Introduction
Introduction
This book explores how Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi turned to consumer culture to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship, and in the process reinforced class and racial hierarchies that had been in the making since the 1920s. Building on recent scholarship that considers ethnic communities within a trans-Pacific context, the book investigates how the Nisei rose to prominence and preeminence in Hawaiʻi. More specifically, it explains how specific patterns of leisure and consumption allowed the Nisei to deliberately act out their whiteness, thereby enabling them to further their economic and political goals. It shows that the creation of Nisei identity was not only a process internal to the Japanese American community, but also a part of the economic and political formation of Hawaiʻi as a whole. The book also discusses the ways in which the adoption of class-based notions of whiteness as a standard of feminine beauty proved to be both empowering and limiting for Japanese Americans.
Keywords: whiteness, Japanese Americans, Hawaiʻi, consumer culture, citizenship, class, Nisei, consumption, Nisei identity, beauty
Hawaii Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
