Hawaiʻi/Hawaii: Alterity, Space, and the Economy of Knowledge

The settler imaginary creates Hawaii as a distinct space from Hawaiʻi. Drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Eve Tuck I seek to explore the overlapping of two distinct epistemological territories sharing the same physical location. This thesis begins with a history of the future that interrogates settler desires for Hawaii. It begins with the imagination of captains of industry and military strategists as they constructed a discursive future for Hawaii. It moves forward to the touristic imagination that produced the modern conception of Hawai. Finally, it turns to the imagination of modern popular media through the film Lilo & Stitch. Through its deconstruction of the symbolic order of settler desire this thesis seeks to chart the geography of an imagined space.