As a genre, the huaben話本 short story reassured readers of a Heaven who punished and rewarded human actions with perfect accuracy. Yet in the years before the Ming明 (1368-1644) collapse, the genre grew increasingly dark. Aina Jushi wrote Doupeng xianhua豆棚閒話, or Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (c. 1668), only a few years after the Manchus solidified their rule. The only full-frame story in pre-modern Chinese literature, the text is also notable for the directness with which it confronts societal and cosmological questions arising from the fall of the Ming dynasty. It was also the last significant huaben before the genre faded into obsolescence. My dissertation asks three questions. Why was this the last major collection of the genre? How do the form and the content work together? And what does Aina contribute to the Qing cosmological questioning through a genre obsessed with an ordered cosmos? I argue that the text deserves further study because of the beautiful complexity of its narrative structure and voices and its direct confrontation of the fall of the Ming. I also argue that Aina questions if there really is a moral Heaven that rewards and punishes human action and if there is any greater significance to virtuous action. His doubts about the presence of a moral Heaven increase as the text progresses but he is unwilling to completely discard Confucian relational ethics. This is shown by his loosening of the requirements of the huaben structure. The narratives become more incoherent and the content generally grows darker. By the final narrative, Aina drops the huaben form and presents an apathetic cosmos directly to the primary diegetic audience. The resulting cognitive dissonance causes the bean arbor to collapse and the audience to disperse. Aina offers us no moral certitude or clear didacticism.

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<p>  </p> <p>Many viewers—especially those from the continental United States—have praised Disney for such recent actions as casting Pacific Islanders in the animated feature film <em>Moana</em> (2016) and assembling a group of cultural advisors (named the Oceanic Story Trust) to guide the filmmakers’ creative decisions. However, my project contends that Disney continues to play a significant role in the maintenance of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, despite these seemingly progressive attempts at challenging Hollywood’s whitewashing. In this project, I argue that Disney creates and replicates the structures of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i through a mechanism that I term <em>imagineered imperial tourism</em>. In my formulation, imagineered imperial tourism involves commodifying historical narratives of colonization to serve the Disney brand by “innocently” repackaging them for the purpose of settler tourist consumption. To signal a Disney-specific branding and reproduction of settler colonial tropes and ideologies, I use the term “imagineered”—a play on Disney’s trademarked term <em>Imagineering</em>, which names the work of the creative team tasked with engineering the company’s most innovative devices, built environments, and technologies.</p> <p>Through a sustained study of Disney’s relevant productions—from the feature films <em>Lilo & Stitch</em> (2002) and <em>Moana</em> to its built environments at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL, and Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa in Ko Olina, Hawai‘i—I suggest that over time, Disney has normalized a version of Native Hawaiian people and history in US popular culture that reproduces common settler colonial discourses which have structured popular perceptions of Hawai‘i. The company’s almost century-long history of media production has cemented these discourses into a set of public pedagogies that have been reproduced across generations. Disney’s Pacific Island-themed productions and attractions are rife with tropes of native primitivism and imperialist nostalgia. They also reveal the primacy of the discursive framework of hegemonic multiculturalism vis-à-vis the commodified “spirit of aloha,” a sentiment which is superficially rooted in Native Hawaiian epistemologies and branded as a key selling point by the tourism industry. Furthermore, Disney has actively colonized Hawaiian lands since 2007, capitalizing on the Islands’ exploitative tourist industry while also obscuring longstanding battles over land ownership and denying Native Hawaiians sovereignty over their stolen lands. Ultimately, I suggest that Disney’s ostensibly “innocent” repackaging contributes to the violent erasure of Native Hawaiian history in popular culture. </p>