The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States
2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaaa233
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Asian American and Pacific Histories
ResumoThe Kingdom and the Republic is both a narrative account of discourse between 1820 and 1828—crucial years in which ali‘i (chiefs) began to evolve Hawaiian governance and law—and a corrective to a number of historiographic conventions. This book is one of several published since Noenoe K. Silva's Aloha Betrayed (2004) that assert the necessity of using Hawaiian-language sources when doing the history of Hawaii. Noelani Arista extends this argument by demonstrating the Hawaiian linguistic and cultural fluency required to uncover layered meaning. Drawing upon a vast collection of American, British, and Hawaiian records, Arista performs close readings and, as she emphasizes, listens for the imprint of Hawaiian legal pronouncement in “missionary letters and journals [and] English-language ‘translated’ or abridged retellings of interactions, chiefly statements, and events” (p. 136). Her legal and political history of Hawaii captures the pulse of the archive, revealing “semiotic depths” often obscured in literal translation, and demonstrates the persistent authority of the spoken word in Hawaiian even as Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiian people) embraced palapala (reading and writing) in the 1830s (pp. 28, 86).
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