Whether presented as exotic fantasy, a strategic location during World War II, or a site combining postwar leisure with military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the U.S. national imagination. Hollywood’s Hawaii is the first full-length study of the film industry’s intense engagement with the Pacific region from 1898 to the present. Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett highlights films that mirror the cultural and political climate of the country over more than a century—from the era of U.S. imperialism on through Jim Crow racial segregation, the attack on Pearl Harbor and WWII, the civil rights movement, the contemporary articulation of consumer and leisure culture, as well as the buildup of the modern military industrial complex. Focusing on important cultural questions pertaining to race, nationhood, and war, Konzett offers a unique view of Hollywood film history produced about the national periphery for mainland U.S. audiences. Hollywood’s Hawaii presents a history of cinema that examines Hawaii and the Pacific and its representations in film in the context of colonialism, war, Orientalism, occupation, military buildup, and entertainment.

The Hard Sell of Paradise examines how mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, negotiating the rhetoric of the tourism industry, offered a complex and contradictory vision of "Hawai'i" for its audiences. From the classic studio system and elite tourism of the 1930s to a postwar era of mass travel, TV, and new leisure markets, the book explores how an eclectic group of populist media reflected the language of tourism not only through its narratives of leisure, but also through its complex engagement with larger cultural and historical questions, such as colonialism, world war, and statehood. Drawing on rare archival research, The Hard Sell of Paradise also explores the valuable role that tourism partners such as United Airlines, Matson Cruise Lines, and the Hawaii Tourist Bureau played in directly and indirectly influencing such films and television shows as Waikiki Wedding, Diamond Head, Blue Hawaii, The Endless Summer, and Hawaii Five-O.

From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multilocal process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through transregional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema. Among the book’s highlights are a rereading of The Goddess—one of the best-known silent Chinese films in the West—from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood’s fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood’s remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of “Chinese elements” in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach, a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalization. As such, Remaking Chinese Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.

Book written from a decolonization perspective of Hawaiian history. The woerk is derived from oral and written Hawaiian language texts by invoking Native representations as alternatives to those constructed by outsiders and settlers.

The Hawaii Movie and Television Book documents, with production information and critical commentary, the Hollywood films and television shows made in Hawaii since 1995 to the present while spotlighting significant film achievements of the past. It also covers television and the iconic fictional island crime fighters. In addition, the book includes an Island film location guide to sites accessible to the general public and a history of the present-day Hawaii film industry. Hawaii played a role in the formative years of Hollywood. It shares a legacy that began a hundred years ago with the consolidating of the U.S. film industry on the West Coast at the beginning of the twentieth century spanning the first feature films made in 1913 through its territorial status, World War II, statehood and now into the current twenty-first century. Since 1995, more than fifty major Hollywood theatrical feature films were made in the Hawaiian Islands, many of them blockbuster productions, with at lea