Legendary Hawai`i and the Politics of Place – Tradition, Translation, and Tourism

Cristina Bacchilega is Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She is the author of Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Legendary Hawai'i is insightful, provocative, and thought-provoking. It forcefully illuminates the implications of tourism for a culture, and the ways in which seemingly simple transactions, such as a tourist brochure to bring tourists and dollars to the island, can work in insidious ways to actually undermine the very people it seems to be celebrating."-Journal of Folklore Research "Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place is an examination of cultural change through textual analysis, and within those boundaries it accomplishes quite a bit... Bacchilega's close reading of texts and her nuanced explications of photographs are persuasive and reach important conclusions about cultural changes occurring in Hawaii, which may also apply to other colonized regions."-Journal of American History "A work of vigilant scholarship and elegant exposition that unsettles long-taken-for-granted genres, modes of representation, narrative codes and ascribed roles."-Hawaiian Journal of History "A fascinating, carefully researched, and accessible look at how indigenous Hawaiian stories were appropriated by non-Hawaiian scholars and writers and used to promote a 'legendary Hawai'i' that misrepresents Hawai'i and its indigenous people and their ways of viewing reality. The book is written with passion and commitment and restores to the original stories and their creators/tellers their true mana."-Albert Wendt