Abstract
This chapter has as its focus a family photograph and album and explores the politics of familial representation through a single photograph of an interracial couple. The couple, a tenacious and optimisitc daughter of Sakada – the name given to Filipinos recruited in the early twentieth century from the Philippine Islands by the Hawaiian Sugar Planter’s Association to work as laborers on the sugar plantations in Hawaiʻi – and a German-Irish American airman provide the entry point to displace the power and repetitions given to the American Dream script that immigrants are expected to desire and fulfill. The author weaves personal and family memoir with feminist cultural theory and historical research to her reading of the photograph foregrounding the social-cultural temporalities to illustrate a revelatory picture of the intersections of U. S. class formation and racial inequality and oppression.
I wanted to explore photography, not as a question, but as a wound(Barthes1979, p. 26).
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Notes
- 1.
Five corporations dominated sugar production in Hawaii: of the total tonnage of sugar produced in 1920, American Factors controlled 29 %, C. Brewer 26 %, Alexander and Baldwin 23 %, Castle and Cook 10 %, and T. H. Davies 6 % (See Takaki, p. 20).
- 2.
Takaki noted that in 1853 the indigenous population was 71,000. Scholars calculated the indigenous population in 1778 to be around 300,000, but after David Stannard’s book Before the horror that number is regarded as too conservative. Stannard estimates the population at around 800,000.
- 3.
Reincorporated Hana Plantation by M. S. Grinbaum & Company that held offices in New York, San Francisco, and Honolulu.
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Tavares, H.M. (2016). Heterofamilial Myths. In: Pedagogies of the Image. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7619-6_4
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