Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President |
Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President
ABC-CLIO Praeger
September 2011
276 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38533-9
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-313-38534-6
Dinesh Sharma, Senior Fellow
Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research
St. Francis College, New York
Distinguishing itself from the mass of political biographies of Barack Obama, this first interdisciplinary study of Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years examines their effect on his adult character, political identity, and global world-view.
Barack Obama is the first American president born and raised in Hawai’i, the most diverse state in the Union, and the first American president to have spent a significant part of his childhood in a Muslim-majority nation, namely, Indonesia. What effect did these—and other early experiences—have on the man who is now, arguably, the world’s most popular political leader?
The first 18 years of President Obama’s life, from his birth in 1961 to his departure for college in 1979, were spent in Hawai’i and Indonesia. These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is noted—his protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted “outpost” patriotism. Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President is the first study to examine, in fascinating detail, how his early years impacted this unique leader.
Existing biographies of President Obama are primarily political treatments. Here, cross-cultural psychologist and marketing consultant Dinesh Sharma explores the connections between Obama’s early upbringing and his adult views of civil society, secular Islam, and globalization. The book draws on the author’s on-the-ground research and extensive first-hand interviews in Jakarta; Honolulu; New York; Washington, DC; and Chicago to evaluate the multicultural inputs to Obama’s character and the ways in which they prepared him to meet the challenges of world leadership in the 21st century.
Features
- Foreword
- Photographs
- Timelines
- Figures
- Appendices
Highlights
- Offers the first systematic study of Barack Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years and their effect on his adult character and political identity
- Shows how Obama’s early experiences fostered a repertoire of social and psychological skills ideally suited to dealing with the complex cultural and geopolitical issues that confront 21st-century America
- Provides new keys to understanding Obama by looking at the varied cultural and religious influences that shaped his attitudes, beliefs, and hybrid cultural identity
- Examines Ann Dunham’s doctoral dissertation, based on her social anthropological fieldwork in Indonesia, for clues to the perceptual prisms she inculcated in her son, Barack Obama