Contested Paradise: Hawaiian Environmental Imagination and the Transnational Critique of Empire

Abstract

This article examines how Kiana Davenport's Hawaiian environmental imagination challenges American Studies to confront U.S. empire's material operations beyond the mainland. Situating Davenport's fiction within the field's shift toward transnational approaches, the study analyzes three interconnected themes: militarized landscapes, tourism's cultural commodification, and nuclear contamination as slow violence. Davenport's narratives reveal Hawai'i as a site of ongoing imperial occupation where land is transformed into strategic infrastructure and Indigenous culture is appropriated and marketed as paradise. Her work exposes how empire operates through environmental control, making visible the connections between ecological harm and cultural violence. Hawaiian environmental imagination calls for a more ecologically grounded American Studies that centers Indigenous resistance and transnational environmental justice. By repositioning Hawai'i from academic periphery to center, this approach expands the field's critical scope to address empire's continuing environmental legacies across the Pacific. The study demonstrates how Indigenous and ethnic literatures compel American Studies toward more transnational and decolonial frameworks, challenging the field to engage with environmental and cultural justice as inseparable concerns.