Sounding 'Racial Aloha' in the Tourist Spaces of Postwar Waikiki

• In Event: Easy Listening Empire: Exotica, Race, and U.S. Imperialism in Hawai‘i

Abstract

In the lead-up to Hawaiian statehood in 1959, political, economic, and cultural leaders combined forces to promote the mixed-race woman as modern symbol of both Hawaiian tourism and statehood by drawing on melting-pot narratives to write its mixed-race bodies into national belonging (Skwiot 2010). A broad postwar consensus emerged depicting Hawai'i as a racially harmonious blending of ‘‘East and West,” a message promoted through tourist entertainments in which the labor of multiracial female entertainers—Hawaiian/Tahitian dancers, musicians, and singers—was central. Around 1955, Waikiki hotels such as Henry J. Kaiser’s Hawaiian Village, began featuring “modern” and “progressive” jazz groups led by Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, and Gene Rains. These artists performed a type of music that came to be known as the genre of exotica: small jazz combos mixed with Latin percussion, Asian instruments, gongs, bells, chimes, bamboo, and bird calls. Denny’s group was hailed as a racially mixed “model U.N.,” a musical “East meets West,” and the “modern sound” of Hawai'i. Although the group included a racially diverse group of male musicians, Denny’s LP albums of self-described “vacation music” also relied on images of ethnically ambiguous women (such as model Sandy Warner, later known as “the exotica girl”) amongst tropical settings of bamboo, water, and palm trees.

In this paper I examine how exotica participated in legitimating a view of Hawaiʻi as a modern and harmonious racial melting pot; a view that was fundamental to expanding U.S. empire through Hawaiian statehood. I situate Martin Denny’s exotica sonically and symbolically in the soundscape of Waikiki to examine how hotels operated both as musical venues and expressions of imperial initiatives in the years leading up the Hawaiian statehood. By tracing entanglements of gender, race, music, and imperial ambitions, I aim to show how Christine Skwiot’s concept of “racial aloha” played out in Hawaiian tourist bars, lounges, and hotel stages. I do this by turning to local newspaper columns dedicated to Honolulu culture and nightlife during the years 1954-59. My paper argues that the emergence of exotica is directly connected to not only gendered discourses around Hawaii as a racial melting pot, but the creative labor of multi-racial and Hawaiian female entertainers. Broadly, this paper examines how a new musical genre reproduces ideas and values of its historical moment (Brackett, 2016) while highlighting the overlooked role of women in its formation.

Author

• Jennifer Messelink