The World and All the Things upon It

Abstract

What if we were to understand indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration, rather than the passive objects of that exploration? What could such a new perspective on the project of global exploration reveal about the meaning of geographical understanding and its place in struggles over power in the context of colonialism? The World and All the Things upon It addresses these questions by tracing how Kānaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian people) in the nineteenth century explored the outside world and generated their own understandings of it. Written with passion, it draws on long-ignored Hawaiian-language sources. Using them, it demonstrates that the powerful words—stories, songs, chants, and political prose—of Native Hawaiian people reveal Kanaka Maoli reflections on the nature of global geography and their place in it. This book looks at travel, sexuality, spirituality, print culture, gender, labor, education, and race to shed light on how constructions of global geography became a site through which Hawaiians as well as their would-be colonizers understood and contested imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism. Rarely have historians asked how non-Western people imagined and even forged their own geographies of their colonizers and the broader world. This study takes up that task. It emphasizes, moreover, that there is no better way to understand the process and meaning of global exploration than by looking out from the shores of a place, such as Hawai‘i, that was allegedly the object, and not the agent, of exploration.

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