University of Hawaii Press Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women's Pan-Pacific (Perspectives on the Global Past)

Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women's Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women's network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project - from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region - the association's vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories. ""Glamour in the Pacific"" tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history. The internationalist vision of the early twentieth century imagined a world in which race and empire had been relegated to the past. Significant numbers of women from around the Pacific brought this shared vision to the lively, even glamorous, political experiment of the Pan-Pacific Women's Association. Fiona Paisley relates the stories of this extraordinary group of women and illuminates the challenges and rewards of their politics of antiracism - one that still resonates today.