Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In the summer of 1917, the Spokesman Review of Spokane, Washington, reprinted a story that had circulated across national news. 1 In the story, a popular vaudeville hula dancer, Princess Jonia, spoke out about the Hawaiian music, entertainment, and image craze that had swept the continental United States in the years leading up to her arrival on the mainland. 2 Two years after capturing the interest of vaudeville with her 1915 Panama-Pacific exposition performance in San Francisco, Jonia, originally from Honolulu and of Kānaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) heritage, expressed her amusement with US hula performances. Jonia declared, “There are no grass-skirted dancers [in Waikiki].…You won’t hear the songs you hear in cafes and restaurants in the States. In fact, [the United States] is more Hawaiian than Hawaii itself.” 3 By 1917 not only was Hawaiian music, hula, and an American-generated visual imagery of Hawai‘i already prevalent in American popular culture, but the intense circulation of that popular culture had generated an imagined nonplace, a realer-than-real island imaginary. The imperial inflection of this re-presentational milieu established Hawai‘i as a metonym for the South Seas and fantasies of tropical paradise, while the “hula girl” emerged as the allegorical access point to this imagery. 4 Progressive Era US fascination with an other world, a terrestrial yet wholly fictive paradise more “Hawaiian than Hawaii itself” and the attendant contours of US imperial ideologies are made legible in the appearance of this so-called hula craze that began at the turn of the century. But who or what ignited this fantastical cultural imaginary?
I argue that two hula figures in the vaudeville circuit enable us to chart the early twentieth-century US obsession with all things tropically terpsichorean as one bundled “Hawaiian Fever” or “hula craze,” a distinct mode of colonial consumption that promised consumers access to the rejuvenating imaginary of an Edenic pleasure island. These two performers, Toots Paka and Doraldina, were among the earliest and most widely circulated vaudeville hula dancers. Both were separately, and erroneously, credited with being the first to introduce hula to the mainland. Although these two historical performers assumed different relations to Hawaiian culture, one claiming a partial Hawaiian bloodline and the other adopting the guise of translational expert, both provided audiences with a sense...