Kaua'i - Hawaii - page 1100

New Voices
Other influential Hawaii writers who found their voices toward the end of the 20th cen-
tury include Nora Okja Keller, whose first novel, Comfort Woman, won the 1998 Amer-
ican Book Award, and Kiana (born Diana) Davenport, whose Shark Dialogues (1994),
Song of the Exile (2000) and House of Many Gods (2007) are sweeping multigeneration-
al family tales entwined with Hawaii's own history.
Other contemporary Hawaii writers, especially women, abound. Some, like Mia King
( Sweet Life, 2008), eschew purely ethnic or Hawaii-centered narratives, while others -
like Kaui Hart Hemmings ( House of Thieves, 2005) and Marie Hara ( An Offering of
Rice, 2007) - explode the 'paradise myth' as they explore conflcted issues of race and
class. Hemmings' novel The Descendants (2007) has a dissolute Southern Gothic air, as
the troubled ʻohana of haole plantation owners and a Hawaiian princess almost lose their
inheritance and their way.
Hawaii has been home to many modern painters, notably Herb Kawainui Kane, and
scores of visiting artists also have drawn inspiration from the islands' rich cultural herit-
age and landscapes. Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and Its People,
1778-1941 by David Forbes is a vivid art-history tour.
Hawaii on Screen
Nothing has cemented the fantasy of Edenic Hawaii in the popular imagination as firmly
as Hollywood. Today, the 'dream factory' continues to peddle variations on a South Seas
genre that first swept movie theaters in the 1930s. Whether the mood is silly or serious,
whether Hawaii is used as a setting or a stand-in for someplace else, the story's familiar
tropes hardly change, updating the original tropical castaways soap opera and providing
a romantic gloss to the real history of colonization.
Hollywood first arrived in 1913, less than a decade after Thomas Edison journeyed to
Hawaii to make movies that you can still watch today at Lahaina's Wo Hing Museum
( Click here ) on Maui. By 1939, dozens of Hollywood movies had been shot here, includ-
ing musical comedies like Waikiki Wedding (1937), in which Bing Crosby crooned the
Oscar-winning song 'Sweet Leilani.' Later favorites include the WWII-themed From
Here to Eternity (1953) and South Pacific (1958), and Elvis Presley's goofy postwar Blue
Hawaii (1961).
Today, Hawaii actively encourages and supports the lucrative film industry by main-
taining state-of-the-art production facilities and providing tax incentives. Hundreds of
feature films have been shot in the state, including box-office hits like Raiders of the Lost