Please join Kahuku Public and School Library as we partner with the Hawai’i Council for the Humanities to bring author Dean Itsuji Saranillio to the North Shore to discuss his recent publication near the 60th anniversary of statehood. Dean Saranillio is an Associate Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University.

In Unsustainable Empire Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity and persuasive force about   historically and ethically complex issues, Unsustainable Empire provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai‘i’s admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to U.S. empire are urgently needed.

Join us for a discussion with the author and light refreshments provided by the Friends of the Library Kahuku.

If you need an auxiliary aid/service or other accommodation due to a disability, please contact the library at least 7 days prior to the program date. We will make every attempt to fulfill all requests for accommodations. All programs are subject to change. For a list of upcoming library events, visit test-library.ehawaii.gov/events