Preface Searching for "the Local": Hawai'i as Miss Universe?

Long ago, in the age of European discovery, when such explorers as the Florentine merchant Amerigo Vespucci roamed the waters of the New World, a wondrous island was discovered west of England and Portugal where labor was said to be a joy, where the will to profit was unknown, where the drive for grandeur, gold, and greed had been sublimated into care for the common good. Nowhere to be found on any earthly map of colonial possession, of course, this island was called Utopia by Sir Thomas More in a satire by that name in 1518. True to Western forms of colonial settlement, this fantasy island of earthly possession, it is more accurate to say, was not so much discovered as made, in a raw act of state power, real politic, and cultural-political imagining, shaped into existence as some "brave new world" of otherness by distancing itself from some unnamed continent, some "mainland" of power where the civilized customs of early-modern capitalism were otherwise installed. "Utopus," so it is narrated by More, "brought his rough and rude people to that high point of culture and civilization whereby they now surpass practically all other men. As soon as he had landed and conquered the place, he caused the part where it was joined to the mainland to be cut through and let the sea around the land."l Nobody has gone quite that far in recommending that modern-day Hawai'i be totally cut off from the "mainland" of the United States superstate or seek some form of economic autarky via complete delinkage from