Lord of a Hawaiian Island”

This case study of a white male couple (Robert and John Gregg Allerton) on Kaua‘i from the 1930s through the 1960s investigates how their colonization of the island has tended to be erased in accounts that highlight both the supposed acceptance of their homosexuality by the island’s residents and, in turn, the couple’s generous philanthropy. Set against this narrative of what Mary Louise Pratt has called “anti-conquest,” I demonstrate that the Allertons’ lives on Kaua‘i were actually more in keeping with the history of western imperialism than most accounts acknowledge, emphasizing also their own innovative strategies toward making the island their own. The article examines both the specifics of the Allertons’ colonizing of Kaua‘i and, more importantly, how imperialism can be misremembered when the colonizers were queer, connecting that narrative obfuscation to myths about acceptance of gay men in Hawai‘i that live on today

Ancient history · Art · Biology · CONQUEST · Ethnology · Genealogy · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Queer · Sociology · White (mutation · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Classics · Gender Studies · History