Hawai‘i in Stereo: Cinerama, Stereophonic Sound, and Hawaiian Statehood

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

Abstract

As the Hawaiian statehood gained momentum, albums like Martin Denny’s Exotica (1955), Arthur Lyman’s Taboo (1958), and Leo Addeo’s Hawaii in Stereo (1959) presented sounds and music from Hawai‘i—some real, some fabricated—to a continental American audience. The latest iteration of “Hawaiian Fever,” which had intermittently struck the imagination of American consumers and audiences from the late 19th century onwards, these mid-century Hawaiian LPs entered the domestic space of the home just as the occupied Hawaiian islands were being incorporated into the domestic space of the U.S. nation-state. A key technology that facilitated this new representation of Hawai‘i was the advent of stereophonic sound, whose commercial availability for the mainstream music consumer also coincided with the statehood movement.

This paper traces the popularity of stereophonic Hawaiian recordings back to an earlier legacy of late-19th century stereoscopic photographs that presented the then new U.S. colonies of the Philippines and Hawai‘i to a curious American public. ] If stereoscopic photographs introduced the colonial possessions of America’s Pacific Empire, then, I argue, that stereophonic sound further domesticated those spaces and rendered them into audio-images of leisure for the middle class home. The paper examines how stereophonic sound was used not only in Hawaiian and “Exotica” LPs, but in film travelogues like South Seas Adventure (1958), which presented widescreen, first person perspective presentations of Hawai‘i – with seven-track “positional” surround sound – that “wrapped [its audiences] in action” and “bathed [them] in sound.” Stereophonic sounds that represented Hawai‘i, I argue, produced a new kind of listening subject for whom the colony became a palatable site of fantasy during an emergent phase of empire.

Author

• Manan Desai, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor