In Gateway State, Sarah Miller-Davenport explores the construction of Hawai‘i as a “bridge to Asia” that an array of actors hoped would serve as a site for cultivating mutual understanding and projecting US global power across the Pacific. Miller-Davenport traces how this utopian vision of Hawai‘i was built by statehood advocates, businesspeople, writers, activists, politicians, and ordinary people both in Hawai‘i and in the continental United States in the post-World War II period. Her analysis of this broad cast of characters draws on a variety of sources from Congressional records to the writings of activists and journalists and even student evaluations.

Miller-Davenport convincingly shows how, despite the particularities of Hawai‘i itself, it became a blank slate for those from the continental United States to fill with their own ideas about race, multiculturalism, and how the United States should act in the world in an age of global decolonization. In the end, we see how those utopian visions fractured when the Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i revealed just how far the reality of inequality in Hawai‘i strayed from the ideal.

In tracing the rise and fall of this utopian vision of multiculturalism in Hawai‘i, Miller-Davenport follows two related stories. First, she shows the changes in Hawai‘i itself as it became this “bridge to Asia” both in thought and in practice through institutions like the East West Center, the Peace Corps, and USAID's Asia Training Center (the subject of chapter 3), and through the tourism industry's promotion of “Aloha Spirit” and the “Golden People” (the subject of chapter 4). Hawai‘i became a place for tourists and trainees to experience Asia while still enjoying the comforts of being in the United States.

The second thread Miller-Davenport traces is how different groups in the continental United States constructed the meaning of Hawai‘i. There, people who may never go to the islands themselves still used the idea of them for their own ends. For black civil rights activists, Hawai‘i was a racially tolerant paradise – proof that integration worked. Meanwhile, consuming Hawai‘i through food, fashion, and backyard luaus allowed white middle-class women and their families to feel worldly without ever having to interact with nonwhite people. As Miller-Davenport argues, Hawai‘i allowed white US citizens to perform racial tolerance without requiring any real commitment to racial equality. However, these related topics of what Hawai‘i meant to black and white people in the continental United States are split into different chapters (2 and 5) with little connection made between the two. Miller-Davenport convincingly shows that the idea of Hawai‘i changed how both groups imagined their place in the nation and their nation's place in the world. Hawai‘i symbolized liberation and equality to both, but the reader must put together for themselves the differences and similarities between the ways the two groups constructed and used Hawai‘i, and what purpose Hawai‘i served in their everyday lives.

This is one example of connections left unmade between the many intriguing threads in this book. Each of the six chapters could stand alone. And if at times the reader is left wanting to know more about how they relate to one another, the payoff comes for instructors, who will have no trouble assigning one or two chapters from the book.

For those who don't know much about Hawai‘i, Miller-Davenport makes the compelling case that this story is absolutely fundamental to understanding the advent of multiculturalism in the United States more generally. Multiculturalism, before it was a leftist critique, was a tool used by liberal policymakers and businesspeople to, as Miller-Davenport argues, advance US interests abroad and make money at home. And she convincingly shows that Hawai‘i – or, more accurately, the idea of Hawai‘i – was absolutely central to the formation of this idea.

Miller-Davenport is well aware that Native Hawaiians were not part of her actors’ project, noting their absence throughout the book. Indeed, it was Hawai‘i's perceived Asianness that mattered most to those involved in building this utopian vision. To them, Hawaiian food was chop suey, not poi. In noting this conspicuous absence, Miller-Davenport adds to a growing chorus of scholars writing about what some have called “Asian settler colonialism” in Hawai‘i, and the ways it has obscured Native Hawaiian indigenous claims.

This book is a welcome addition to the growing field of studies on US colonial empire. It is useful especially for thinking about how statehood fits into our conversations about empire. As Miller-Davenport has shown, while statehood symbolized decolonization to many, it most certainly did not end colonialism in Hawai‘i.