Plucked from tropical America, the pineapple was brought to European tables and hothouses before it was conveyed back to the tropics, where it came to dominate U.S. and world markets. Pineapple Culture is a dazzling history of the world's tropical and temperate zones told through the pineapple's illustrative career. Following Gary Y. Okihiro's enthusiastically received Island World: A History of Hawaii and the United States, Pineapple Culture continues to upend conventional ideas about history, space, and time with its provocative vision. At the center of the story is the thoroughly modern tale of Dole's Hawaiian pineapple, which, from its island periphery, infiltrated the white, middle-class homes of the continental United States. The transit of the pineapple brilliantly illuminates the history and geography of empires--their creations and accumulations; the circuits of knowledge, capital, labor, goods, and the cultures that characterize them; and their assumed power to name, classify, and rule over alien lands, peoples, and resources.

""Pineapple Culture" is an imaginative reframing of world history with Hawaii and its best known tropical product at its center. By turns philosophical and historical, it interrogates the tropes and tropical hermeneutics, as well as the structures and practices of empire."--Edmund Burke III, coeditor of "Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics"

"By excavating the career of the pineapple as tropical desire and trophy of empire, Okihiro masterfully situates Hawaii within discussions of imperial commerce, multiracial plantation economies, domestic science and gendered modernist culture. A stunning model of inclusive global history!"--George J. Sanchez, author of "Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945"