For half a century, the United States has treated Cuba and Hawai'i as
polar opposites: despised nation and beloved state. But for more than a
century before the Cuban revolution and Hawaiian statehood of 1959, Cuba
and Hawai'i figured as twin objects of U.S. imperial desire and as
possessions whose tropical island locales might support all manner of
fantasy fulfillment--cultural, financial, and geopolitical.
Using travel and tourism as sites where the pleasures of imperialism met
the politics of empire, Christine Skwiot untangles the histories of Cuba
and Hawai'i as integral parts of the Union and keys to U.S. global
power, as occupied territories with violent pasts, and as fantasy
islands ripe with seduction and reward. Grounded in a wide array of
primary materials that range from government sources and tourist
industry records to promotional items and travel narratives, The
Purposes of Paradise explores the ways travel and tourism shaped U.S.
imperialism in Cuba and Hawai'i. More broadly, Skwiot's comparative
approach underscores continuity, as well as change, in U.S. imperial
thought and practice across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Comparing the relationships of
Cuba and Hawai'i with the United States, Skwiot argues, offers a way to
revisit assumptions about formal versus informal empire, territorial
versus commercial imperialism, and direct versus indirect rule.
