Two professors with University of Hawaiʻi ties co-edited a newly released book putting a distinctive spin on a tourist guidebook concept. Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi, was initially conceived as an alternative guidebook to Hawaiʻi, but transformed into a deeply place-based guide to decolonization in the islands.
UH Mānoa American Studies Associate Professor and Honors Director Vernadette Gonzalez and Hōkūlani K. Aikau, associate professor of ethnic studies and gender studies at the University of Utah (formerly of UH Mānoa’s political science department) collaborated on the project. The book features 57 contributions from artists, academics and activists from all over Hawaiʻi.
“The ‘Detours’ project first started out with us thinking through what it might be like to take the genre of the guidebook, take that shape, the framework that it has, and have people from here tell stories of place, rather than have somebody from outside come here and tell everybody else where to go, what hotels to go to, what are the places to see and what are the things to do,” said Gonzalez.
Events featuring the book’s contributors will be scheduled in the upcoming months.
The book is available from Duke University Press and Amazon.
