Reclaiming Kalākaua: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on a Hawaiian Sovereign examines the American, international, and Hawaiian representations of David La‘amea Kamananakapu Mahinulani Nalaiaehuokalani Lumialani Kalākaua in English- and Hawaiian-language newspapers, books, travelogues, and other materials published during his reign as Hawai‘i’s mō‘ī (sovereign) from 1874 to 1891. Beginning with an overview of Kalākaua’s literary genealogy of misrepresentation, Tiffany Lani Ing surveys the negative, even slanderous, portraits of him that have been inherited from his enemies, who first sought to curtail his authority as mō‘ī through such acts as the 1887 Bayonet Constitution and who later tried to justify their parts in overthrowing the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 and annexing it to the United States in 1898. A close study of contemporary international and American newspaper accounts and other narratives about Kalākaua, many highly favorable, results in a more nuanced and wide-ranging characterization of the mō‘ī as a public figure. Most importantly, virtually none of the existing nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts about Kalākaua consults contemporary Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) sentiment for him. Offering examples drawn from hundreds of nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspaper articles, mele (songs), and mo‘olelo (histories, stories) about the mō‘ī, Reclaiming Kalākaua restores balance to our understanding of how he was viewed at the time—by his own people and the world. This important work shows that for those who did not have reasons for injuring or trivializing Kalākaua’s reputation as mō‘ī, he often appeared to be the antithesis of our inherited understanding. The mō‘ī struck many, and above all his own people, as an intelligent, eloquent, compassionate, and effective Hawaiian leader.

In the nineteenth-century United States, jokes, comic anecdotes, and bons mots about the Pacific Islands and Pacific Islanders tried to make the faraway and unfamiliar either understandable or completely incomprehensible (i.e., “other”) to American readers. A Laughable Empire examines this substantial archival corpus, attempting to make sense of nineteenth-century American humor about Hawai‘i and the rest of the Pacific world. Todd Nathan Thompson collects and interprets these comic, sometimes racist depictions of Pacific culture in nineteenth-century American print culture. Drawing on an archive of almanac and periodical humor, sea yarns, jest books, and literary comedy, Thompson demonstrates how jokes and humor functioned sometimes in the service of and sometimes in resistance to US imperial ambitions. Thompson also includes Indigenous voices and jokes lampooning Americans and their customs to show how humor served as an important cultural contact zone between the United States and the Pacific world. He considers how nineteenth-century Americans and Pacific Islanders alike used humor to employ stereotypes or to question them, to “other” the unknown or to interrogate, laughingly, the process by which “othering” occurs and is disseminated. Incisive and detailed, A Laughable Empire documents American humor about Pacific geography, food, dress, speech, and customs. Thompson sheds new light not only on nineteenth-century America’s imperial ambitions but also on its deep anxieties.

In a dynamic near half-century career of insight, engagement, and instruction, Kent G. Lightfoot transformed North American archaeology through his innovative ideas, robust collaborations, thoughtful field projects, and mentoring of numerous students. Authors emphasize the multifarious ways Lightfoot impacted—and continues to impact—approaches to archaeological inquiry, anthropological engagement, indigenous issues, and professionalism. Four primary themes include: negotiations of intercultural entanglements in pluralistic settings; transformations of temporal and spatial archaeological dimensions, as well as theoretical and methodological innovations; engagement with contemporary people and issues; and leading by example with honor, humor, and humility. These reflect the remarkable depth, breadth, and growth in Lightfoot’s career, despite his unwavering stylistic devotion to Hawaiian shirts.

This volume examines the visual culture of Japan’s transition to modernity, from 1868 to the first decades of the twentieth century. Through this important moment in Japanese history, contributors reflect on Japan’s transcultural artistic imagination vis-a-vis the discernment, negotiation, assimilation, and assemblage of diverse aesthetic concepts and visual pursuits. The collected chapters show how new cultural notions were partially modified and integrated to become the artistic methods of modern Japan, based on the hybridization of major ideologies, visualities, technologies, productions, formulations, and modes of representation. The book presents case studies of creative transformation demonstrating how new concepts and methods were perceived and altered to match views and theories prevalent in Meiji Japan, and by what means different practitioners negotiated between their existing skills and the knowledge generated from incoming ideas to create innovative modes of practice and representation that reflected the specificity of modern Japanese artistic circumstances. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Japanese studies, Asian studies, and Japanese history, as well as those who use approaches and methods related to globalization, cross-cultural studies, transcultural exchange, and interdisciplinary studies.

Introduction -- Emerging nations, emerging empires : inter-imperial intimacies and competing settler colonialisms in Hawai'i -- At the borders of nation and state : The 1894 Constitutional Convention -- How the Portuguese became white : The search for labor and the cost of indemnity -- "The Shinshu Maru Affair" : barred landings and immigration detention -- Historicizing the homestead in "Wahiawa Colony" : from "American family farm" to industrial plantation economy -- Conclusion.