Content area
Full Text
Waikïkï: A History of Forgetting and Remembering, by Andrea Feeser and Gaye Chan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. isbn 978-0- 8248-2979-7; xi + 188 pages, maps, photographs, historical chronology, glossary, bibliography, index. Cloth, us$29.00.
In Waikïkï: A History of Forgetting and Remembering, Andrea Feeser (author) and Gaye Chan (artist and designer) dig deep into the many layers of Waikïkï's history to reveal its extreme transformation from a site that once sustained Native Hawaiian communities and a diverse array of animal and plant wildlife, to a place that has been systematically commercialized and converted into "a paved-over and polluted urban resort" (124). Notably, the book constitutes an outgrowth of the Historic Waikïkï project, a political and social activist enterprise that seeks to examine and critique the impact of the colonial project, capitalist enterprise, and tourism in Hawai'i (see http://www .downwindproductions.com /about _us.html). Importantly, Feeser and Chan actively subvert the popular myth of Waikïkï as a playground for leisure and pleasure seekers and instead reveal it as a site fraught with tension.
Waikïkï focuses on nine locations in the Waikïkï area-Lë'ahi (Diamond Head), the Ala Wai, Kälia, Kawehewehe, Helumoa, Uluniu, Kaluaokau, and Käneloa and Kapua. Each location constitutes a chapter that weaves together "the many stories that thread through Waikïkï's past and present" (8), thus enabling a more complex and nuanced reading of the place and the people whose lives have been woven into the fabric of Waikïkï's distant and more recent history. The authors' choice of each location is strategic in that all are associated with the three natural springs that once provided fluid sustenance to the land and its inhabitants-springs that are deeply connected to the meaning of Waikïkï's name: "Place of Spouting Waters." In a unique and creative way, Feeser and Chan use the springs-'Apuakëhau, Pi'inaio, and Ku'ekaunahi-as a salient metaphor for both the land's and the people's suffering and resilience in the wake of colonial imposition. The authors argue that although the flow of the springs has been impeded as a result of the development process, the fact that they periodically resurface through subterranean channels...