Open Information Science 2020; 4: 156–168 Tonia Sutherland* Disrupting Carceral Narratives: Race, Rape, and the Archives https://doi.org/10.1515/opis-2020-0012 Received December 21, 2019; accepted May 21, 2020 Abstract: Using critical archival studies as a methodological frame, this paper applies theories of the carceral archive to two historic legal cases: the Ala Moana Boys and the Central Park Five. Through these two cases I demonstrate that engaging the three primary underpinnings of the carceral archive—documentary records, narrative construction, and Foucauldian conceptions of “the carceral”—can critically expose, complicate, and unsettle carceral narratives, providing a new theoretical framework for troubling what Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie calls “the danger of a single story” in the historical record. Finally, I argue that it is through disrupting carceral narratives and centering more liberatory counter-narratives that archives might envision and promote themselves as sites replete with emancipatory impulses and ripe with liberatory potential. Keywords: archives, narratology, race, carceral, Massie, Central Park Five 1 Introduction In the early morning hours of September 13, 1931, a 20-year-old Navy wife, Thalia Hubbard Massie, reported to police in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi that she had been pulled into a car, driven down Ala Moana Road (or Beach Road, now known as Ala Moana Boulevard), beaten, dragged into the brush, and raped by four or five Hawaiian men. Within hours, Honolulu police had rounded up five suspects, young men in their early twenties who all hailed from the working class Kalihi-Palama neighborhood of Oʻahu. Of the young men, only two were actually Native Hawaiian; two were Japanese, and one was Chinese-Hawaiian. Collectively they would come to be known as the “Ala Moana Boys.” One month later, on October 12, 1931, the Ala Moana Boys were formally indicted for the alleged kidnapping and rape of Thalia Hubbard Massie, wife of Navy Lieutenant Thomas Massie. The trial of the Ala Moana Boys drew national attention at a time when lynchings were still common in many parts of the United States. (The trial of the nine Scottsboro Boys, falsely accused of raping a white woman in Alabama, had occurred only six months prior, and a local sheriff had been forced to call in the Alabama National Guard to forestall a lynching.) It was little surprise, therefore, that when the Ala Moana Boys’s trial ended in a hung jury after just one month, it served to anger many in Hawaiʻi’s white community. Navy officials began to increase existing pressure to bring Hawaiʻi—at this time a United States territory—under military rule, and on the United States mainland, or Turtle Island, newspapers and other media were brimming with American outrage at the alleged failure of Hawaiʻi’s justice system to protect white women from being attacked by “brown natives (Simpson, 1932, p.1).” Almost sixty years after what is now known as The Ala Moana Case (the precursor to the highly Research Article *Corresponding author, Tonia Sutherland, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawaii United States, E-mail: tsuther@ hawaii.edu Open Access. © 2020 Tonia Sutherland, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attributi- on 4.0 Public License.