Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment

by Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart

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

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Food, Politics, Indigenous, Research, Grad School

264 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2022

About the author

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reviews

[Mehak · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is perhaps one of the best texts within ethnic studies/post-colonial studies (and the first text on food studies) I've ever read. By using the lens of ice, cold/frozen foods, and thermal technologies, Hobart delves into the ways Hawai'i was colonized and native Hawaiians were racialized and forced to assimilate into American-ness, long before Hawaiian statehood. I love the powerful question that Hobart asks at the end of the book, reflecting on a 2019 trip she took to organize to halt telescope construction at the sacred site of Mauna Kea, where community was being fed and supported by food in coolers filled with ice – she asks, "in what ways, i wonder, do "artificial" ice and refrigeration constrain the conditions of possibility within movements that call for deoccupation, demilitarization, and dismantling of the settler state? In what ways do they support activist and movement spaces? What place does refrigeration have within Indigenous futures that move beyond settler capitalism, when coldness has played such an intimate role in these systems of oppression?"

[Mikayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️4

Cooling the Tropics takes you on a surprisingly eye-opening journey through the world of ice and its unexpected implications. It was incredibly fun to challenge my perspective on refreshment. While ice might not seem political at first glance, the connections are undeniably intriguing. Throughout the book, Hobart’s knowledge and passion for the subject shine through, greatly enhancing my enjoyment of this text.

[SaltyClone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise and thought-provoking analysis of a very "cool" topic :). Hobart has elegantly slotted this critical account of ice/refreshment/cooling in Hawai'i neatly into broader arguments about imperialism, temperature-regulating technology, and resulting colonizer/colonized subjectivities.

[Etienne RP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hawai’i on Ice

Many public events in the United States and in Canada begin by paying respects to the traditional custodians of the land, acknowledging that the gathering takes place on their traditional territory, and noting that they called the land home before the arrival of settlers and in many cases still do call it home. Cooling the Tropics does not open with such a Land Acknowledgement, but Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (thereafter: Hi′ilei Hobart) claims Hawai’i as her piko (umbilicus) and pays tribute to the kūpuna (noble elders) and the lāhui (lay people) who “defended the sovereignty of [her] homeland with tender and fierce love.” She describes her identity as “anchored in a childhood in Hawai’i, with a Kānaka Maoli mother who epitomized Hawaiian grace and a second-generation Irish father who expressed his devotion to her by researching and writing our family histories.” She expresseS her support for decolonial struggles and Indigenous rights, and participated in protests claiming territorial sovereignty for Hawai’i’s Native population. How can one decolonize Hawai’i? How can Hawaiian sovereignty discourse articulate a claim to land restitution and self-determination that is not a return to a mythic past? What about racial mixing, once regarded with anxiety and now touted as a symbol of Hawai’i’s success as a multicultural US state? What happens to settler colonialism and white privilege when the local economy and the political arena are dominated by populations originating from East Asia and persons of mixed descent? Is economic self-reliance a feasible option considering the imbrication of Hawai’i’s economy into the US mainland’s market? Can the rights of the Indigenous population be better defended in a sovereign Hawai’i? What is the meaning of supporting decolonial futures that include “deoccupation, demilitarization, and the dismantling of the settler state”? Can decolonization be achieved by nonviolent means, or do sovereignty’s activists have to resort to rebellion and armed struggle? What would be the future of a decolonized Hawai’i in a region fraught with military tensions and geopolitical rivalries? What can a decolonial perspective bring to the analysis of Hawai’i’s colonial past and possible futures? And why is academic research on Hawai’i’s history and society so often aligned with the decolonization agenda, to the point that decolonial approaches are almost synonymous with Hawaiian studies in the United States? More to the point: how can a PhD student majoring in food studies and chronicling the introduction of ice water, ice-making machines, ice cream, and shave ice in Hawai’i address issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, Native rights to self-determination, and decolonial futures?

Decolonize Hawai’i

Unbeknownst to most Americans, and to all non-US citizen but a few exceptions, there is a thriving independence movement taking place in the Hawaiian Islands today. It was borne out of an unlawful US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, it survived Hawai’i’s accession to statehood in 1959, and it is currently in opposition to the territorial encroachment by military infrastructure and other state interests over confiscated land and sacred sites. The Hawaiian sovereignty movement doesn’t advocate a return to a mythic past. Simply put, Native communities demand respect for their traditional cultures, consideration for their role as stewards of the land, and empowerment to take part in all decisions that affect them. Since 2014, local activists have opposed the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a scientific endeavor with governmental support from Canada, France, Japan, China, and India. Slated to become the most powerful telescope on the planet, the stadium-sized facility threatens to desecrate one of the most sacred sites for Kānaka Maoli. Construction was temporarily halted due to a blockade of the roadway leading to the site, and further protests as well as legal battles prevented construction of the telescope to resume. Hi′ilei Hobart took part in the protests, helping to keep the basecamp of picketers provisioned with food and beverages. Participating in local struggles fed into her dissertation in more than one way. Firstly, it underscored the obvious: ice and snow are native to Hawai’i; they are not an imported commodity brought by Anglo-American settlers along with “civilization”. Those who tell the story of how ice first came to Hawai’i get it wrong: ice and snow have been there since time immemorial. During winter, snow frequently falls on the ice-capped summits of the island chain’s tallest mountains. But even confronted with this evidence, popular discourse continues to construe ice and snow as alien to Hawai’i, and to frame Maunakea―the site of the TMT―as a terra nullius unoccupied by the Native population and thus open for grabs and available for construction in the name of science and progress. Discursive logics have combined to produce Maunakea as “not-for-Hawaiians” (Kānaka Maoli were supposed to steer away from altitude, and the first individuals on record to climb the mountaintops were Westerners), as “not-Hawai’i” (outsiders picture Hawai’i as a tropical paradise of lush valleys and beaches), and as “not-Earth” (NASA used the desolate volcanic site for outerspace simulations of spacewalks on Mars and the moon). Cumulative efforts to frame Maunakea as empty and alien have resulted in disregard for Natives’ rights and belief systems.

The second lesson Hi′ilei Hobart could draw from her roadblock picketing is a better sense of the local cosmogonies that tie humans with nature and the elements in Hawai’i. For Kanaka Maoli, Maunakea’s snow, mist, and rain are not just atmospheric phenomena: they signal the lingering presence of gods (akua) and ancestors’ spirits who have been occupying the place even in the absence of humans. Local tales or mo’olelo kept by way of oral transmission carry foundation myths of the islands and mountains and attest to Maunakea’s central role in Indigenous place and thought, while animating the elements and other life forces with their own spirit and consciousness. Likewise, for the anthropologist, commodities are animated with a life of their own. According to Marx, a wooden table “does not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” Ice and refreshments in the tropics are imbued with values, desires, longings, and social hierarchies. They have a history that intersects with the history of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the militaro-touristic complex in Hawai’i. Discourses about ice encapsulate ideas about race, modernity, gender, and the affective sensorium. They help rationalize Indigenous dispossession and contribute to the legitimization of imperialism. As historian Eric Jennings has demonstrated, the concepts of freshness and refreshment marked colonial relationships in the tropics. The hill stations and colonial spas built by the French and the British in their colonial outposts were predicated on the idea that fragile European bodies could not endure tropical heat and had to periodically regain some of their vigor in high-altitude places where conditions of life in the homeland were reproduced. The same logic explains how ice and frozen refreshments were progressively naturalized in Hawai’i’s foodscape. First to penetrate the Hawaiian market in the nineteenth century, ice cubes were associated with masculinity, alcohol consumption, saloon culture, plantation ownership, and white privilege. By contrast, the more feminine ice water came to be seen as a means to achieve temperance, mitigating the warm climate, and cooling after effort. Ice cream was a symbol of whiteness, sugary sweetness, purity, leasure, and innocent childhood; for young women, who could frequent the ice cream parlor without being chaperoned, the fast-melting delicacy was also synonymous with freedom and romantic encounters. Born on the plantations, shave ice is associated with brown labor, rural life, Asian migrants, mom-and-pop stores, and nostalgia for simpler times.

Infrastructures of the cold

As a third lesson of the author’s fieldwork as an activist came the realization that American society depends on thermal infrastructures, from the cold chain to keep perishable foodstuff to air conditioning and big houses protected from outside temperature. Freezers and refrigerators are essential to modern survival. These infrastructures have become so embedded in everyday life that they fade into the background, and their very invisibility guarantees that structures of dispossession and extraction go unnoticed. This is what the author labels “thermal colonialism”, defined as the modes by which temperature was managed and organized to favor settlers’ interests and reproduce racial hierarchies. Americans have become quite literally “conditioned” to experience coolness or frozen taste in hot weather, to the point that they consider the “right to chill” as constitutionally guaranteed. But desire for freshness and refreshment has a history: it is not biologically determined. We realize the importance of infrastructures of the cold when they fail us: the fragility of the cold chain in Hawai’i reveals itself after a hurricane, when lines of supply are disrupted, or each time the islands brace for an emergency. When things fall apart, networks of care and resilience take precedence over market relations and commercial interests. This is what Hi′ilei Hobart realized in the encampment at Mount Maunakea as she filled coolers with ice and drained their brown water to keep foodstuff fresh and edible. Managing community food resource pooling made her aware of food insecurity and thermal dependence in a state that heavily relies on imported goods and processed food. As her food studies turned to food work, she realized that “all that is frozen melts into water” (to paraphase Marx’s famous quote) and wondered whether Hawai’i had a future beyond the ice age: “what place does refrigeration have within Indigenous futures that move beyond settler capitalism, when coldness has played such an intimate role in these systems of oppression?” Draining water from coolers also drew her attention to melt as a condition of our current times marked by climate change and the images of fast-disappearing glaciers. She also discovered the materiality of freshness and frozenness, which pointed to a different kind of political economy as the one she had envisaged as a graduate student: an economy that is not based on commodity fetishism and labor exploitation, but on user value and short “farm-to-fork” circuits of exchange. Commodity trade, Marx argues, historically begins at the boundaries of separate economic communities based otherwise on a non-commercial form of production. As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Hi′ilei Hobart’s history of how artificial ice came to Hawai’i is heavily dependent on her sources. Scarce at the beginning, with a few advertisements and newspaper clippings (including publications in the local language, ‘ōlelo Hawai’i), they include a wider array of testimonies, photographs, business records, cookbooks, consumer goods, and personal memories as we move closer to the present. She first chronicles the great American ice trade, in which big blocks of ice harvested from lakes in the Northeast or in Alaska circulated the globe from 1840 to 1870, the year the first ice-making machines were introduced. The ice that went to the tropics was a luxury product, used in cocktails, to chill wines, and for service at fine hotels where American planters, Western missionaries, European tourists, and Hawaiian elites mingled. The ice importing business never really took off in Hawai’i: even though entrepreneurs petitioned the local rulers for monopoly rights and invested in storage facilities, the venture remained unprofitable and was interrupted in 1860 after two decades of sporadic shipments. King Kamehameha III had mixed feelings about alcoholic beverages and iced punches: ruling over a “semi-European” polity that was modernizing fast, he also leaned to the robust temperance movement championed by Western missionaries and patronage ladies. He eventually died in 1854 after drinking from a poisoned punch-bowl of iced champagne. Under the reign of the last Hawaiian monarch, King Kalākaua, Honolulu was a fast-growing city with all the trappings of a Western metropole. ‘Iolani Palace, the royal residence, had electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones even before Buckingham Palace or the White House. Among these technologies, ice machines and ice factories came into operation in the 1870s, transforming a once-foreign commodity into a local product.

Entering the Ice Age

Hawai’i entered the ice age at about the same period as the United States: when home refrigeration, cold chains for perishable goods, ice cream parlors, and soda fountains connected Honolulu’s domestic life to global standards of modernity. But unlike in the mainland, the use of freezing technologies were subject to colonialist frames of interpretation and local resistance. Settler reports of Kānaka aversion to ice stood as indictment of their slow pace to civility. Native people’s first contact with ice cream, taken as extremely hot instead of freezing cold, was derided as a sign of inferior civilizational status. Hawaiian-language newspapers, however, refuted implications that Kānaka Maoli were confused about or afraid of ice, and advertised the lavish cosmopolitan banquets including icy desserts served at the ‘Iolani Palace. But haole (foreigners), ali’i (elite Hawaiians), and maka’āinana (local commoners) reacted differently to frozen tastes, reflecting hierarchies of class, gender, and racialized proximity to whiteness. The racist and classist distinctions manifested themselves after US annexation during the pure food battles of the 1910s. The newly appointed food commissioner decided to apply US legislation strictly to ban poi, a local dish alternatively described as a truly delicious paste with yeasty flavor or “a native concoction that tastes like billboard paste,” and to increase the butterfat content of ice cream to mainland levels, contradicting local tastes and recipes developed by Japanese and Chinese ice cream vendors.

Shave ice and its “rainbow” of flavors is now offered as a metaphor for the “rainbow state” and its multiethnic, postracial population. As a symbol of Hawai’is racial landscape, the rainbow offers an important vehicle for the affective, and often tense, sentiments of identity and belonging. How did a food practice brought by Japanese migrants come to epitomize a US state, and how did a sugar plantation economy built along racial lines produce a racially harmonious society in the only US state with a nonwhite majority population? Shave ice offers an alternative narrative to forms of refreshment oriented toward white leasure, like the ice creams or tiki cocktails fetishized by the touristic gaze. Historians trace the origin of shave ice to Japanese agricultural workers and plantation store owners who brought the food tradition of kakigōri from Japan. Born in rural spaces where non-Hawaiians put down deep community roots, shave ice offers an alternative story about race and refreshment, one that is not tethered to whiteness and the leisure class. Asian immigrant populations in Hawai’i, once systematically marginalized, have become a “model majority” characterized by upward class mobility and adherence to nationalist values. They dominate the local economy, to the point scholars have forged the category “Asian settler colonialism” to describe the ascendancy of working-class communities of color. Hawai’i is now considered as a laboratory for multiethnic harmony as well as a harbinger of what the whole United States could become: a postracial nation, turning its back on its history of Native Indian extermination and Black enslavement. These fictions mask ongoing structural racism against Native Hawaiians and other ethnic minorities (Samoans, Filipino-Americans…) The shave ice success story glosses over such divisions and obscures Kānaka Maoli claims for Indigenous sovereignty. For present-day Hawaiians, it also brings back shared memories of childhood and nostalgia for “simpler times” characterized by community resilience, rural life, and low economic wealth. Again, this nationalist narrative envisioning an ahistorical and uncomplicated past erases a history of racial discrimination and labor exploitation, and produces “Hawaiians” as an always already multiethnic category that excludes indigeneity or Kānaka Maoli claims to place.

Hawaiian futures

I don’t see much potential in an independent, sovereign, or post-statehood Hawai’i that would grant Indigenous people rights of self-determination and privileges of territorial ownership. There are other ways to tackle the deep structural inequalities and discrimination that affect the Native population. As the French have experienced in French Polynesia, recognizing Indigenous rights is not synonymous with granting full independence or a right to secession. Politics of atonement and official apologies may be aligned with the Anglo-saxon protestant mindset, but they have their limits: short of reparations and restitution, they leave intact the structures of power that have led to Native dispossession and do not advance the living conditions of Indigenous populations. Economic needs must also be addressed, and the responsibility of all leaders, oriented toward independence or otherwise, is to chart a course that guarantees economic growth and sustainable development. I see tourism as a chance for Hawai’i, and militarization as a necessity borne out of historical and geopolitical concerns. Americans will always remember Pearl Harbor. Hawai’i is America’s first line of defense and its most strategic outpost in the Pacific. The security of the continent hinges on the continued presence of military forces which, along with tourism, form the twin pillars of the economy. (...)

[isaac dwyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is available in the Spring 2023 issue of E3W, published by the University of Texas at Austin.
****

Within the paradigm of the global refrigeration chain, how did the taste for ice develop in Hawaiʻi? What does the aesthetic of industrial thermal technologies in the Pacific archipelago reveal about the specificities of haole (id est, white settler) settler colonialism and Kānaka Maoli resistance?

In Dr. Hiʻlei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart’s new monograph, Cooling the Tropics, the new faculty member of the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale University argues that nigh all cold thermalities in Hawaiʻi, from consumable pleasures to the state management of volcanic alpine tundra, become semiotically articulated in what the I-Kiribati poet Teresia Teaiwa dubbed the ‘militouristic.’ Employing self-reflective ethnographic and historiographical research methods and anthropological theory, Hobart traces the past two-and-a-half centuries of Hawaiʻi’s cold under colonial occupation through five expressions: cocktails, refrigeration, ice cream, Hawaiian ice shave, and Mauna Kea.

Hobart’s critical lens emanates from her expertise as a food scholar. By considering the genealogy of the islands’ fruity makai-side resort cocktails and their turbulent relationship with the transoceanic ice trade, Hobart shows how a taste for their boozy sweetness was produced by the haole plantation overseer class as leisurely respite from equatorial torpor. While white consumption of chilled cocktails was permitted and licensed by the Hawaiian government, the 1850 penal code declared any native found imbibing the same would be summarily fined. In contrast to the logic of sexually racialized notions of inborn indigenous lassitude, whites were permitted to not only indulge in the mixological, but profit from it handsomely. “This trick,” Hobart writes, “in which alcohol polarized haole leisure and Hawaiian languor, reverberated throughout tourist industry stereotypes that, into the twentieth century, celebrated white comfort and expense of Native labor.” Hobart’s intervention thus trods along a similar path as Sidney Mintz’s landmark 1985 study of the sugar industry, Sweetness and Power.

The aesthetic of cold consumption is further framed vis-a-vis its utility for systematic indigenous dispossession by the ice shave. Through close readings of advertisements, attending to the psychoanalytical substrate of commercial marketing, Hobart argues that ice shave is leveraged as a saccharine sublimation of Hawaiʻi’s racial politics. The bouquets of tropical syrups ooze oh-so-gently into one another—maintaining their distinct colors yet suspended in whiteness. Each color is imagined as a distinct race suspended in mellifluous concert, offering a “metaphor […] wherein a sugar plantation economy produced a racially harmonious society for the only US state with a nonwhite majority population.” To proffer the sweet rainbow as epitomizing the islands’ “local flavor” leads to “Hawaiianness [becoming] obliquely depoliticized in the service of neutralizing Kanaka Maoli indigeneity.” To render indigeneity neuter through visual subsumption, Hobart argues, is de rigueur in the capitalist packaging of “local flavor.”

The most delectable elements of Hobart’s work are to be found in her close readings of visual advertising materials. Examining a 1921 advertisement for Rawley’s ice cream, Hobart presents us with the image adorning the cover of her book, a full-page portrait of a young Hawaiian girl:

“Presented without title or logo, it trades the purity of nature for the purifying embrace of civility. Instead of flowing freely, her hair is styled with glossy bangs and short curls that show off the nape of her neck. Rather than depicted in an outdoor setting, she is posed for a formal studio portrait, sitting with her torso turned toward the camera to create a three-quarter profile, left hand resting in her lap.

The image offers a study in contrasts: the girl’s brown skin gleams against a white pinafore. She is smiling, but her lips are obscured by an ice cream cone that sets off her brownness with its milky whiteness.”

Hobart offers the image along with a self-condemning advertising byline from the Christmas edition of the tourist periodical, Paradise of the Pacific. It provides a lesson on the prosody of orientalist pederosis:

“Merry Christmas. Santa Claus doesn’t forget good little girls just because they live in Hawaiʻi, where the old fellow’s reindeer outfit would have a pretty hard time sledding, and nary chimney exists for his convenience. Nevertheless, as one may easily perceive, he manages to deliver the goods. This child is pure Hawaiian, and furnishes a beautiful example of what Hawaiian eyes can do.”

Hobart hardly needs to go in for the kill, but she does so exactingly: “While it is unclear exactly what her eyes are able to do in this instance (Entice a pedophilic onlooker? Convince a skeptical Santa of her humanity?), the trappings of whiteness become materially and metaphorically significant to purity’s embodiment.” Hobart’s critique is like that of an anticolonial Edward Bernays, revealing the frozen white dairy dessert lapped up by Kanaka child like some kind of eugenic eucharist.

Food scholarship and critical geography collide as Hobart turns her gaze towards the internationalized galaxy-gazing megaplex scooped into the Mauna Kea summit. No aspect of the occupation’s imperial kitsch is spared: from the flourishing fun park activities, Exempli gratia: photos of a Haole skier hittin’ the slopes backgrounded by telescopes, captioned “Hawaii Not?” and NASA astronauts-in-training putzing about in full moonwalk gear through what the federal agency Columbused as “Apollo Valley.” Hobart’s critical intervention, however, gains its strength not only from its astute analyses of the US militaristic occupational apparati, but her firm argumentation for the specificities of indigenous sovereignty, futurity, and relationality.

Mauna Kea, the islands’ highest volcano, is the site of the world’s most important and sophisticated astronomy observatories. It is also the center of the Kānaka Maoli weltanschauung; its caldera the piko (navel) from which the world and our known reality emerged. As the preparation for construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT)—a new telescope of gargantuan extent, as its name would suggest—came to a head in 2015, the summit access road became a site of strategic occupation by Kānaka Maoli activists and their allies, to protect their sacred site from further imperial desecration. Hobart’s research draws on the archives to historicize the logic of the astronomical incursion: “the summit of Maunakea has been systematically recast as a space both otherworldly and a-national […] research sites like Maunakea often become valued as places that transcend international politics […] belonging to no one in particular and to everyone in general.”

It is Hobart’s exploration of her personal participation in the occupation of the summit protesting the TMT that provides the material fodder for her final theoretical intervention. Volunteering as a part of the culinary crew, part of her kuleana(responsibility) was the thermal management of donated perishables, entailing constant monitoring of the ice blocks rapidly melting in the high-altitude sunlight. Arising from the same semiotic logic undergirding her close-readings, Hobart proposes we consider this ice melt through the lens of “not only […] anticolonial struggle but also […] interdependence and calibration: a phase state change that […] re-forms bonds at a molecular level. For Indigenous archipelagic peoples, melt can remind us of shared struggles across vast geographies.” This could be construed as an over-imaginative leap. Does not the threat of the deteriorating thermal technology—that is, a melting ice chest filled with shredded meat straight off a container ship—reveal a fundamental vulnerability? Perhaps, but such a bold leap might be necessary to traverse the crevasse from critique towards liberatory manifesto.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual Rating: 2.5 or 2.75 or maybe 3. I'm having a hard time articulating my feelings on this so bear with me. Overall, I found this book to be a little disappointing. It's not bad by any means, the author clearly did a lot of research and brought in her own experience at points which I always appreciate. But, I don't think this stuck the landing in the same way other reviewers have said.

Part of that's on me, I went in expecting a more ethnographic approach and this was far more historical in nature. There's also some media criticism and brief citations to interviews people affected by ice's introduction to Hawaii, but other than that the majority of this book is a history of Hawaii's relationship to ice. Even after I adjusted my expectations, however, I found this book lacking in certain ways.

The writing was a little dry and meandering to me, which made it hard to fully focus at points. I really like academic writing, but for a topic like this (prescient, connecting a lot of important big issues, some level of humor baked in--after all there are Victorian ice cream bans at one point) I really prefer something more approachable. There were several times where Hobart did lean into that conversational tone, and I just wish we had seen more of it throughout.

The biggest issue to me is the thermal analytical/infrastructural approach. I found the concept really interesting and can see the validity in it, but this book did not do a good job of convincing me that it was an especially useful way of examining colonization in Hawaii. At times the approach is used effectively, but in many cases Hobart shoves it aside for some other lens only to bring it back in the last couple of pages of a chapter. In some cases "thermal analysis" meant a specific examination of temperature and its relation to socially constructed identities and in others it meant examining cold things, but without focusing on the meaning of temperature. For example, the first chapter is all about the dynamics of heat/cold in relation to Hawaii's geography and the ways in which the "tropical paradise" is contrasted with the "frigid mountain peaks" present on some of the islands. But the chapter on ice cream focuses almost exclusively on the significance of dairy, not temperature. Both chapters are called thermal analyses, but only one zeroes-in on, well, temperature. I guess analysis of any cold thing is a thermal analysis? It felt like Hobart identified a useful framework, but didn't quite pin down what it would mean aside from "looking at anything related to temperature." Or, at the very least, she didn't explain her deeper reasoning throughout the book.

There were also times where I felt the author wandered off topic a bit. For example, I see what she was going for with the American Girl doll section, but it felt really ham-fisted. In the last chapter, she's talking about the ways shaved ice is used as a metaphor for (imposed) diversity in Hawaii and then just goes "and in American Girl doll books they also use shaved ice." Like, okay, sure. But are doll books for kids really the best way to explore this idea? If you think so, why? Without a clear explanation it just feels like Hobart cast a wide net for different examples without deeper consideration for how they fit within the thermal analysis framework. This isn't the only example, but it was the most confusing to me, as a reader.

I want to emphasize that I don't think this is a horrible book and the idea of thermal analytics on its own is fascinating. I just wish this work exploring it had been more organized and concise. I will say that the conclusion offered a lot of insight into why Hobart landed on a thermal approach and that softened my feelings on the book a lot. If you are interested in the topic I would give it a read, especially if you are wanting to learn more about Hawaii's history. Just bear in mind that if you are really interested in the specific framework being proposed, you might be a little frustrated by the end.

[Melina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic text. Touches on so many important topics: the Mauna Kea Thirty Mile Telescope project thats been being protested for years, the importation of ice and forced reliance on ice and refrigeration, the militouristic infrastructure of Americanized Hawai’i, the fetishization of refreshment as a calling call for white tourism, the imposition of colonial “use value” onto indigenous sacred sites “for science”, and the abstraction and desolating of inhabited and sacred land in order to make the ongoing colonization of the hawaiian islands palatable to liberals. It’s parasitic, but it’s colonialism so of course it is. I think this is a particularly great recommendation for those interested in the climate crisis and who’s inclination leans more towards the natural sciences. “Science” as an emerging 16th century concept is rooted in colonial violence and its raison d’etre as an area of specialization especially with regards to engineering, geography, urban planning, and infrastructure continues to promulgate imperialism and indigenous dispossession. If you care to do something about that , Read beyond your field.

[John Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book looks at the history of the Hawai'ian islands in a unique way, through its relationship with ice. The book begins in the present at the only place where ice is readily available naturally in Hawai'i, on the slopes of Mauna Kea volcano and then moves on to the history of outside forces that brought ice first to the islands by ship. It moves on to look at the colonial push to have Hawai'ians eat ice cream and move away from poi. Finally, it comes up to the present with a look at the shaved ice shops. This is a well-researched and well-written study of the the islands told in a very unique way.

[Queer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book. It is a chilling meander through history and food that questions our sensibilities and the origins of seemingly ubiquitous tastes today all while rooted in kanaka experience, religion, ways of knowing, and care.

[Coco Gelato · Rating 3 out of 5]

a surprising amount of ice cream, but not enough of ice trade

[Adrienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I purchased Cooling the Tropics a full year before I actually read it, and I was looking forward to diving in the whole time! It might seem like a random thing to be interested in, but I was genuinely fascinated by examining ice from a political and colonialist perspective. The book revealed its unexpected impacts and it was surprisingly fun to rethink something as simple as refreshment. The connections Hobart made in this book were thought-provoking and her enthusiasm and deep knowledge of the subject came through.

[Hobey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting study of settler colonialism in Hawaii and how it was done through thermal activities.

[Martin Abelvik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was gifted this by a friend and now i see why -
Essential and fresh perspectives for anyone operating in the pacific poltical context.

[fime · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesannnnnte

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic book that is accessible and intriguing in this premise and presentation. Certainly one of my favorite books that I've read this year.