Militarized Threads: Fashioning Empire through the Aloha Shirt

Christen T. Sasaki
Ethnic Studies
UC San Diego

“Militarized Threads: Fashioning Empire Through the Aloha Shirt” considers how the garment, which is synonymous with tropical Hawaiian getaways in the cultural imaginary, came to represent varied aspects of the political spectrum—from serving as a uniform for armed white nationalists to articulating Hawaiian sovereignty and cultural resilience. As the first book to connect the nearly one-hundred-year history of the aloha shirt to the processes and structures of empire, Militarized Threads challenges the way the garment is innocuously coded as synonymous with the idea of “Hawai‘i as paradise,” and contends that taking the shirt seriously reveals the power of meanings produced, sustained, and consumed through objects and places where militarism and tourism overlap. This project engages with UCHRI’s theme of “Entanglement” by laying bare the imbricated systems of tourism, militarism, and Indigenous cultural resilience that the aloha shirt embodies. It seeks to enrich scholarship that critiques the spread of militarization through everyday life practices by asking, “If we can see militarism in khaki clothing, why can we not see it in a garment that is paired with guns and other weapons?” And perhaps most importantly, “What’s at stake when one dons an aloha shirt?”

Image Credit: University of Hawai‘i Archives