Teresa Shewry
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816691579
- eISBN:
- 9781452952390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691579.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter examines how writers from Hawai‘i associate hope with water. In Hawai‘i from the late nineteenth century onward, the agricultural industry diverted water from rivers and other sources to ...
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This chapter examines how writers from Hawai‘i associate hope with water. In Hawai‘i from the late nineteenth century onward, the agricultural industry diverted water from rivers and other sources to sugar plantations in particular. The recent collapse of the sugar industry fueled struggles for the restoration of water. Gary Pak’s short stories represent the return of water to places and peoples from which it was taken for sugar plantations, anticipating a promising, open future through engagement with the migratory spaces and temporal uncertainties of water. Poet Cathy Song provides a different perspective, writing about people who live and work on the plantations to which water was diverted. In exploring the gendered and racialized labor arrangements woven together with water in these sites and beyond, she recognizes alternative social practices and potentials in the everyday, mundane, and yet creative interactions between migrant workers and water.Less
This chapter examines how writers from Hawai‘i associate hope with water. In Hawai‘i from the late nineteenth century onward, the agricultural industry diverted water from rivers and other sources to sugar plantations in particular. The recent collapse of the sugar industry fueled struggles for the restoration of water. Gary Pak’s short stories represent the return of water to places and peoples from which it was taken for sugar plantations, anticipating a promising, open future through engagement with the migratory spaces and temporal uncertainties of water. Poet Cathy Song provides a different perspective, writing about people who live and work on the plantations to which water was diverted. In exploring the gendered and racialized labor arrangements woven together with water in these sites and beyond, she recognizes alternative social practices and potentials in the everyday, mundane, and yet creative interactions between migrant workers and water.
