Inspired by recent work on global decadence as well as Susan Sontag’s classic formulation of dandyism, this chapter focuses on the figure of the dandy as he appears in fiction and nonfiction writing from and about the Hawaiian islands. In the hands of Anglo-American travel writers such as Charles Warren Stoddard and Robert Louis Stevenson, the island dandy often embodies an alluring but dangerous decadence associated in particular with late nineteenth-century Polynesia; for Indigenous writers and practitioners, by contrast, the dandy’s subversive, nonnormative masculinity becomes a way of leveraging European style against encroaching colonial power. This chapter argues that the island dandy thus emblematizes the manifold anxieties surrounding cultural and political modernity that would emerge in the 1890s and give the decade its characteristic sense of jubilant expectation and pessimistic dread. Within the broader context of the volume, the chapter also considers what approaches and methods might better serve the field of Victorian studies as it reorients itself along increasingly global lines.

For its first 5,000 years, the language which eventually became English remained firmly geographically anchored in the Northern Hemisphere. The first expansion of English as a native language into the Southern Hemisphere was not until 1659, when it arrived on the remote island of St Helena, about 15° south of the equator in the South Atlantic. There was no further movement of English until the 1780s, when it arrived in Australia and then, during the 1800s, into the Pacific.

Woman suffragists and labor activists continue to sing together, in more than one language, while, in Chicago, the Columbian Exposition of 1893 introduces a new musical genre – ragtime – to the world. Black composers and lyricists – Scott Joplin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Will Marion Cook, Harry T. Burleigh, Bob Cole, and the brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson – work to free themselves from the debasements of the “coon song.” Black operatic singers like Marie Selika Williams and Sissieretta Jones carve out their careers against the tide of popular minstrelsy. A strange new phenomenon – Filipinos in “coon songs” – reflects the latest muscle flex of US Manifest Destiny: the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and – for good measure – Hawai’i, all richly captured in popular song. Lili’uokalani’s overthrow and Hawaiian annexation lead to two remarkable musical by-products of US imperialism: the infiltration of Puerto Rican kachi kachi music in Hawai’i and the unique work-song body – the hole hole bushi – of the Japanese plantation laborers – all women. Meanwhile, Tin Pan Alley has a field day with the newly seized territory, transforming a site of misery and loss into a popular music paradise with the likes of “Hula Hula Dream Girl,” “Along the Way to Waikiki,” and “Oh! How She Could Yacki Hacki Wiki Wacki Woo.”

Labor’s gloves are off, and the country is rocked by waves of strikes, all backed by militant battle songs. The Pullman Strike brings to the fore Eugene Debs and other champions of labor and socialism, Coxey’s Army marches on Washington (singing), German immigrants fly the red flag of Anarchism (in song), and Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms swell the streets and sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side, transforming the national soundscape with Yiddish labor anthems and laying the foundations of modern musical theater. The Mexican corrido becomes more prominent amidst white nativist hostility, and in California the Chinese community continues to pit their authentic songs of struggle against the slanders of minstrelsy and the insult of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the western plains, the Lakota Ghost Dance and its attendant songs drive the US government into a panic born of ignorance, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. With the frontier officially closed and white settler colonialism entrenched from sea to shining sea, the champions of Manifest Destiny look further westward, to the Pacific islands, where a songwriter named Lili’uokalani, the queen of Hawai’i, awaits her overthrow.