Imagining a Multicultural America: Orientalism, Hawaii, and Hollywood WWII Film

FAIN: FT-54246-06

Delia Caparoso Konzett
University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH 03824-2620)

This study explores Hollywood's WWII films in relation to Orientalism and America's gradual transformation into a multicultural society. War films set in the Pacific reflect a critical turning point in America's re-assessment of its cultural isolationism, race relations, and international affiliations. In my analysis of WWII film, I will argue that WWII Orientalism, alongside its containing rhetoric of race, also projects an inclusive democratic vision of American society, imagining a multicultural America. With its rich multiethnic society, Hawaii plays a central role in this development and as a cultural gateway to the East provides a model for an emerging American multiculturalism.

Associated Products

Hollywood's Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War (Book)
Title: Hollywood's Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War
Author: Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett
Abstract: Hollywood’s Hawaii offers a first full length study of the film industry’s intense engagement with the South Pacific and Hawaii from 1898 to the present. Whether as exotic fantasy, strategic location during World War II, or a combination of postwar leisure and military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the U.S. national imagination. As entertainment products the films also mirror the cultural and political climate, ranging from the era of U.S. imperialism, Jim Crow racial segregation, the attack on Pearl Harbor and WWII, the civil rights movement to the contemporary articulation of consumer and leisure culture as well as the buildup of the modern military industrial complex. Major Hollywood directors (Griffith, Fleming, Vidor, Milestone, Ford, Huston, Zinnemann, Preminger) and major Hollywood stars (Clara Bow; Dolores del Rio, John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Robert Mitchum, Deborah Kerr, Elvis Presley, Kirk Douglas) have given significant attention to the Pacific as part of a larger national agenda to define U.S. national identity in its encounter with the Asian and Pacific Other. Focusing on important cultural questions pertaining to race, nationhood, and war, this study offers a unique view of Hollywood film history produced from the periphery for mainland audiences. In addition to major films, special attention is given to smaller productions and B films as subcultural representations that have their own peculiar insights. Finally, the book pays particular attention to the construction of a white mythology via the ethnic and racial Other captured in classical Hollywood cinema. The study also brings to bear the insights, theories, and methods of major critical thinkers, including Miriam Hansen, Emily Rosenberg, Paul Virilio, Richard Dyer, Michael Rogin, Siegfried Kracauer, Benedict Anderson, Gilles Deleuze, and Henri Lefebvre.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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