Losing site: Architecture, memory and place

describes as ‘conjoined sites of tourism and governance’. (4) From these bases, boosters and developers saw tropical tourism as a vehicle to attract virtuous white US settlers prior toWorld War I.A series of ‘vices’ associatedwith black, Spanish, or nativeHawaiian culture (the rumba, bullfighting, and hula, among others) generally found official disfavor, despite their popularity amongUS tourists.After thewar, authorities in both places set aside tourismas settlement strategy, embraced excess and vice, and marketed to tourists the ‘barbaric’ pleasures associated with once-powerful local aristocracies. The rise of vice tourism went hand-in-hand with increasingly corrupt and exclusionary governmentswith ties to elites: inHawaiï the long-dominant haole class; in Cuba, a clientelist ruling class linked to the USA. Tourism became a site where nationalists in Cuba and multiracial statehood advocates in Hawaiï joined battle with those elites, arguing that tourism was ‘a symbol and source of racism and imperialism’ (12). 1959 brought these struggles to a conclusion. It is no small irony that tourist narratives played an important role in the erosion of traditional elites after the 1930s. To illustrate this point, the author examines the role of Henry R. Luce’s media empire in this process. She contends that the Luce authors saw in Castro and his 26th of July Movement masculine heroes akin to America’s own revolutionary fathers – and a tonic to the uptight culture of the ‘organization man’, the icon of Eisenhower-era Cold-War culture. Writers treated Hawaiï as an example of racial democracy under the aegis of US power, an extension of the family romance first drawn by haoles seeking to justify their rule a half-century earlier. In the context of the Cold War, and of simmering racist violence in the mainland USA, such a showcase could hardly have been more valuable on the world stage. Economically written, tightly organized, and shorn of jargon (though not of conceptual insights), this book would fare well among most upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Specialists of empire, US expansion, and tourism history will all find insight here. While The purposes of paradise effectively puts the lie to the notion of American exceptionalism, it also generates a lingering question: How significant was tourism in terms of sheer numbers and as an economic-development strategy in comparison to European colonial peripheries in the same period? Could it be argued that the great numbers of US tourists to visit Cuba and Hawaiï (among other tropical destinations in the US sphere) made US tropical empire a particularly touristic one – and was that experience exceptional in the course of modern empires? Such questions lie beyond the scope and intent of this important work. Christine Skwiot’s accomplishment has been to establish that US expansion was so thoroughly enmeshed with tourism as to be unthinkable without it.