Hawaiian Studies - Criticism

Criticism

Hawaiian Studies has always been opposed by different elements. Proponents of Hawaiian Studies feel that this is a reactionary movement from the right. They point out the rise of the conservative movement in the United States during the 1990s which saw the discipline come increasingly under attack. For proponents, the backlash is characterised as an attempt to preserve "traditional values" of Western culture, symbolized by the United States. For some critics, this actually is a slant by the proponents to disparage criticism by false association to right wing ideology. They have no objection about Hawaiian culture being legitimate topics of academic research. What they object to is the current state of Ethnic Studies which they see as characterised by excessive left wing political ideology or Hawaiian claims to justice which, in their view, greatly undermined the scholarly validity of the research. However, Hawaiian Studies has been accused of promoting "racial separatism", "linguistic isolation" and "racial preference".

Hawaiian Studies has suffered most criticism by attorney William Burgess and retired high school mathematics teacher Kenneth Conklin. Their criticism is political and aimed at Hawaiian claims to justice and has never really attacked the actual scholarship of Hawaiian Studies scholars.

Read more about this topic:  Hawaiian Studies

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.”
    Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)