted in the experiences of people indigenous to Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and Asia c.) addresses a topic that is critical to the understanding of the histories, or cultures, or beliefs, or the arts, or the societal, or political, or economic or technological processes of these regions d.) promotes an in-depth analysis or understanding of the issues being studied in order to foster greater multi-cultural respect and understanding.

Week #16: Final Examination