Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment by Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (review)

Reviewed by: Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment by Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart Hōkūlani K. Aikau (bio) Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment by Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart Duke University Press, 2022 IT ISN'T VERY OFTEN that a book has the immediate effect of shifting my perspective on everyday life. Hi'ilei Hobart's Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment did just that. Her attention to the thermo-politics of coldness, refrigeration, and ice had me hyperaware of how ubiquitous these sensory experiences, technologies, and consumer products are in my everyday life—from my family's dependence on the refrigerator to the life-sustaining necessity of air conditioning in this time of extreme heat. Hobart describes how cooling and freezing technologies emerged and how they have become so normalized and naturalized in Hawai'i that they are almost invisible. She shows the reader how "the normative thermal relationships between bodies and environments have developed as a function of American imperial power, arguing that they continue to operate today as embodied expressions of ongoing settler colonialism" (2). While the project spans from nineteenth to twenty-first-century Hawai'i, Hobart's attention to the colonial, racial, and gendered dynamics of "thermal colonialism and settler refreshment" makes this book relevant beyond the context of its central case study. Hobart provides richly nuanced readings of multiple texts and archives that include Hawaiian mo'olelo (stories/histories), business ledgers, shipping logs, advertising, as well as commodities such as ice, ice cream, refrigerators, and shave ice. She writes, "Tracing ice and the cold offers a sensorial through line that connects power to pleasure as it traverses the racial and economic terrains of these multiple configurations" (9). Hobart opens and closes the book on Mauna a Wākea to stress that her project is not singularly about the politics of ice. Rather, in juxtaposing the ontological differences between Kanaka Moali notions of temperature, especially the cold and snow, and the value of the mountain for Western scientific exploration of space, she masterfully demonstrates how notions [End Page 114] of temperature are inextricably linked to race, colonialism, dispossession, and extraction. In chapter 1, Hobart contrasts the sacredness of Mauna a Wākea for Kanaka Maoli with the mountain's value for Western science and astronomy. In opening the book with this long-standing controversy, Hobart amplifies the ways in which temperature, its regulation, manufacturing, ideologies, and discourses are part of a much larger project of sustaining settler colonialism. The three middle chapters trace the history of ice in Hawai'i from its first introduction and decline in the 1850s (ch. 2), to the revival of ice in the islands as refrigeration technology improved between the 1860s and 1880s (ch. 3), to the role of shave ice in manufacturing touristic imaginaries in the early twentieth century (ch. 4). Written as a chronological narrative, each chapter begins by setting the political and social context before moving on to explain how ice, ice cream, shave ice, and cold temperature offer insights into the social and political milieu of Hawai'i. As Hobart explains, while ice, as a commodity, had a relatively small material footprint, as a signifier it carries much weight. Hobart's piercing attention to the thermal politics of temperature makes visible the colonial ideologies, racial projects, and gendered domestication of refrigeration, ice, and the role they play in the settlement and control of Hawai'i. The final chapter invites the reader to engage in a thought exercise that could be the foundation of a final creative or research project in an advanced undergraduate course or a graduate seminar. What infrastructure, strategic planning, and governance systems would need to be put in place to break free from thermal dependence? Until reading this book, I had not fully grasped the impacts of thermal dependency on our lives and futures. Hobart describes the precarity of melting ice in the context of having to feed hundreds of kia'i (guardians) at the Pu'uhonua o Pu'uhuluhulu, the base camp for the blockade to protect Mauna a Wākea. After reading this book I now realize that my thinking about Indigenous...