Beginning in the mid-1800s, Americans hauled frozen pond water, then glacial ice, and then ice machines to Hawaiʻi-all in an effort to reshape the islands in the service of Western pleasure and profit. Marketed as “essential” for white occupants of the nineteenth-century Pacific, ice quickly permeated the foodscape through advancements in freezing and refrigeration technologies. In Cooling the Tropics Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi to show how the interlinked concepts of freshness and refreshment mark colonial relationships to the tropics. From chilled drinks and sweets to machinery, she shows how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses. By outlining how ice shaped Hawaiʻi’s food system in accordance with racial and environmental imaginaries, Hobart demonstrates that thermal technologies can-and must-be attended to in struggles for food sovereignty and political self-determination in Hawaiʻi and beyond.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient
Note on ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i Usage vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Feeling Cold in Hawai‘i 1
1. A Prehistory of the Artificial Cold in Hawai‘i 21
2. Vice, Virtue, and Frozen Necessities in the Sovereign City 47
3. Making Ice Local: Technology, Infrastructure, and Cold Power in the Kalākaua Era 71
4. Cold and Sweet: The Taste of Territorial Occupation 91
5. Local Color, Rainbow Aesthetics, and the Racial Politics of Hawaiian Shave Ice 113
Conclusion: Thermal Sovereignties 137
Notes 147
Bibliography 205
Index 233
