Cooling the Tropics

Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment

Bibliographic Data

ID11700271
AuthorsIssay Matsumoto (University of Southern California, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume43
Issue4
Pages114-116
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American Ethnic History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0278-5927 • E-ISSN: 1936-4695
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/19364695.43.4.13
OpenAlexW4401022753
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart's Cooling the Tropics is a deeply theorized and meticulously researched cultural history of foodways, colonialism, and Native Hawaiian politics in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hawai‘i. Primarily relying on English and Hawaiian language newspapers, magazines, and memoirs, as well as letters and published oral histories, this interdisciplinary study engages with political and cultural histories of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hawai‘i by historians such as Noenoe Silva, Jonathan Osorio, Kamanamaikalani Beamer, Noelani Arista, Maile Arvin, and others. While these field-defining works have examined Kanaka Maoli life in Honolulu from many angles, Cooling the Tropics expands upon these works by illuminating how foreign and urban Indigenous foodways were a crucial realm in which American colonialism in the Pacific was challenged and sustained.The first half of the book examines Hawai‘i before and during the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 considers the historical “animacies” of Maunakea, the site of contemporary sovereignty struggles against the Thirty Meter Telescope. This legacy of Kanaka Maoli cultural reverence for the cold on Maunakea belies the settler colonial myths that the summit is empty of Indigenous presence and that coldness was purely a foreign concept to Hawai‘i. Chapter 2 brings readers to the parlors and saloons of Honolulu's haole and Kanaka Maoli elites, where imported ice-cooled alcoholic beverages kickstarted refrigeration in Hawai‘i beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Although a “relatively minor trade commodity” at the time, ice in Hawai‘i intersected with “ideologies of race and ‘civility’ that shaped nineteenth-century American imperialism in the Pacific.” Chapter 3 brings readers into the period of growing American imperial pressure on the Kingdom during the 1870s. Iced drinks and ice cream were mistaken as markers of “Americanization,” when in fact Honolulu became a center of “Kanaka Technoscapes,” where infrastructural investment ushered in an age of Hawaiian urban modernity.The second half of Cooling the Tropics brings readers to the period after US annexation. Chapter 4 is a fascinating comparative examination of attempts by the Board of Health under the new Territorial government to criminalize “unsanitary” poi production and enforce regulations of ice cream milk fat percentage. Archived letters between officials at the Board of Health about seemingly minor controversies in food regulation tell a powerful story of how settler colonial governance of health criminalized both Indigenous foodways and reportedly unscrupulous Asian vendors. Chapter 5 examines the development of early twentieth-century refrigeration technology and skips ahead to demonstrate how the colorful shave ice was crowned a symbol of Hawai‘i “localness” and multi-ethnic harmony after statehood in 1959. Through examining recent figures such as former President Barack Obama and even phenomena like American Girl dolls, Hobart convincingly shows how settler colonial “racial imaginaries” of shave ice obscure contemporary claims of Indigenous sovereignty. The conclusion meditates on the role of refrigeration and coldness in Indigenous futures. Here, Hobart succinctly summarizes the contemporary stakes of scholarly and political attention to thermal infrastructure as a matter of Indigenous and planetary survival in the face of climate change.Historians and scholars across a wide disciplinary range will learn from Hobart's elegant prose and theoretical interventions. Historians of migration in Hawai‘i and the Pacific world will benefit from Hobart's exploration of Hawai‘i's elite culture and “urban foodscape”—particularly the rich descriptions of Indigenous urbanity and Honolulu's late nineteenth-century “Kanaka Technoscapes.” Works by early to mid-twentieth-century historians and Park school social scientists such as Andrew Lind, Romanzo Adams, Lawrence Fuchs, Gavan Daws, and others continue to be foundational to much of the historiography of migration and labor in Hawai‘i. Despite containing crucial demographic data, however, these early works often inaccurately and offensively depicted urban Kanaka Maoli as a powerless “deracinated” community. With Cooling the Tropics, Hobart has contested these depictions and convincingly opened a path for future studies of colonialism, Indigeneity, and foodways in the Pacific. For these reasons, scholars across disciplines and fields will find Hobart's careful study . . . refreshing

Biology · Climatology · Tropics · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Ecology · Environmental Science · Geology

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