Plantation Disaster Capitalism in Maui: Reckoning with Tourism after the Fire

Abstract

Maui residents are reckoning with tourism in the aftermath of the 2023 fires. Drawing from historical sources and popular media reports, we argue that beyond the island’s strained relationship with the tourism industry, residents are contending with the slow emergency of plantation disaster capitalism. We draw from Naomi Klein and Kapua’ala Sproat’s (2023) concept of plantation disaster capitalism which identifies the plantation industry’s domination of resources as the basis of tourism’s untethered control of land and water on the island. These crisis-driven industries perpetuate dependence through ongoing cycles of accumulation by dispossession. The concept of ‘slow emergencies’ further accounts for how, while the Maui fires rapidly destroyed lives, over a century and a half of settler colonial, racial, and capitalist relationships had already restructured landscapes and livelihoods and set the stage for the 2023 disaster. In critically addressing calls for tourism’s resurgence, this conceptual paper contributes to emerging scholarship on plantation disaster capitalism in tourism destinations.

Keywords:

• Maui fires
• plantation disaster capitalism
• disaster capitalism
• settler colonialism
• water justice
• crisis capitalism
• post-crisis tourism
• Hawai’i
• neoliberalism
• slow emergency

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Noelani Ahia for her groundbreaking organizing and for taking the time to speak with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurel Mei-Singh

Laurel Mei-Singh an Assistant Professor of Geography and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include environmental justice, militarization, the relationship of race and indigeneity to histories of war, fences and self-determination, carceral geographies and abolition, racial capitalism, and the Pacific. Her current book project develops a genealogy of military fences and grassroots struggles for land and livelihood in Wai’anae, a rural and heavily militarized region of the island of O’ahu in Hawai’i.

Mary Mostafanezhad

Mary Mostafanezhad is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Her work is broadly focused on development and socio-environmental change in the Asia-Pacific Region. Collectively, Mary has published ten books and more than 50 articles and chapters on these themes. Mary is the co-editor-in-chief of Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment and a co-editor of the Critical Green Engagements Series of the University of Arizona Press.

Tazim Jamal

Tazim Jamal is Professor in the Department of Hospitality, Hotel Management and Tourism at Texas A&M University, USA. Her research interests include ‘sustainable’ tourism and collaborative tourism planning. She is the author of Justice and Ethics in Tourism (Routledge, 2019), co-editor of Justice and Tourism: Principles and Approaches for Local-Global Sustainability and Well-Being (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Studies (2009). She is also Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism.