Scholarship surrounding literature from Hawai‘i has often been beset by battles over representation. In particular, controversies over how outsiders depict Hawaiian life and culture have been raised with texts such as James Michener’s 1959 bestseller Hawaii, and arguments about local and settler literary authority emerged as part of academic literary criticism back in the 1990s. Current scholarship on literature from Hawai‘i emphasizes ethnic and racial conflict, and in so doing tends to obscure other kinds of significant differences—between urban and rural, academic and non-academic, large- and small-scale production—that exist in literary practices in Hawai‘i. In contrast, there is a plentiful, heterogenous, and multifaceted body of writing that has been and continues to be produced on the Island of Hawai‘i (the Big Island). These literary practices include publishing houses that promote literature in multiple languages including English and Native Hawaiian, groups that actively seek to preserve Big Island culture and history (such as the memory of plantation life), and collaborative community and student efforts. Newer forms of expression such as bilingual manga, documentary film, musical theater, and Native Hawaiian and English rap music have added to long-standing traditions of storytelling, theater and performance, and life writing. Detailing these many voices and different kinds of writing and working directly with writers allows for a much more nuanced understanding of what “literature from Hawai‘i” encompasses and how it should be read. This interpretive model reconnects a large present-day and historical body of work to a specific place (as opposed to a vague notion of the islands) and to the Big Island communities who serve as the primary audiences and critical readers of this work.
