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.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)