Hula, Nationalist Spectacle, and the Politics of Bacchanalia
Guest post: Dr Lindsay Wilhelm (Oklahoma State University)
For two weeks in February 1883, Honolulu – the bustling capital of what was then the Hawaiian Kingdom – was given over to pleasure. The occasion was the coronation of Hawaiʻi’s king, David Kalākaua, who had come to power nine years prior but, for various practical reasons, had never held a formal investiture.[1] Charismatic and well-educated, with a reputation for sharp dress, irreverent humor, and unorthodox ideas, Kalākaua had, in the meantime, circumnavigated the globe: an unprecedented year-long trip he undertook in order to study other forms of government, reinforce Hawaiʻi’s robust network of embassies and consulates abroad, and investigate new technologies to take back home (electric light, for example, which Kalākaua had installed in his royal residence in 1887 – four years before the White House got electricity).[2]
Fig. 1: David Kalākaua (1836-1891) before his accession, circa 1874, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum
Fig. 2: Kalākaua circa 1875, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, NPG.79.144.
On his return, he determined that what the nation needed was a material demonstration of the islands’ importance on the global stage, as well as his power as their sovereign. The resulting coronation in many ways reflected Kalākaua’s international sensibilities, whetted by the royal functions he had attended during his tour: at the ceremony itself, Kalākaua and his queen, Kapiʻolani, donned crowns custom made for them in England, and celebrations continued through endless rounds of state dinners, public and private receptions, balls, horse races, fireworks displays, a regatta, and, finally, a grand lūʻau (feast) open to all his subjects. As historian Stacy Kamehiro observes, the modern European touches were intentional. They were meant to convey ‘Kalākaua’s policy of advancement and progress for Hawaiians’ by aligning their national culture with that of other western monarchies.[3] Unsurprisingly, these same gestures galled Kalākaua’s pro-American critics. The opposition Honolulu newspaper Saturday Press, for instance, caricatured him as the blustering, spendthrift petty tyrant ‘King Cosmopolitando’.[4]
Fig. 3: Coronation of King Kalākaua and Queen Kapiʻolani, February 12, 1883, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Photograph Collection, PP-36-4-001.
But besides the price tag – upwards of ten-thousand dollars, a significant sum for the 1880s – the aspect of the coronation that really seemed to bother Hawaiʻi’s haole (foreign) population was its integration of European pomp and circumstance with traditional Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) performing arts. Kalākaua had made Indigenous cultural revival a key part of his nationalist agenda, and his fun-loving court was a hub for the study and performance of mele and hula (song and dance, respectively). These arts quite literally took center stage at the coronation. He invited Hawaiian elders from throughout the Kingdom to recite old mele, which he then had transcribed.[5] Dozens of new hula were also performed in the course of celebrations, many in honor of Kalākaua and his ancestors, or in commemoration of the occasion.[6] The big lūʻau culminated in an elaborate hula program organized in part by the master musician and local celebrity ʻIoane ʻŪkēkē, popularly known as ‘Dandy’ for his fabulous sense of style.[7] If the goal of the coronation was, as his sister and successor Lydia Liliʻuokalani later wrote, to give the people ‘a renewed sense of the dignity and honor involved in their nationality’, then the festivities were an unmitigated success – not to mention a great time.[8] But all this unapologetic revelry proved intolerable to a small, yet powerful minority of anti-monarchists, some of whom would later go on to participate in (or at least cheer on) the series of coups that resulted in Liliʻuokalani’s overthrow in 1893. With its sinuous physicality and intimate connections to pre-contact religious ritual, hula became a particular flashpoint in this controversy.
Take, for instance, George W. Stewart’s mock-epic ‘The Crowning of the Dread King’ (1883), published in pamphlet form shortly after the coronation. Stewart reserves his most scathing critique for the hula performance, which he reimagines as a drunken, tropical Bacchanal. Drawing on Orientalist stereotypes and cultural constructions of the femme fatale, Stewart describes with voyeuristic pleasure how the dancers ‘sway [their] lithe elastic bodies’ in ‘snake-like motions’, their arms ‘swaying, writhing, twisting’ as the chanting grows louder.[9] At once alluring, comically overwrought, and nightmarish, the dancers’ movements in turn excite the audience into an orgiastic frenzy that Stewart compares, in a rather facile analogy, to both classical and Biblical paganism:
Wilder grows the waving, twisting,
Of the hula hula dancers,
Devotees of Lakakane,
Devotees of Baal-Peor.
Wild the scene before the palace!
Wild the scene before the dread king!
And the many torchlights gleaming,
The surrounding torchlights flick’ring,
[…]
Making wilder still the wild scene,
Lending the nocturnal revels
All the weirdness, all the madness
Of a Bacchanalian riot.[10]
Like elsewhere in the poem, the faux Homeric verbal repetition here serves as a rhetorical send-up of the coronation’s extravagance, which its critics thought incommensurate with what they deemed to be Kalākaua’s (and, indeed, Hawaiʻi’s) real geopolitical significance. But in this scene, reiteration also instantiates the dance’s dreamlike temporal indeterminacy. ‘Time’, Stewart continues, ‘who waits nor pain nor pleasure, / … / Rushes on to greet the morning’.[11] By contrast, the throng of hula dancers and spectators ‘lives forever in the present’, ‘lost in pleasure, mad with license’, and ‘drunk with unrestrained abandon’. When the night finally ends, the crowd doesn’t so much leave as get chased out by the dawn, personified as the chaste, White-coded ‘Aurora’.[12]
Fig. 4: George W. Stewart, title page to ‘The Crowning of the Dread King’ (1883),Digital Archives of Hawaiʻi.
This representation of the coronation hula – that is, the crowd’s hedonist disregard for the future – is certainly ‘decadent’ in the banal sense, if we take decadence to mean wanton self-indulgence and sexual license. Accusations of this sort had been leveled at hula as far back as European contact. In 1779, a surgeon aboard one of James Cook’s ships described how a group of dancers ‘wriggled their backsides and used many lascivious gestures’, and in 1801 George Vancouver dismissed another performance as ‘an offensive, libidinous scene’.[13] (It’s possible that some of these more scandalized accounts describe hula maʻi, or hula in celebration of a chief’s genitalia; music in this genre was also performed at Kalākaua’s coronation).[14] In subsequent decades, New England missionaries had pushed Native leaders to suppress hula as a so-called ‘heathen’ practice, including by regulating its public performance by law (more on this later). Though these laws were lifted in the 1870s, the intimations of immorality remained, and they reached a fever pitch in the wake of the coronation. As Hawaiian studies scholar Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio explains, the descendants of missionaries, like their forebears, ‘conceived the hula to be evil’, and viewed its persistent popularity as ‘the clearest sign of weakness and degradation of the Natives’.[15] This is perhaps no better illustrated than in the case of Honolulu-based publishers Robert Grieve and William Auld, who were convicted of obscenity for reprinting the Hawaiian lyrics to some of the hula performed at the coronation; the politician William Castle, scion of a major missionary family, spearheaded the prosecution.[16]
But putting aside this admittedly pat understanding of decadence as mere debauchery, I’m intrigued by how debates surrounding the coronation hula might intersect with decadence in more nuanced, and hopefully more interesting, ways. Recent formulations of literary decadence, especially in a global context, encourage us to see the movement not just as a shared set of stylistic and artistic values, but also – to borrow phrasing from Regenia Gagnier – as a ‘dialectics of decadence and modernization’, one that arises from the friction between nineteenth-century progressive ideologies and real socioeconomic conditions in the era of imperial decline.[17] As I’ve argued recently in Volupté, this diffuse notion of decadence helps us tease out decadent discourses at work in Anglo-American writing about Hawaiʻi, which had no capital-D ‘Decadent Movement’ to speak of.
Time, history, and anthropologically inflected notions of progress are watchwords here. In brief, Victorian anthropology analogized societies to the individual lifespan, ranging from primitive childhood to civilized adulthood to decadent old age; in this schema, Indigenous peoples were said to be ‘stuck’ in perpetual childhood or (alternatively, but often in the same breath) in the throes of premature decay. At the same time, Hawaiʻi under its native rulers had a first-rate public education system, a thriving periodical press, functioning infrastructure, and strong diplomatic ties to other nations. Hawaiʻi thus occupied an ambivalent place in the Victorian cultural imagination, figuring as both a timeless idyll – in the words of one visitor, ‘a sunset world of endless afternoons’ – and a hypermodern state with ‘one of the best administered governments in the world’, as the same visitor observed.[18] To put it another way, Hawaiʻi’s patent advancement along normative axes of economic, social, and industrial development appeared to clash with both its primal natural beauty and its escapist tourist appeal, which held out the tantalizing possibility of stasis in the midst of a ceaselessly changing world. (Alfred Tennyson’s 1832 poem ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, with its lyrical evocations of altered states and ‘a land where all things always seem’d the same’, was a popular cultural touchstone for travel writers).[19] To some haole (again, foreign) observers, moreover, Kalākaua’s mediation of old-world European courtliness, fin-de-siècle heterodoxy, and Indigenous values made him the very personification of this idea. The French diplomat Marie Bosseront d’Anglade, for instance, remarked on the King’s curiously ‘dual character’, born out in his approach to governance: in Kalākaua’s kingdom, d’Anglade writes, ‘modernity has been superimposed upon Hawaiian tradition but without destroying it, so that a curious combination of Kanaka and European elements has been effected’.[20] The queer American writer Charles Warren Stoddard, a fervent supporter of Indigenous autonomy who lived in Hawaiʻi off and on through the 1870s and 80s, later depicted the king as a kind of diaphanous aesthete, a deliciously perplexing amalgam of modern-day ‘Bohemianism’ and ‘nursery tale’ chivalry.[21]
Fig. 5: Eduard Arning, Kalākaua’s birthday, 1885, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Photograph Collection, PP-32-9b-005.
For Kalākaua’s American-aligned critics, hula was similarly emblematic of Hawai’i’s equivocal relationship to modernity. Historian Noenoe K. Silva has pointed out that nineteenth-century bans on hula performance were driven as much by greed as by anxieties about public morality. In this period, plantations dominated Hawaiʻi’s economy, and their owners had lobbied parliament to pass laws making work compulsory. What’s more, Native Hawaiian resistance to labor exploitation – rooted in a native culture with different attitudes toward land use and property ownership – was often interpreted by haole commentators as sheer laziness. Hula, according to this logic, exacerbated and enabled their idleness: one censorious editorial called it ‘a nuisance, fostering indolence and vice among a race that heaven knows is running itself out fast enough, even when held in check with all the restraints which civilization, morality and industry can hold out’.[22] Thus, Silva explains, ‘the puritan work ethic and disdain for traditional Kanaka Maoli practices dovetailed seamlessly with the attempts to exploit Kanaka Maoli labor’.[23] As she further points out, attacks on the purported temptations of hula persisted in the press well into the twentieth century, long after the legal ban was lifted – in part because the debate over hula was less about shoring up sexual mores than enforcing a particular vision of industrial capitalist modernity on a resistant native population.
Superadded to more sensationalized fears of sexual licentiousness and pagan idolatry, the to-do surrounding hula at Kalākaua’s coronation thus tapped into complex, often contradictory conceptions of Hawai’i as a culture in its decadence. That these conceptions served settler colonial interests and facilitated the dismantling of Hawaiʻi’s independent monarchy is indisputable. But viewing haole critiques such as Stewart’s ‘The Crowning of the Dread King’ through the lens of decadence also helps us recognize some of the subtler political ramifications of the coronation spectacle. That is to say, some of the criticism of Kalākaua was inadvertently observant in one regard: his brand of nationalism did trouble the Euro-American shibboleths of ‘civilization, morality and industry’, all tied up in neat narratives about the inevitable triumph of Western Enlightenment over the forces of ‘savagery’. To his detractors, Kalākaua’s revival of Hawaiian music and dance was, at worst, an atavistic return to the bestial past, and at best the last gasp of a people on the verge of extinction.
But as his own public persona suggests, Kalākaua’s court was in fact marked by concerted cultural syncretism. Under his patronage, hula was a living art, reflective of ancient tradition but also innovating in response to the introduction of new instruments, melodies, venues, and audiences. (This was, after all, the heyday of the aforementioned ʻŪkēkē, renowned for both his dandyish outfits and his skill with the Indigenous stringed instrument from which he took his name). A closer look at the genres of chant and dance that emerged in Kalākaua’s reign reveals how nimbly he, ʻŪkēkē, and other Hawaiians negotiated the seismic shifts of contact, with a resilience and panache that defied, as well as invited, decadent comparison.
Fig. 6: A. A. Montano, ʻIoane ʻŪkēkē with two of his hula dancers, circa 1890s, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Photograph Collection, PNLPC-2-07561.
Musicologist and historian Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman has written extensively on these genres, known collectively as hula ʻauana. As she points out, hula ‘auana was distinguished from the older, sacred hula kuahu by virtue of its secularity; unlike hula kuahu, which required ritual invocation of the gods, the modern hula ‘auana could be performed by and for anyone. Stillman further identifies two performance ‘streams’ within hula ‘auana, both of which were featured at the 1883 coronation: hula ‘ōlapa, in which melodies were chanted and accompanied exclusively by Indigenous percussive instruments; and hula kuʻi (literally, ‘to join old and new’), which combined Western and Indigenous elements in composition, instrumentation, and choreography.[24] The rise of hula kuʻi and other vernacular traditions, as Stillman teaches us, calls into question colonial histories that emphasize ‘trajectories of assimilation’, taking for granted the uniform decline and disenfranchisement of Native Hawaiians.[25] More precisely, in the late nineteenth century, the capacity for hula kuʻi to ‘[link] the generations that have passed before us to those yet to come’ would have cut against the decadent framing of Kānaka Maoli as a people with no future of their own making – a people that, if they were to survive, would have to be ushered into modernity by a benevolent colonial guardian. What Stewart had depicted as a wild, primitive Bacchanal – of a piece with the Hawaiians’ supposed temporal disjointedness – was really more akin to an avant-garde showcase, a hybridizing of old and new that modeled how Kānaka Maoli might adapt to changing times, on their own terms.
If the connections to decadence here still seem a bit tenuous, that’s partly by design. Though Hawaiʻi attracted its share of decadent-adjacent personalities – Stoddard, the Japanese writer Yone Noguchi, American poet Joaquin Miller, and Robert Louis Stevenson come to mind – decadence was a nonnative idea, based on teleological and linear conceptions of history transplanted from elsewhere, projected onto an Indigenous culture that conceived of time in very different ways. Kalākaua, for his part, probably wasn’t aiming for a decadent effect when he planned his coronation celebration, even if he was certainly familiar with ‘art for art’s sake’.[26] But in the politically turbulent, culturally heterogenous landscape of 1880s and 1890s Hawaiʻi, decadence emerged as one framework for understanding dynamics that otherwise defied easy definition. The coronation brought these dynamics to the surface, traversing and testing settler binary distinctions between tradition and modernity, civilization and primitivism. The performances staged there were provocative for more than just their sexuality, their expense, their ‘decadence’ in the colloquial sense; they were provocative because they challenged the bourgeois values that fueled colonial expansionist thinking. And that provocation, perhaps, might be the most decadent thing about them.
Notes
[1] Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1874-1893 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1967), pp. 11-12.
[2] Tiffany Lani Ing, Reclaiming Kalākaua: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on a Hawaiian Sovereign (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), pp. 136-54; Julia Flynn Siler, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure (New York: Grove Press, 2012), p. 104.
[3] Stacy Kamehiro, The Arts of Kingship: Hawaiian Art and National Culture in the Kalākaua Era (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), pp. 30-31.
[4] ‘The Chronicles of Cosmopolitando’, Saturday Press, 10 Feb. 1883.
[5] Ing, Reclaiming Kalākaua, p. 12.
[6] Ing, Reclaiming Kalākaua, pp. 159-60.
[7] Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, p. 264.
[8] Lydia Liliʻuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, Co., 1898), p. 104.
[9] George W. Stewart, ‘The Crowning of the Dread King’ (Honolulu: Thos. G. Thrum, 1883), p. 25.
[10] Stewart, ‘The Crowning of the Dread King’, p. 26.
[11] Stewart, ‘The Crowning of the Dread King’, p. 26.
[12] Stewart, ‘The Crowning of the Dread King’, p. 27.
[13] Qtd. in Dorothy B. Barrère, Mary Kawena Pukui, and Marion Kelly, Hula: Historical Perspectives (Honolulu: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 1980), pp. 17 and 21.
[14] See Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly, Hula: Historical Perspectives, pp. 133-39.
[15] Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), p. 203.
[16] For contemporary coverage of the trial, see, for example, ‘Police Court’, Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 10 March 1883.
[17] Regenia Gagnier, ‘From barbarism to decadence without the intervening civilization; or, living in the aftermath of anticipated futures’, Feminist Modernist Studies 4 (2) (2021), p. 167.
[18] Isabella Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1876), pp. 152 and 67.
[19] Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, Poems, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1842), 1:176.
[20] d’Anglade, Marie Gabriel Bosseront, A Tree in Bud: The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1889-1893, trans. Alfons L. Korn (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), p. v.
[21] Charles Warren Stoddard, Hawaiian Life: Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (Chicago and New York: F. Tennyson Neely), p. 115.
[22] Qtd. In Noenoe K. Silva, ‘He Kānāwai E Hoʻopau I Na Hula Kuolo Hawaiʻi: The Political Economy of Banning the Hula’, The Hawaiian Journal of History 34 (2000): p. 33.
[23] Silva, ‘He Kānāwai E Ho’opau I Na Hula Kuolo Hawai’i’, pp. 32-33.
[24] Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, ‘Of the People Who Love the Land: Vernacular History in the Poetry of Modern Hawaiian Hula’, Amerasia Journal 28 (2002), p. 89.
[25] Stillman, ‘Of the People Who Love the Land’, p. 85.
[26] The global press often described Kalākaua in terms that evoked comparison to the dandy aesthete, and he was reported to have seen F. C. Burnand’s aesthetic satire ‘The Colonel’ (1881) in London shortly after it premiered. He might have also acquired familiarity with the movement through his friendships with Stoddard and Stevenson, or his own extensive reading. See, for example, ‘London Gossip’, Hampshire Telegraph 20 July 1881.