American Pacificism Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

American Pacificism

“Paul Lyons provides a splendid combination of original archival work, literary and psychoanalytical speculation, and anthropological insight, making this a cuttingedge kind of interventionist work in postcolonial literary research. The book is written in a historically informed yet theoretically rich mode that should be of interest not only to Pacific Studies scholars but also to those interested in the broader dynamics of American imperialism and the vocabularies of racial and cultural interaction.” Rob Wilson, University of California at Santa Cruz

This study provides a provocative analysis and critique of American representations of Oceania and Oceanians, from the nineteenth century to the present. Arguing that imperial fantasies have glossed over a complex, violent history, Paul Lyons develops the concept of “American Pacificism.” This theoretical framework draws on contemporary theories of friendship, hospitality, and tourism to refigure established debates around “Orientalism” for an Oceanian context. Lyons explores American–Islander relations and traces the ways in which two fundamental conceptions of Oceania have been entwined in the American imagination. On the one hand, the Pacific Islands are envisioned as economic and geopolitical “stepping stones,” rather than ends in themselves, and on the other they are imagined as ends of the earth or “cultural limits,” unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity. Both conceptions obscure not only Islander cultures, but also innovative responses to incursion. The Islands instead emerge in relation to American national identity, as places for scientific discovery, soul-saving and civilizing missions, manhood-testing adventure, nuclear testing, and eroticized furloughs between maritime work or warfare. Ranging from first contact and the colonial archive through to postcolonialism and global tourism, this powerful volume draws upon a wide, rewarding range of literary works, historical and cultural scholarship, government documents, and tourist literature. Paul Lyons is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma¯noa, where he teaches U.S. literatures, literary and cultural theory, and regional/settler literatures. He has published three novels, an edition of Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Wreck of the Essex, and essays on U.S. and Oceanian literatures and arts.

Postcolonial Literatures

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from nonanglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denise deCaires Narain African Literature, Animism and Politics by Caroline Rooney Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition by Tobias Döring Islands in History and Representation edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 by Anindyo Roy Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ by Evelyn O’Callaghan Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body by Michelle Keown Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction by Sue Kossew Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada Gopal Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire by Terry Collits

Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hardback editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research strand of the series. Titles in paperback include: Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique by Benita Parry Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denise deCaires Narain Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or classic texts in the field. Titles include: 1. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris edited by Andrew Bundy

American Pacificism Oceania in the U.S. imagination

Paul Lyons

First published 2006 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Paul Lyons This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.? “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. ” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lyons, Paul. American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. imagination/Paul Lyons. p. cm. – (Routledge research in postcolonial literatures) Includes bibliographical references. Contents: Bound-together stories, varieties of ignorance, and the challenge of hospitality – Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be: forms and functions of American Pacificism – Opening accounts in the South Seas: Edgar Allan Poe’s narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, James Fenimore Cooper’s The crater, and the antebellum development of American Pacificism – Lines of fright: fear, perception, performance, and the “seen” of cannibalism in Charles Wilkes’ Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee – A poetics of relation: friendships between Oceanians and Americans in the literature of encounter – From man-eaters to spam-eaters: cannibal tours, lotus-eaters, and the (anti)development of early twentiety-century imaginings of Oceania – Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in cold war terms: A. Grove Day, James Michener, and histouricism – Changing pre-scriptions: varieties of antitourism in the contemporary literatures of Oceania. 1. American literature–History and criticism. 2. Oceania–In literature. 3. Oceania–Foreign public opinion, American. 4. United States–Relations–Oceania. 5. Oceania–Relations–United States. 6. Pacific Area–In literature. 7. American–Oceania. I. Title. II. Series. PS159.O28L96 2005 810.9⬘3295–dc22 2005006028 ISBN 0–415–35194–4 (Print Edition)

For Richard Hamasaki

I look at the map of the Pacific. The American navy calls the Pacific the American Lake. They have ships in Samoa Hawaii, Taiwan, Philippines, Belau, Kwajalein, Truk the Marianas, the Carolines. In Micronesia there are only 90,000 people, who gives a damn? The dead are louder in protest than the living. The living are silent. Everything is silent. Silent Silent Silent Silent Silent John Pule, The Shark that Ate the Sun

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: bound-together stories, varieties of ignorance, and the challenge of hospitality

1

Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be: forms and functions of American Pacificism

24

Opening accounts in the South Seas: Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater, and the antebellum development of American Pacificism

48

Lines of fright: fear, perception, performance, and the “seen” of cannibalism in Charles Wilkes’s Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee

72

A poetics of relation: friendships between Oceanians and U.S. citizens in the literature of encounter

97

From man-eaters to spam-eaters: cannibal tours, lotus-eaters, and the (anti)development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imaginings of Oceania

122

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms: A. Grove Day, James Michener, and histouricism

149

Conclusion: Changing pre-scriptions: varieties of antitourism in the contemporary literatures of Oceania

176

Notes Bibliography Index

201 227 257

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the contribution to my spirit and intellectual life made by a number of friends and co-conspirators. I am deeply grateful to Rob Wilson and Vanessa Smith – both of whose work on cultural poetics in Oceania informs my own – for their encouragement and personal support. During hikes along the ‘Aihualama Trail I discussed this book as it took shape with Cindy Franklin and John Zuern, both of whom read drafts of chapters and offered insightful criticisms. If I could remember half of what Craig Howes explained to me during our runs together this would be a better book. As is, I am much indebted to Craig for close readings of several chapters. Laura Lyons, Cindy Ward, and Mari Yoshihara have read and commented helpfully on several sections as well. Many of the views expressed in this book formed through conversations with Trish Allen, Alex Calder, Jennifer Dang, Ned Davis, Ma¯healani Dudoit, Epi Enari, Tom Farber, Sia Figiel, Mark Hamasaki, Dennis Kawaharada, Solomon Manupule, Doug Matsuoka, Rodney Morales, Ron Murray, Gary Pak, Jojo Peter, John Pule, Michael Puleloa, S. Shankar, Robert Sullivan, Kathryn Takara, Rapata Wiri, Holly Yamada, and Amy Yoshida. Monica Ghosh talked through much of the manuscript with me and added light to my life. What I have learned about language and culture from my Kumu ‘Olelo Hawai‘i – Kalani Makekau-Whittaker, Kealohamakua Wengler, Lalepa Koga, Kaliko Baker, Ioli‘i Hawkins, Kekeha Solis, Kamuela Chun, and Laiana Wong – as well as from my fellow hauma¯na, has informed my outlook and enriched my ways of relating to the storied ‘a¯ina of Hawai‘i nei. At the same time, this book has been written within and against a political context in which ‘Oiwi lack selfdetermination on sovereignty in their own land, and my scholarship is offered in the spirit of alliance with those who contest and resist this ongoing occupation. My friend and guide in the waters, Richard Hamasaki (aka “Red Flea”), has contributed most to my attempt to situate myself in Hawai‘i, and to begin to envision my own role within the challenging poetics and politics in the Islands, and for these reasons, and for the hospitality that the Hamasaki ‘ohana has shown me over the past decade, this book is dedicated to him. I am grateful to Cristina Bacchilega, Chair of the English Department, for her gentle nudges and for the environment she is working to create in Kuykendall Hall.

xii Acknowledgments My thanks go as well to David Hanlon, Director of the Center for Pacific Island Studies, and Dean Joe O’Mealy of the College of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics for research and travel support. I thank the anonymous readers of Arizona Quarterly, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and Boundary 2 for comments on essays that formed the basis for substantially revised chapters of this book, and the staff of the Hawaiian/Pacific Collection at Hamilton Library for facilitating my research. Too many students to list have made teaching at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma¯noa a pleasure, as well as a learning experience, and I thank them for insisting that I make myself clearer and for letting me know what’s what. My deepest love is for my family, my parents Nick and Mari Lyons, who instilled in me a lifelong appreciation for literature and the arts, and for my siblings, Charlie, Jennifer, and Tony, who are themselves creative forces.

Introduction Bound-together stories, varieties of ignorance, and the challenge of hospitality

The mighty American foundation poured over the backs of their host. Imaikalani Kalahele (2002)

In the fixity of our mourning, we have perhaps forgotten this movement of invitation which is hospitality, and sacrificed a little of our humanity to the desire to know. Anna Dufourmontelle, Of Hospitality

In “The Rope” (1993) Angela Davis describes how, while “anchored” in her “various communities,” she feels that the “rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow” her to “move into other communities to understand and learn.” Seeking to avoid the cycles of violence that began with “colonialist” divisions of the world into “firm biological” communities, she has been “thinking a lot about the need to make more intimate those connections and associations and to really take on the responsibility of learning” (Davis 1993: 31–2). To readers of Herman Melville, whose problematic legacy in Oceania will feature prominently in this book, Davis’s metaphorical “rope” might conjure up “The Monkey-Rope” chapter in Moby-Dick (1851), in which Ishmael and Queequeg are “wedded” to each other by a whaling rope, “fast at both ends,” that makes them interdependent. Each has “the management of one end” of the rope, and they are bound both literally and by “usage and honor” not to cut the rope in an emergency. For Ishmael this means that his “individuality [is] now merged” with Queequeg; the rope has become a “siamese ligature” (Melville 1988: 319–20). Melville imagines, for a moment at least, the lives of an Anglo-U.S. citizen and an Oceanian as twinned, through processes that are at once intimate, and nested within larger historical, economic, and political structures.1 Angela Davis, on the other hand, recodes the charged image of “the rope” to argue the emotional necessity and ethical responsibility of learning about other communities, seen as multiple and not simply geographic, while remaining anchored in her own. Implicit in her sense that this is a “responsibility” (an answer to a call that one hears in the “risky night of

2 Introduction non-knowledge” [Spivak 1994: 25]) is the notion that a rope that does not “allow” enough give for one to “understand and learn” about other communities restricts and denies a need and a call. At the same time, even “long enough” ropes do have limits. Both Melville and Davis, as differently positioned as they are, suggest a vision of history in which members of different communities – like communities themselves – are called to form ties, to which response-ability in turn gives character. For Melville the line is “magical, sometimes horrible” and “all men live enveloped in whale lines” (Melville 1988: 278, 281). These lines either join people affectively and functionally or act as instruments of limitation, exploitation, or domination, or as lines of resistance. Which it is depends on the willingness of parties to know and be known by each other, on how each extends or responds to hospitality, on their willingness to admit perspectives other than their own, or on the ways in which the responsibility to “move into other communities” and “know” is understood. In a literal sense, both Melville and Davis imply, individual experiences cannot remain individual: one brings and performs one’s culture in any encounter, and what one brings away potentially multiplies, ripples out in performance, in retellings, gestures, story, and song. Such an understanding of intercultural experience and history, in the case of Oceania, leads to what Pacific ethnohistorian Greg Dening calls a recognition of the stories of Native (indigenous islanders) and Stranger (foreigners, settlers, at first Euroamericans) as “bound-together” or co-created. This bound-togetherness is unabstractable from fluid social relations and untranslatable into non-dialectical, linear models (Dening 1980: 238). The resultant multi-toned stories point, not to what some postcolonial theorists call “hybridity,” but to senses in which, from the time that Euroamericans crossed “beaches” into island/Oceanian spaces, native and non-native cultures mutually possessed each other, with all the sensuous and invasive associations of the word “possession.”2 This book critiques the massive senses in which, in U.S. cultural production about Oceania, both the responsibility to understand and learn and the willingness to imagine U.S. history as bound-together with Oceanian history in a way that is “managed from both ends” have been rudely abrogated. Even when the aim is a critique of imperialism, U.S. artists and scholars narrating stories of intercultural relation in Oceania have for the most part misperceived, misrepresented, disrespected, or ignored Oceanian institutions, perspectives, humor, and ways of knowing (and narrating), attempting to subsume indigenous categories into their own. As Nicholas Thomas and others have noted, the critique of “imperialist representation has frequently reinscribed precisely the distancing and silencing of the Other that is identified in colonialist texts” (Thomas 1999: 132). In this sense, most U.S. postcolonial criticism, has, “like the Orientalism it contests, look[ed] from afar and [found] what it expect[ed] to see” (Calder and Turner 2003: 8). This willed and stunning ignorance/ignoring of Oceanian priorities has thus been with few exceptions reduplicated in the critical/academic response to the body of historical and imaginative work on Oceania, forming a mutually reinforcing web of representations and discourses outside of which it has been difficult for U.S.

Introduction 3 citizens to regard Islanders. It has been normative, for example, for literary critics to take as comic a scene such as that in Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawai’i (1866) in which Hawaiian bones are gathered up as “mementoes”: “You have got some of my bones,” says Twain’s tourist, “Mr. Jones; and you have got my spine, Mr. Twain” (Twain 1975a: 60). Such literary scenes recall and re-enact the sordid history of disinternments of Islander bones for measurement, display, or trade. In fact, Twain’s primary historical source, James Jarves, author of the popular nineteenth-century U.S. history of Hawai‘i, received the nickname “po kanaka,” or “skull man” (literally “po‘o”/head + “kanaka”/man), from Hawaiians after bribing “adventurous fellows” to procure “several perfect crania, which were sent to Boston” ( Jarves 1844: 156). My account of the reasons for the refusal by U.S. writers and scholars to respect Oceanian peoples in fundamental ways, or to take on the responsibilities of learning, and for the broad conversion in the U.S. public sphere of complex and violent relations with Oceanians into the stuff of tourism is not offered in the first instance as a corrective reading, though I would hope in places to suggest directions alternative modes of narration might take. My own conviction is that a prior, ground-clearing step is required to clarify the scope and duration of the problem, the structures of its attitudes and frames of reference, the forms it has taken, and the functions it has played in U.S. culture and policy formation. In this first instance, my procedure is to emphasize, as Toni Morrison does with “American Africanism,” the variety of invested ways that in U.S. cultural production concerning Oceania the “imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision” (Morrison 1992: xi). At the same time, I foreground linkages among the forms that imaginings of Oceania take and developments in U.S.–Islander history, and attempt reconstructions of material scenes of intercultural engagement, if only to suggest what has been occluded, or credulously repeated, and with what effect. My sense is that even fantasmic representations of Oceania – invented images “whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention” (Owens 1992: 4) – are routed through an archive imbricated at the base in material relations. Through this dual emphasis on what Gananath Obeyesekere describes as “deconstructiverestorative” reading (Obeyesekere 2005: 265–7) and descriptive analysis of a succession of delimiting modes through which Oceanians were imagined, I attempt to disrupt varieties of ignorance and the emotional apathy that characterizes, vis-àvis Oceania, much of the legacy of American studies and U.S. cultural production. Here I refer to “American studies” in “New Americanist” senses, both in terms of the established human-science disciplines (humanities) that might be grouped under the umbrella organization of the American Studies Association, with its troubled modeling and remodeling of its referent (“America”), and in (and against) the expanding contemporary ambitions that call themselves “postnationalist American studies” (see Desmond and Dominguez [1996]; Rowe [2000b, 2002]) or “inter-Americas work” (Sadowski-Smith and Fox 2004). The latter enterprises aim to destabilize exceptionalist models implicit in the term “America,” replacing a territorially bounded multiculturalism with more rhizomatic, hemispheric, transnational, comparativist frameworks, but paradoxically seem to be transnationalizing

4 Introduction American studies by expanding their reach into each point of local conjuncture (Lyons 2005; Dirlik 2004). In these spheres, however they are understood, Oceania plays a decidedly minor role, although, as this book will argue, the ways that Oceania has been imagined and represented, or even relegated to being a backdrop for U.S. ventures, has been injurious to Oceania, and indexical of and contributive to important aspects of the U.S. national narrative. A foundational element of this narrative is the ahistorical claim that “America” is synonymous with the U.S. state. Through this move, which has become so normalized that today it seems difficult even for critics of the U.S. state to put alternatives to “America” into practice, white U.S. citizens construct themselves as normative and central actors against which, domestically, non-white citizens are marked and differentiated (African American, Native American, Asian American) while internationally the “Americas” are demarcated as “Central America,” “South America,” “Latin America.” As Eduardo Galeano long ago noted, this amounts to the construction of Latin/South America as “a sub-America” (Galeano 1978: 12). For these reasons I use U.S. rather than “America,” while retaining institutional terms such as American studies and Americanist and employing terms such as American Pacific archive and American Pacificism to designate the workings of exceptionalist ideology. National narratives, the views adopted by dominant classes and legitimated in the public sphere, are largely developmental, Enlightenment narratives that, in Donald Pease’s formulation, construct “imaginary relations to actual sociopolitical conditions to effect imagined communities called national peoples” (Pease 1994: 3–4). My hope would be partly to draw more attention to the scope of U.S. history, mission, and self-definition in Oceania, but, more importantly, to participate in a reorientation of the scholarship that is written by U.S. non-Islanders toward a more Island-centered perspective and counter-memory, one informed by the current drives within Pacific studies to decolonize its methodologies and orientations, and one that does not subsume Oceanians uncritically into the dominant models of U.S. race relations or the center–periphery frameworks and deterritorializing paradigms of postcolonial and globalization theory.3 Such necessarily interdisciplinary work, which for historical reasons related to colonial partitioning of the region has largely slipped through disciplinary structures, would “feel the need” to “move into other communities,” and to respond to the challenges of doing so non-appropriatively in relation to the multilayered, multivocal region of Oceania, which has always involved diasporic dimensions that do not compromise genealogical claims to indigeneity. While descriptions of cross-cultural interaction among Europeans and Oceanians, or images of islanders in the European mind, as in Vanessa Smith’s Literary Culture and the Pacific (1998) or Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) and Imagining the Pacific (1992), have received extensive treatment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literary and cultural studies, only a fraction of such attention has been given to U.S. relations in Oceania. Institutional support for/interest in Pacific Islands research in the U.S. has centered on development issues and the postwar adjustments of Oceanians to modernity, and

Introduction 5 has until recently rarely involved the humanities. This is despite the facts that the U.S. was, for most of the nineteenth century, the dominant commercial presence in the world’s largest area (hence a massive American Pacific archive exists that generates and validates U.S. views of the region, along with specific claims to possession); that since World War II, while much of the region was politically decolonizing, the U.S. has been the most formidible colonizing force in Oceania, in particular economically and militarily; and that, after New Zealand, the U.S. is now home to more diasporic Oceanians than any other nation (Spickard 2002: 19). The Oceanian diaspora in the U.S. goes back to the early nineteenth century (Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau wrote in 1868 that “thousands of Hawaiians have gone away to foreign lands and remained there” [Kamakau 1992: 245]), and there are now, in some cases, as many Islanders in the U.S. as there are Islanders in the Islands (White and Tengan 2001: 386; Diaz 1994: 53). Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro, and Tongan communities in particular make the West Coast of the U.S. part of Oceania. Likewise, insofar as U.S. cultural interaction with Oceanians has received attention within the broader anthropology of colonialism, it is usually as a subset of European representational practices, with the U.S. treated like the derivative “paperback” version to which Europe is the “hardcover” (to invoke Don DeLillo’s analogy in The Names). Until recently, mainstream American studies work on U.S. activity in Oceania has emphasized maritime, exploratory, economic, and military history, seen in the post-World War II years as the forerunner of a Cold War geopolitics and regional planning, from angles that consolidate and/or critique discourses about America. With a few striking exceptions, American studies work about Oceania proceeds without substantial interest in Oceanian history, political structures, or source materials. The drive toward cross-cultural Pacific scholarship that has emerged slowly in and around Oceania over the past fifty years, beginning with J. W. Davidson’s call for more Island-centered, localized history, attentive to the “range and diversity of [multicultural] situations” (Davidson 1966: 12), remains largely ignored in American studies humanities-oriented scholarship. At present, nothing like Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans (1991) or Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans (1997), or Nicholas Thomas’s Entangled Objects (1991) or Colonialism’s Cultures (1994), or the extensive reconstructions of interaction among Cook’s crews and Islanders, concentrates specifically on the U.S. context. U.S. activity in Oceania is largely unmentioned in the innovative interdisciplinary work on intercultural encounter and representation that appears in such collections as Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr’s Voyages and Beaches (1999), Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith’s Islands in History and Representation (2003), Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn’s Body Trade (2001), Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche’s Double Vision (1999), or Lamb, Smith, and Thomas’s Exploration and Exchange (2000). In the U.S. context, recent notable collections, such as Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson’s Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (1999) and Robert Borofsky’s Remembrance of Pacific Pasts (2000), likewise have a remarkably small representation of U.S. activity in Oceania, and situate Oceanian history

6 Introduction and politics within the transnational, regional framework of Pacific/cultural studies. There remains a feeling in the humanities-oriented conversation about Oceania, even when conducted in the pages of the Honolulu-based journal the Contemporary Pacific, that Pacific studies is not really connected to American studies, even in its deterritorializing senses, or that the two are fundamentally nonintersecting fields of area study. Rob Wilson’s Reimagining the American Pacific (2000a), to which I am much indebted, is singular (among works that position themselves at a junction point of American studies and a decolonizing Asia/Pacific cultural studies) in analyzing and contesting the ongoing power of U.S. imperialism without at the same time sacrificing an engagement with indigenous Oceanians and Pacific-“local” cultural productions. Where my optic most obviously differs from Wilson’s is in keeping Asia, and Asia/Pacific constructions, as much as possible out of the frame.4 In terms of both American studies and Pacific studies, much of the difficulty of approaching the U.S. role in Oceania has to do with the intellectual and conceptual “situation” of Hawai‘i as a U.S. colony. In quite different ways, both American studies and Pacific studies show an uneasiness about how to approach the relationship between Hawai‘i and the rest of Oceania. A doubly faulty U.S. syllogism begins that Hawai‘i is part of the U.S. and Hawai‘i is part of Oceania, but does not know where to end. Within the national narrative, the U.S. disavows having colonies in the sense of overseas territories that are administered, generally with dual institutional systems (legal, educational) that segregate colonizers and colonized (Flores 2002; Kiste 1994: 228). Rather, within the national narrative, Hawai‘i has not been colonized but incorporated and Hawaiians are not colonial subjects but part of a multicultural citizenry that shares full political rights. While Americanists who engage Hawai‘i do not politically accept this narrative, in practice, energy has been split between regarding Hawai‘i as an example of U.S. imperialism and as a place to interrogate U.S. interethnic relations, in particular those involving the Asian-American diaspora. Hawai‘i is in other words, on the one hand, a “Pacific” place that can be taken metonymically (for better or worse) for Oceania. (In U.S. visual culture, for instance, Islanders have a Hawai‘i tinge – dance hula, give lei [flower necklaces] – at the same time that, as with “Hollywood Indians,” distinctions among Islanders routinely collapse [see Churchill 2003: 210].) The American Pacificism developed around Oceania as a whole is applied to Hawai‘i, and underdeveloped islands are taken as evidence of what Hawai‘i would be without colonization. On the other hand, Hawai‘i becomes a laboratory of U.S. race relations or of East–West/U.S.–Asia relations, in which Hawaiians, linked to other Pacific Islanders, have belatedly entered the census as a discrete category from Asians in order to be further assimilated as an ethnic minority. If one takes the organization of cultural production as indexical of broad national understandings, the most progressive anthology of U.S. imaginative writing, the Heath Anthology of American Literature, reflects the confusion that U.S. narratives have about how to “include” Hawai‘i. The anthology contains no Hawaiian writers and two contemporary Asian-American poets.5 From the Pacific studies angle as practiced outside of U.S. institutions, there has

Introduction 7 been a widespread if not generally expressed feeling that Hawai‘i has been so assimilated into the U.S. that it is not properly an object of Pacific study in a contemporary sense (White and Tengan 2001: 392), and that, excluding Hawai‘i (Micronesia factoring only after World War II), the U.S. does not have a substantial history in the region. To follow the “literary” anthologies-as-litmus line, for instance, Hawaiian writers were not included in the first two major anthologies of Oceanian literature, Lali (1980) and Nuanua (1995), nor are Hawaiians discussed in the first important study of “South Pacific” literature (Subramani 1992). The attitude might be summed up by a professor at the University of the South Pacific, in Suva, Fiji, who argues that, “For many of us Hawai‘i is no longer part of the Pacific. It has been swamped by Asia and dragged to continental North America,” but then goes on to suggest that the day-to-day struggle of Hawaiians for justice “symbolizes the power, the frustrations and the despair of all Pacific islands” (Waddell 1993: 29–30). Ron Crocombe notes that in international relations terms, Oceania does not include Hawai‘i or “any other island which is fully incorporated into a metropolitan power” (Crocombe 2001: 19). As will surface at various points in this book, depending on the critical agenda, Hawai‘i tends to be pressed into discursive service as either a triumphalist scenario, a fully modernized/Americanized Oceanian place, or a nightmare scenario, an Oceanian place in which what is distinctively Oceanian has been lost through assimilation. (As Hawaiian poet-activist Wayne Kaumualii Westlake wrote, “Pacific leaders . . . see Hawaii as a place where indigenous peoples’ traditions and heritage have been raped and bastardised, crushed and demolished, all in the name of Progress and the American Dream. Hawaii is no ‘role model’ for Pacific Island territories and emerging nations to imitate. If anything, it’s an example to avoid” [Westlake 1980: 37].) At the same time, for reasons associated with its original charter (Quigg 1986), the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i has until recently been more oriented toward the region as a whole than toward Hawai‘i, a situation whose significance has shifted with the hiring of Oceanian faculty and the emergence and expansion of the Kamakaku¯okalani Center for Hawaiian Studies.6 Without denying that the vision of Oceania as a space of cultural interaction, invention, and fluid movement functions restoratively and progressively to loosen colonial confinements, and without denying that there is much narrative truth and force to Epeli Hau‘ofa’s elegant vision in “Our Sea of Islands,” my own work emphasizes the ways that Islander-oriented socio-political contexts and cultural vitality routinely drop out of U.S. humanities writing about Oceania. Hau‘ofa’s front-seat audience – pan-Pacific Islanders, as implied by the pronoun “our” – lives the effects of the history the essay discusses in ways that remain abstract to most U.S. audiences. Situated myself in a Hawai‘i seen as a colonized and contested Oceanian place, I address ways in which neglect on various fronts of U.S. relations in Oceania as a region is supported by a variety of invested ignorances and touristic discourses. In the case of Hawai‘i history, this includes a massive national denial (Williams 1980: 14; Merry 2000: 24; Duratalo 1992: 244). If the much-abbreviated literature and institutional review above (limited mostly

8 Introduction to monographs and a handful of comparatively well-funded institutions) simply registers the obvious – that New Zealand, Australian, and European institutions have historically better encouraged and supported humanities-oriented work on Oceania – I suggest that this itself is symptomatic and consequential. The U.S. does have a history in the region and its citizens do possess and are possessed by structured images of Islanders, and the flight into postmodern mixing at once leaves these tropologies in place, renders claims to traditional knowing and belonging nostalgic, and threatens to distract from the incomplete project of decolonization which in many locations binds Islanders to the project of modernity. “There can be no ‘postmodernity’ for us,” Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, “until we have settled some business of modernity” (Smith 1999: 34). The circulation of belittling images of Oceanians in the U.S. media is as far from dead as “American” nationalism, and the current varieties of sanctioned ignorance and rubrics of denial about Oceania enable obliviousness to U.S. policy in the region. As Eve San Juan writes, in the U.S. Oceanian places remain “so thoroughly fetishized that it seems impossible any more to grasp” what their referents might be: “Michener’s Hawaii, the film South Pacific, and an avalanche of tourist brouchures” preserve the islands as “icon[s] of the exotic” (San Juan 2002: 71). Given the development of a literature of encounter between settler-colonists and Native Americans on the U.S. continent, the lack of culturally informed scholarship on the encounter of U.S. citizens and Oceanians before World War II until recently suggests that large-scale social conditionings are at work in these sanctioned ignorances, most notably a distancing that is as much psychological as geographical. Even to people of liberal good will on the continent aware of U.S. imperialism in Oceania, the feeling remains that the Islands are small, insignificant, far from the centers of interest, culturally eccentric, and the province of anthropologists. (On the academic marginalization of Pacific studies – even within circles where the impact of globalism are studied from cultural studies/ postcolonial anthropological points of view – Robert Borofsky asks, “is the Pacific fated to remain intellectually pacific – tranquil and calm?” [Borofsky 2004: 54].) If in American studies/postcolonial theory the critique of U.S. imperialism vis-à-vis Oceania is becoming normative, the prevailing attitude remains that understanding Island socio-politics and poetics is the province of specialists, and that Oceania merits attention not for its cultural vitality, history of resistance, or forms of leadership and adaptation (in which “politics” has had to be recurrently reinvented [see Mykkänen 2003]), but only insofar as it provides a mirror for Americanists or cultural studies projects, or a theoretical playground for investigations of U.S. sexuality, masculinity, race, nation, or ecological movements. My study thus foregrounds ignorance as a constitutive component of American studies work in Oceania that exceeds American studies paradigms of left/right or nationalist/postnationalist. This is not primarily ignorance about how the U.S. has formed states and territories, tested weapons, recruited soldiers, exploited resources, induced dependencies, displaced populations, and ruptured cultures in Oceania, although there is scant U.S. public consciousness of this legacy. Rather, it is a more deeply invested ignoring of Oceanian epistemologies, political institutions and

Introduction 9 forms of cultural and intellectual tradition and performance. Such ignorance is, of course, not a U.S. monopoly. As Jonathan Lamb argues in Preserving the Self in the South Seas (2001), “Europeans spread ignorance before they spread trade routes and disease” (Lamb 2001: 5). They spread it as much through romantic descriptions as through denigration of Islanders: As Tzvetan Todorov formulates it in The Conquest of America (a work that refers exclusively to contemporary “South America”): “Lack of knowledge . . . is irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be” (Todorov 1984: 256). To speak of fields or the network of horizons that make up institutions as ignorant about “foreign” cultural systems (epistemologies, horizons) in the sense that I mean the term is to refer not to individual errors of argument, reading, or historical detail as much as to pervasive forms of not-knowing and erasure that have deep structures and histories. This involves in the first instance chronic mistranslation, such as Eric Cheyfitz analyzes in The Poetics of Imperialism (1991), in which colonists “translate” indigenous terms and categories into terminologies they are at home in, rename indigenous places and categories, and even suggest that imposed terms were always in the landscape waiting to be found. The maintenance of such collective illusions over time functions through what Pierre Bourdieu terms collective or structured “misrecognition,” based on a series of mutually confirming citations that condense into a collective heritage, archive, or cultural memory as it functions selectively to secure needs in the present. At the same time, Bourdieu’s “misrecognition” crucially involves a collective acceptance that deceptions are at work along with a willed stationary vantage point. Such agreement on “a lie which would deceive no one were not everyone determined to deceive himself” (Bourdieu 1977: 133), like resistance to swinging from one’s anchor in Davis’s rope metaphor, can stem from indifference, a range of self-serving desires, or the posttourist’s skepticism about whether there is anything “authentic” to understand. To emphasize the senses in which ignorances about Oceania in U.S. writing are ideological is not to position myself as an authority on Oceanian cultures.7 It is adamantly not to attempt to speak for others, the problematic ethics of which have been valuably explored by Linda Alcoff (1991). Davis’s desire to “move into other communities,” as suggested, presupposes a foundational hospitality or invitation, without which “moving in” might be an invasion. “Travel” writing, however much a caring witness aspires to be a care provider, may always become invasive, even with an invitation and liberal good will. Rather, to argue that institutions of which one is a part are damagingly unmindful of Oceanian epistemologies is to call for greater vigilance about the stakes of discursive practices, including one’s own. My own invocations of Oceanian categories in this study cannot help but mark the position of my anchorage, the conditions/conditionings of my journey, and the ends of my rope. (As in Hawaiian “po¯” before a word often has the positive sense of being surrounding by a thing [flowers, friends], while “po¯” at the end of a word generally connotes ignorance [hupo¯] or blindness [makapo¯], one lofty aim is to keep ignorance before one.) One might go further and suggest that acknowledging ignorance meaningfully can be the beginning of an ethics. “One must be very humane to say, ‘I don’t know,’ to afford ignorance,” Nietzsche writes (quoted in

10 Introduction Obeyesekere 2005: 267), but only if such acknowledgement includes a call to transform practices, and stimulates an understanding of the responsibility to know and understand, along with the pleasures of doing so. As Barbara Johnson puts it, “If I perceive my ignorance as a gap in knowledge instead of an imperative that changes the very nature of what I think I know, then I do not truly experience my ignorance” (Johnson 1987: xi). Part of owning ignorance meaningfully, therefore, means stressing that the root of the word corresponds to “ignore” as an active verb, and thus in a sense to “resistance to knowledge.” Scholarship always involves making choices about subject matter, approach, what to invest in studying, what to emphasize, who to invoke as authorities, for whom and for what we do our writing, and what we do not need to know to accomplish our projects. The selection/omission process, which often depends upon what Puakea Nogelmeier calls the “discourse of sufficiency,” in which “a small core” of texts are taken as representative of a whole body of knowledge (Nogelmeier 2003: 2) – or even the belief that the mythical value of stories transcends knowledge of language and culture – is never as innocent or passive as scholars think. Whether “choices” are causes or effects is rarely simple, ignorance being not simply non-knowledge or insufficient knowledge, as Eve Sedgwick notes, but something as “potent and multiple” as knowledge that in fact “competes with knowledge” for control over “the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons.” Our knowledges are to a degree empowered and constituted by what they are institutionally sanctioned to ignore. For Sedgwick, the most consequential ignorances are those organized around the “epistemological privilege of unknowing” that obfuscates fears and desires and maintains boundaries. Such privilege, amounting to an interpretive overconfidence felt within one’s own delimited spheres, is at the same time a rejection of responsibility for knowledges outside of these spheres. In these senses ignorance is not “darkness from which the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts” but “a plethora of ignorances,” chosen in many cases for one, about which one “may begin to ask questions about the labor, erotics, and economics of their human production and distribution” (Sedgwick 1993: 25). When it comes to representing Oceania, as Papau New Guinea poet and scholar Steven Winduo notes, leaving out Oceanian voices has been a principal form of constituting colonial authority over the region (Winduo 2000: 601). In inventorying the “labor, erotics, and economics,” or the archival bases of the ignorances/denials that structure what I will develop as “American Pacificism,” and in emphasizing the ways in which critics are affectively and institutionally sheltered from awareness of the consequences of structured ignorances, I am drawn to the notion of hospitality as a category through which Euroamerican– Oceanian encounter and relation might be effectively audited and at times appreciated, and to hospitality theory as a promising frame for thinking about meetings among peoples who are foreign to each other’s social spaces. Hospitality seems foundational to every culture’s maintenance of social order, from the interpersonal to the clan to the formation of political units. This is strikingly so in Oceania, where the often extravagant, formal manners and warmth of greeting

Introduction 11 strangers is nearly always commented on in the literature of encounter and remains a vital part of cultural protocol and the complex negotiation of globalization. The ability to accept hospitality on something of the terms in which it is offered and to reciprocate is therefore registered both by Islanders and by Euroamericans. However, the greater the colonial impulse, the more such hospitality is recoded into the settler/colonist’s terms, or even turned into evidence against hosts regarded as amiable beyond their means. By the 1850s in Hawai‘i, for instance, a U.S. attorney, William Little Lee, would note, “Certainly they [Hawaiians] are a kind and peaceable people, with a superabundance of generous hospitality; but with all their good traits, they lack the elements necessary to perpetuate their existence” (quoted in Merry 2000: 5). A few years later, responding to the processes by which U.S. laws were replacing Hawaiian judicial systems, Kamakau warned Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III) that “entertaining foreigners” who will leave their hosts only the scraps “will lead to the government coming into the hands of the foreigner” (Kamakau 1961: 401). To this day, in the perverse description of tourism as a “hospitality industry” or in Bill Clinton’s thanks to the Chamorros of Guam for “hosting military bases [and] sharing the land” (quoted in Lee and Salas 1999: 1), invocations of hospitality are telling. (For years, one commentator wrote, the U.S. Navy actually ran Guam “much as a land battleship” [Meller 1968: 205].) While oriented more toward problems of forced assimilation and intolerance associated with diaspora and immigration, Jacques Derrida in Of Hospitality (2000) suggests that, theoretically, the relation among host/native and guest/foreigner is built on a conundrum that Orientalist or colonialist thought wills in inverted ways. In a passage that gestures toward the importance of genealogy, Derrida crucially distinguishes between “foreigner” and the “absolute other” of much philosophical and postcolonial analysis: the “latter cannot have a name or a family name” and is thus outside “the absolute or unconditional hospitality” (Derrida 2000: 25). (In many Oceanian societies the ultimate act of hospitality will be precisely the possibility of names being exchanged as a means of welcoming the foreigner into a social community.) In the classical heritage within which Derrida works, hospitality is impossibly suspended between senses in which one owes unconditional or absolute hospitality to guests, and the possibility that, if one does not impose conditions or laws, or include regulations with one’s hospitality (in which case one’s hospitality has become conditional), there is the danger that guests will ruin one’s space and impose their own customs and language games (see Derrida 2004: 22–3). The tension in this Western understanding is lodged in the opposing derivations of the Latin hostis – hospitality/hostility, host/hostage – with the individual as a microcosm for the movement of larger bodies. The only way out of the conundrum, and into an emotive space where relation might heat up, is through dialogue about each party’s views and needs, presumably including negotiation about the protocols/formalities of dialogue itself, as happened in some measure on the beach wherever cultural exchange did not break down into violence, resulting in the creation of third spaces. In Maori culture, for instance, one might engage in a korero, an exchange of stories in a mode that looks for pragmatic solutions and shared understanding. In Hawaiian culture, ho‘oponopono might be a way of healing

12 Introduction perceived rifts, or of preventing them from reaching destructive proportions. In each case dialogue, or response-ability, is never, as Gayatri Spivak argues, “pure,” but involves protocols or a necessarily structured and staged “exchange-effect” (Spivak 1994: 45). To respond means “to resonate with the other, contemplate the possibility of complicity – wrenching consciousness-raising, which is based on ‘knowing things,’ however superficially, from its complacency” (ibid.4: 87). In the classical sources, such engagement involves “recognition,” or active forms of “ac-knowledge-ment,” there being no relation outside of some state of knowledge. All recognition, Aristotle maintains in a passage applicable to cross-cultural encounter, “is a change from ignorance to awareness, pointing in the direction either of close blood ties or hostility” (Aristotle 1967: 36). In a colonial relation, the colonist arrogantly gives up on any meaningful sense of dialogue or mutual recognition, or any sense of the host’s governing categories as viable. Guests thus take it upon themselves to impose, regulate, or marginalize the indigenous languages and protocols, “adopting” the hosts forcefully into their language game. From this point, even calls for restoring sovereignty end up being argued for and adjudicated in non-native terms. This sense of inverted guest–host relations is frequently articulated in Oceanian contexts. As the O¯lelo No‘eau (Hawaiian poetic proverb) goes, “Malihini no na¯ keiki o ka¯ la¯kou ‘a¯ina pono‘i iho” (“The children of the land are strangers in their own land” [Pukui 1983]). Given that languages in various senses are where people dwell, that “language is a form of knowing by itself” (Trask 1993: 149), the host is taken discursive hostage. (This sense of “hostage” as related to “education” is developed by several Oceanian poets, such as Sam Alasia from the Solomon Islands, who writes in “Hostage,” “Held hostage by terrorists – / Indoctrinated, lost, / Deprived of my freedom, / I am black / Clothed in white” [Alasia 1988: 1], and the Samoan poet Ruperake Petaia, who writes in “Kidnapped,” “One day I was / kidnapped by a band / of Western philosophers” [in Wendt 1980b: 271].) Likewise, Manulani Meyer struggles with the question of how to critique the “illusions of paradise that hold our islands hostage to those with money and power” (Meyer 2003: 82). In the literal sense, the ignoring, disparaging, misappropriation of native knowledges, protocols, and basic definitions as the foundation for ethical relation to lands and peoples is the starting point of colonial scholarship, the crude Orientalism in and through which colonialism grounds its claims and claims its grounds. The foundation upon which a hospitable relation might be built and sustained, as Imaikalani Kalahele forcefully reminds readers (see epigraph), is instead, in concrete ways, poured over the backs of the host, and hardens over time. In these senses it is important to recall that in Oceanian societies hospitality generally includes several senses of acknowledgement. This is both a respect for the host’s knowledges about how things are done, where resources are found, and how they are to be distributed and sustained, and a sense that interpersonal relations are fundamental to knowledge and responsible relation (Meyer 2001: 134–9). In Hawaiian culture, for instance, the guest–host relation was in part a knowledge relation. Kanaka (people) were at any moment kama‘a¯ina or malihini in relation to the ground on which they stood. Several nested meanings of the word kama‘a¯ina

Introduction 13 resonate against each other: To “be born in a place, native born”; “to be a host”; “to be acquainted, familiar with”; and “to know someone” are pragmatically and poetically merged. A meaningful relation to a place involves multiple forms of located knowing. Literally a “land child” (kama = child + ‘a¯ina = land, earth, that which feeds in multiple senses), the kama‘a¯ina knows the land (more generally, the environment) and the origins, locations, and respectful uses of its resources. The malihini is a stranger to that ‘a¯ina and its orders of knowing and relies on kama‘a¯ina for guidance about the resources of that place. There are protocols or kuleana (responsibilities, rights, privileges) for how each party should act, and mocking ‘o¯lelo no‘eau about kama‘a¯ina who shirk the responsibility to share resources, such as “Kalaoa ‘ai po‘ele‘ele” (“Kalaoa eats in the dark,” which Pukui explains as “said of a village where people ate in the dark to avoid having to ask visitors or passers-by to partake of food with them” [Pukui 1983: 155]).8 Though the arrival of Euroamericans began to transform or erode institutions with ancient origins designed for surviving on islands, the spirit and “social centrality” of hospitality and “reciprocity,” which Tongan writer-scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa describes as a “core value” in the Oceanian worldview (Hau‘ofa 1999: 35), infuses new cultural forms, and might likewise provide a dynamic context for re-envisioning approaches in various media to narrating history in Oceania as a congeries of “bound-together” relations. In a postcolonial criticism that does not want to eat in the dark, it would seem, some sense of hospitality, or of “knowing one’s place” in relation to the history and knowledges of an ‘a¯ina would inform attempts to reconstruct and clarify intercultural relations. One might approach postcolonial work by asking how hospitable such work is to indigenous peoples, knowledges, expressive forms, and protocols. For academic institutions, this would include questions of hiring practices, modes of providing credentials, intellectual and pragmatic authority, curriculum and pedagogy, requirements and modes of assessment, access to/terms of publishing, and ways of conceiving the space and function of the university in relation to represented communities. (On the question of how or whether American studies might be an institutional home for Native American studies see Deloria 2003; Warrior 2003.) Hospitality regarded this way, as a set of ethical and pragmatic questions about the forms and functions of scholarly work, might thus lead to a renovation of the familiar spatial metaphor of the archive as house (or state knowledge, or of the state of knowledge), or the archive as a network of institutions. Too often these are colonially administered places where there are conditions, non-native custodians, and patri-archies, and where hospitality is extended only toward knowledge classifiable within particular sets of cultural logics, by scholars who have their papers in order. This is to say that, if the stories of kama‘a¯ina (Natives) and malihini (foreigners) have, since contact, become bound-together and entangled, in many Native American studies accounts the stories of Natives and Strangers either remain segregated or are imagined as hybridized, with indigenous histories, institutions, and noetics ignored or referred to gesturally. A verticalist sense of indigenous particularism and rights to selfdefinition and self-narration – which is not contingent on Manichean notions of indigenous difference – is vital to any postcolonial reason.

14 Introduction In the word relation, as I use the term, there are at least four dimensions: first, a material scene of interaction; second, the stories/re-representations that are told about that relation; third, an official discursive formation or public sphere that informs the shape imaginings take and within and against which a given representation takes shape and to which it relates; and, fourth, emergent spaces of articulation in which a poetics of relation in Eduoard Glissant’s sense (Glissant 1997) inaugurate alterations in the official, bounded narratives. It is axiomatic to students of colonial representation that, where the material relation is exploitative, the representation will almost invariably lack complexity, and be heard in the public sphere in delimited and invested ways. In other words, to the degree that to “relate” (enter into relation) is something that is “related” (narrated, relayed), narration serves as an enunciation and demonstration of an ethico-political and situated relation; it includes a power relation or race–gender–class relation (and an occlusion of resistant relations), in which narrative can impress itself with a force that produces material effects. Thus, how or in what terms and with what motivations anticolonial critics – in Hawai‘i, one cannot speak of a postcolonial relation – engage the peoples represented performs a relation. It positions the critic and reveals the differences that writing makes, the situatedness of writing, and the institutional conditions in which narrative is constituted, validated, and circulated as knowledge. That, in the case of contemporary U.S. scholarship on Oceania, all such relation takes place within a context in which notions of hospitality are ruthlessly commodified (most notably in corporate tourism, in which Island cultures are figured as “‘naturally’ . . . giving and entertaining” [Trask 1993: 181]) sharpens the stakes. Hawaiian hospitality is assumed to be fundamental and unconditional, even in defeat: “Hawaiians who resented the overthrow of the monarchy by American haoles,” writes Lawrence Fuchs in Hawaii Pono, still might “welcome and feed a malihini haole [Euroamerican] stranger for weeks at a time” (Fuchs 1961: 85). In notpostcolonial Hawai‘i, for instance, one daily sees buses with “Paradise Rediscovered with Polynesian Hospitality” scripted on them, and kama‘a¯ina means (in local, public, and commercial usage) “Hawai‘i resident,” so that those paying state taxes are eligible, in distinction to out-of-state tourists, for “kama‘a¯ina rates,” such as discounts for car rentals and hotel rates.9 To participate in alternative modes of relation vis-à-vis Oceania, an anticolonial American studies requires a recognition that ignorance rather than discursive proprietorship is the necessary and defining condition of the malihini, and that this entails both active listening and, given the discursive history, introspection about motivations for researching and writing about the region at all. As Rotuman scholar-playwright-film-maker Vilsoni Hereniko argues in “Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism” (2000), It is time for Western scholars to realize that legitimacy, or the right to speak, has always been an issue for Pacific Islanders, who do not necessarily believe in the First Amendment. The least that outsiders can do, if they wish to speak as if they were some authority on Pacific societies, is to invite indigenous Pacific

Introduction 15 Islanders, whenever possible, to share the space with them, either as copresenters or as discussants or respondents. (Hereniko 2000: 86) Within a restorative framework – one that would appreciate the complexities and violences of U.S.–Islander relations so often obscured within colonial frameworks – a shared understanding of hospitality (as outside of U.S. civil rights frameworks) would in these terms mean not that the native (in a reversal replicating the behavior of the colonist) would discount non-native knowledges (this has not happened, historically), but that the non-native scholar or creative writer would recognize ignorance as entailing responsibilities (White and Tengan 2001). Among these would be an active reconceptualizing of the understanding promoted by U.S. creative writing institutions and media of what it means to use one’s imagination cross-culturally, and of what and how one might need to know and understand in order to be able to write about (represent) cultural groups not one’s own with care and respect. The prevailing doxy in the U.S. liberal understanding of the arts is that the imagination can and must be free from all a priori restraints and institutional pressures, and that it has no requirement to interrogate itself from the points of view of those it impacts. The concomitant desire to defend imaginative or academic freedom announces itself as resistance to censorship, or a fear that ideological audits might reduce literature to politically correct propaganda, tied to pre-scribed agendas. Such a defense of the imagination asks critics to give up their ethical function and often serves as a cover story (Fujikane 2000: 160). I suspect that resistance to the sorts of care I am concerned with has more to do, where cross-cultural representation is at stake, with authors and institutions guarding against having to listen to or share authority with those they represent. Donald Denoon calls this reserving the “right to misrepresent,” and sees it as endemic to purely text-based approaches, which, generally committed to a sequencing that reifies invested notions of cause and effect, reduces the diversity of performance contexts, and leads to forms of criticism which diminish the emotive, communal, and interactive dimensions of cultural production (Denoon 1997). Because of the valorization of imaginative “freedom,” and the lack of contact between literary artists and reading communities, nothing like the guidelines for researching other cultures in anthropology, with its healthy “epistemological hypochondria” (Clifford Geertz, quoted in Malcomson 1990: 116), and nothing like the protocols around creative non-fiction and oral history involving “human subjects,” is taking shape within literary circles around representation. The problem and its evasion run to the heart of aesthetic principles, formed in Europe during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and institutionalized in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, with considerable input from Southern agrarian/new critics, when authors and critics generally assumed that readers were all white or “one of us,” and were thus never required to consider, as one might posit that a humane writer should today, that those described in a work of art might be part of the audience, or might be people with whom one would enjoy breaking bread-fruit. In this regard, Talal Asad’s argument that criticism must

16 Introduction “always be addressed to someone who can contest it” (quoted in Krupat 1992: 173) might ground a reconceptualization of the cultural work and aesthetics of both creative writing (fiction, drama, poetry) and creative non-fiction, in particular travel writing. A complimentary component of intercultural representations would be a conscious attempt to clarify the terms of relation between authors and the objects of their representions. In “Towards a New Oceania” (1976), Samoan writer-scholar Albert Wendt expresses what I take to be a base-line Oceanian perspective on these matters, which is far from calling for an in-any-event unenforceable moratorium on outsider representation: “I’m not saying that . . . the papalagi [Euroamerican in Samoan] should not write about us, or vice versa. But the imagination must explore with love, honesty, wisdom and compassion . . . writers must [respect] the people they are writing about” (Wendt 1993: 18). At the same time, Wendt makes clear, writing respectfully about groups that one is not a part of is not the same thing as arrogating to oneself the right to speak for (or as) those people – from the “inside” – and functions within a history of discursive and material violence. Literature, of course, is only a part of a much larger story of representation, but it has been a significant, indexical one. If, in the words of Eduardo Galeano, it would be “madness or arrogance” for any writer to “claim that literature” or criticism is “going to change reality,” it seems “no less foolish to deny that it can aid in making the change” (Galeano 1992: 140). This, I hope, is the direction in which my performance of the story of U.S. imaginative failure and violence in Oceania points. American Pacificism provides an analytic description of representations of Oceania and Oceanians within the U.S. public sphere over the past two centuries. Beginning with chapter 2, my chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order, with chapters 2, 3, and 4 concentrating on the nineteenth-century formation of an American Pacific archive, and chapters 5 and 6 and the conclusion addressing twentieth-century extensions and renovations of that archive. However, in each chapter the aim is to establish categories for analysis that will have a broader application to the whole sweep of what I define, in chapter 1, as “American Pacificism.” The term, developed in place of what might be considered American Pacific Orientalism, refers to a wide variety of colonial forms of representation, whether or not a colonial relation was established with those represented, that comprise a discrepant “series of discursive practices in various epistemological domains” (Behdad 1994: 13). While there is a hermeneutic circularity to “South Seas” narrative (DeLoughery 2002: 160–1), the various forms of Pacificism play a range of functions that respond to the needs of the national narrative during given historical periods, rather than forming an essentially repetitive or consistent mirror to the nation. As essentializing appraisals that paradoxically evolve from generation to generation, it is clearly not the “essential nature” of the Islander that changes, but the material relation and the discursive needs of the perceiver. In my reading, the range of U.S. needs met by national expansion into Oceania are distinguishable (and even at times an escape) from the cluster of imaginative needs and repressions that developed around Native Americans and African Americans, although there is a circulation of discourses, as suggested by the

Introduction 17 expectations implied by U.S. ethnolinguists bringing Native-American grammars to Oceania (see Joyce 2001: 69), and by the numerous applications of U.S. racial stereotypes to Oceanians. While there are considerable overlaps among U.S. and European Pacificisms in the representation of what is, at all historical points, a layered, diverse region, and while many of the critiques of U.S. oppression of Native Americans could be extended to Oceania,10 chapter 1 attempts to distinguish what is both “American” and “Pacificist” about “American Pacificism.” The dominant U.S. classes were themselves anxiously working out their “Americanness” (as ways-of-being apart from “Europeanness”) during the nineteenth century. As tracked/critiqued in the founding texts of American studies, the central tenet of this national self-definition was the belief that U.S. institutions and principles, at once democratic and providential, contributed to the creation of a “new” political subject, one mobile and individuated while committed to a larger national mission. This individual became a “subject” within the particular dynamics of U.S. racial formations as they articulated with other social institutions and ideological processes, which identified spiritual identity and national expansion with individual subject formation. In the nineteenth century, as Pamela Cheek argues in her comparative study of the gendered dimension of Orientialisms in Oceania, nationalism is particularly bound up with constructions of masculinity: “one became not just a man, but an ‘American’ man, as opposed to a British, or French, or Oceanian subject” (Cheek 2003: 2; see also Nelson 1998). In Oceania, as evidenced in numerous self-conscious attempts to perform U.S. culture for natives, self-fashioning involved the creation of that masculine subject as “civilized.” To invoke Judith Butler, such performances, in compulsive and compulsory ways, were not so much imitations of a coherent subject as attempts to constitute that subject through contradistinction (Butler 1993). In tracking U.S. views about Oceania, with Islands from the first conceived of as stepping stones on the way to Asia, I suggest that the long repressed category of “empire” in relation to the U.S. (Kaplan 1993; Kiernan 1978) has a trajectory that took on a nationalistic shape in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. Empire and U.S. hegemony in Oceania were imagined long before U.S. colonial activity began. If, as S. Shankar argues, colonialism is imbricated in the whole concept of European modernity, this plays out differently in terms of U.S. national aspirations (Shankar 2001). I am particularly attentive to how, as ambitions for extension formed in the pre-colonial period, they were denied or covered over by both economically imperialistic commercial narratives and glossing, oneiric representations of Oceania. Bifurcating between exotic notions of friendly and hostile natives, these representations have been recurrently rechannelled into touristic forms. As Deborah Root has shown, “because exoticism works by generating excitement” from “the ambivalent relation to difference,” qualities that are abject can with “the proper distance produce delight, desire” (Root 1998: 34). This attitude toward a putative Oceanian cannibalism, in my analysis, eventuates in various forms of cannibal tours that at once desire to conserve/confine Islanders within premodernity, and to bring Islanders out of intolerable practices,

18 Introduction or to consume them within democratic modernity. Cannibalism as a discourse marks a media campaign that at once makes abject and compels, that becomes a site/sight through which U.S. citizens, as suggested, perform “civilization” to themselves, even in moments of seemingly relativistic “acceptance.” The reception of Herman Melville’s early fiction exemplifies these dynamics, and chapter 1 concludes with an abbreviated tour of Melville studies, figured as a metonymy for the ways in which American studies have both insubstantialized Islanders and refigured Oceania toward nationalistic ends. Chapter 2, “Opening Accounts in the South Seas,” links textual production to commercial enterprise. I suggest ways in which American Pacificism develops in relation to an economic nationalism that must go through Islanders who are at once desired and outfitted against. To disclose the phobic nature and juvenile aggressions working through U.S. ambivalences toward Islanders, I take up a text that has not been regarded in relation to Oceania, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). In Poe’s attempt to capitalize on the excitement around the Wilkes expedition – a U.S. government project that involved teams of scientists aboard several ships on a four-year tour of Oceania – I suggest that Pym catches the competitive, nationalistic psychic energy of the period, even at moments in which Poe attempts to parody Pacificist discourses. By connecting Pym to texts surrounding the expedition, including sailing orders, documents lobbying for the expedition, and narratives that informed its conception, I suggest that Poe’s novel registers the antebellum transition to a market economy, whose growth was linked to exploration and the discovery of resources and routes; I also explore the circulation of discourses, in which representations of Islanders are informed by the scientific racism around which paternalistic pro-slavery arguments and Indian policy arrange themselves. In this, Pym renders visible senses in which, in nineteenthcentury seamen’s yarns, discovery narratives, government documents, and popular fiction alike (and often these slip into each other), Oceania emerges as a theater in which regressive and deathly U.S. fantasies of laissez-faire capitalism and Jacksonian speculation are played out under the guise of scientific research or juvenile adventures. To suggest how American Pacificism manufactures consent about Islanders in the course of debates about political theory, my chapter concludes with a reading of James Fenimore Cooper’s Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater, a Tale of the Pacific (1847), which moves from Robinsoniad to colonial treatise, raiding the American Pacific archive for details much as Poe does, only now to allegorize the dangers of Jacksonian individualism. With Poe and Cooper, as dependent as they are upon accounts of Oceania, genuine encounter is rendered absurd, foreclosing ways in which Oceanian perspectives might be recuperated. Chapter 3, on “fear and perception,” turns to the Wilkes expedition itself as an instance of how the climate in which the expedition took shape, registered in Poe and Cooper, informs the ways Wilkes and his men perceive and engage with Islanders. I analyze how a mode of fear (false evidence appearing real) and perception interact in a crucial episode in Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1845) – in which indigenous performance is incorporated as evidence – in order to suggest instabilities at work in the “eyewitness” accounts

Introduction 19 that are the foundation of colonial archives. The chapter juxtaposes Wilkes’s text with Melville’s response to the emerging archive in Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), in which Melville remarks upon and embodies the obsession with cannibalism in order to explore its construction and uncanny hold. The modes of representing the “seen” of cannibalism in Wilkes, compared to Melville’s anxious re-”cite”-ing of prior constructions of cannibalism, suggest divergent conceptions of mimesis and knowledge production fundamental to the development of American Pacificism and its critique, or distinctions between complex and vulgar forms of American Pacificism. At the same time, as Typee’s reception suggests, nothing guarantees that a complex Pacificism will be more effectively hospitable than a vulgar one. If, as suggested in chapter 3, a discourse of fear underwrites the construction of founding texts in the American Pacific archive, generating lines of fright and exacerbating tensions that rebound and produce violence on the beach, accounts and attestations of friendship hold out the promise of a powerfully regenerative counter-discourse. As peoples pull toward each other, the description of cultural forms at once gains focus and blurs with desire. Chapter 4, on cross-cultural friendships, argues that discourses of friendship, like those of fear, at times altered experience and on-the-ground practice. For Islanders, as suggested, relation is a key knowledge component. If for both sides fear portends, produces, and authorizes force, friendship potentially facilitates exchange. Within the rip-tide of colonialism, this can itself contribute to hegemony, or become a romanticized form of tourism. My concentration on friendship – if often as an abused, missed, or utopic moment – aims to function as a complex counterpart to that of fear semiotics (based on the putative endemic violence of the “cannibal”). Through culturally contextualized readings of texts, from beachcomber and trader narratives to canonical literary works to anthropological memoir, I suggest that a poetics of relation developed between Oceanians and U.S. citizens that complicates ideas about American Pacificism as a monolithic, Kafkan machine impressed on natives.11 Kamakau gives a good sense of the range of ways in which Islanders and foreigners interacted: Many foreigners of different races, the red, the black, the white, came in the early days to Hawaii . . . some were received hospitably by the Hawaiians, taken under the care of the chiefs, became favorites, and bequeathed to Hawaii their posterity . . . others tried to enrich themselves, were proud, and trod the Hawaiians under their feet. (Kamakau 1992: 245) Before colonialism, much of the initial forming of relations worked through formalized friendship rituals, such as name exchange, which were at once real, manipulated, and mythologized in the Euroamerican archive, such that the important compiler of Hawaiian lore Abraham Fournander claimed that name exchange was “esteemed” among “all the islanders of the Pacific Ocean” as “the strongest pledge of friendship” (Fournander 1969: 183–4).

20 Introduction I assert in this chapter, in ways that I hope reverberate through my narrative, that there were always intimacies and ways that friendships (in its various senses) bridged cultural gaps, and always U.S. individuals who, against the prevailing institutional bigotries, joined their lives with those of Islanders, and took on the responsibilities, difficulties, and pleasures of learning and sharing. However, even in identifying this fundamental aspect of what is a complex international set of relations, I acknowledge senses in which, while friendship is an attractive countercategory to fear and racism, it is rarely entirely free of fear, including the fear that desires will be met, which activate processes that Jonathan Lamb describes as “preserving the self.” Such complexities in the erotics of the fear–friendship continuum – pivoting around the fear/desire for incorporation – are suggested by Melville’s mistranslation of the Marquesan tribal name Taipi to signify “a lover of human flesh” (on cannibalism/homosexuality as linked see Crain 1994; Torgovnick 1990: 182–4). Most of the canonical U.S. writers about Oceania were literally tourist boosters, and, especially in the twentieth century, were constituted as native informants to metropolitan readers in part by writing directly for the tourist industry. Jack London, for instance, worked with promoter Alexander Hume Ford in the development of iconographic images for tourist promotion, particularly around Waiki¯ki¯ and surfing. In chapter 5, on the transition from a literature of encounter to literary tourism, I extend the categories established in chapters 2, 3, and 4 to a range of texts (literary, cinematic, anthropological), from the late nineteenth century to the present, starting with the self-consciously literary tourism of Charles Warren Stoddard, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams, and running through cannibal tourists ( Jack London, Fred O’Brien), lotus-eater writers ( James Norman Hall, Charles Nordhoff, Robert Dean Frisbie, Robert Flaherty, Margaret Mead, Annie Dillard), and contemporary post-tourists such as Paul Theroux and Larry McMurtry, in order to show discursive continuities and transformations. My use of the expression “literary tourism” draws upon Louis Owens’s description of the term to describe writing that evades the hard work of “crossing conceptual horizons,” writing that avoids the literary terrain that is “multidirectional, uncontained, unstable, and always plotting return visits” (Owens 1998), but extends to the literal links to tourism in Oceanian contexts. For instance, motivated largely by reading Melville and other South Seas authors, Adams exchanged names in Tahiti with the Arii Taimai (whose story he co-authored as Memoirs of the Arii Taimai [1891]), and found the friendship meaningful. However, his primary motive in going to the Islands, expressed throughout his epistolatory journal, was a Fijian cannibal tour. The turn toward colonial humor in discussing a “recently ended” cannibalism, evident from Twain’s lectures on “fellow savages” of the Sandwich Islands through contemporary writings on Oceania, rechannels the fear-driven semiotics into literary tourism, with its search for authentic remnants of primitivity. A coda reads Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992) as a post-tourist text that expresses a sour imperialist nostalgia, or the postmodern adventurer’s disappointment at the difficulty of finding novelty or unspoiled places for his “powers of taste to work on,” as Mary Louise Pratt has

Introduction 21 described Theroux’s travel writing in another context (Pratt 1992: 218). My coda further suggests how, in different ways, texts by Annie Dillard and Larry McMurtry exhibit a desire to remain ignorant about Oceania around the sites/ sights of curiosity and commodification, while critiquing the despoiling effects of colonialism, ecological devastation, and globalization. Drawing on tourism theory – “tourism” is regarded in this book not as opposed to reality, but as a state of knowledge (or state knowledge) and a set of material and economic relations – chapter 6 identifies points of contact among touristic and scholarly writings as modes of regarding and constructing Oceania in Cold War scholarship that eventuate in what I term histouricism. I emphasize senses in which a popular, public sphere-oriented scholarship and tourism were, in terms of U.S. popular consumption of Oceania and a touristic episteme, complementary activities, driven by the needs of the national narrative, and suggest the turn this took toward a model of triumphalist “history” during the drive to statehood for Hawai‘i that grew more urgent in the Cold War years. This is partly the story of how, as Hawaiian writer-scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask argues, “a rich historical past became small and ignorant” in the hands of scholars who told a linear history of Hawai‘i as an inevitable if occasionally bittersweet triumph of Western ways over “primitive” Hawaiian ways . . . a few authors – the most sympathetic – have recorded with deep-felt sorrow the passing of our people. But in the end, we are repeatedly told, such an eclipse was for the best. (Trask 1993: 149; see also Diaz 1994) Histouricism, presented as at once entertaining and pedagogic – exemplified in “edutaining” journals such as National Geographic, American Heritage, and Readers Digest – turned Hawaiian history into snapshots of inevitable demise and benevolent incorporation, even when the snapshots were pasted together over a thousand pages, as in James Michener’s tremendously influential novel Hawaii (1959), subsequently a blockbuster movie, as had been Michener’s South Pacific (in book, dramatic, and cinematic forms). The Cold War notional compression, or ascendancy of liberal consensus, made the period amenable to panglossic histourical narrative. During this period, as William Appleman Williams argues, “empire” became so much a “way of life” that awareness of U.S. violence was lost in the “euphoria of our enjoyment of the ends” – the nation’s unprecedented power (Williams 1980: ix). In a section on Michener as “histouricist par excellence,” which sketches the historical content and theory of Hawaii, in conjunction with Michener’s extraliterary works, I examine the ways that histouricism is constituted by a doublegesture that rationalizes and celebrates colonialism, eschewing the word “colonialism,” while silencing Oceanian voices or twisting them into collusive postures. To show the conflation of imperial politics and touristic promotion involved in this outlook I examine the career of University of Hawai‘i scholar A. Grove Day, whom Michener called “the foremost authority on Pacific literature,” along with works by Day’s colleagues and contemporaries, as

22 Introduction overdetermined instances of the values and histourical vision of those who represented the region to the U.S. public sphere between World War II and the Civil Rights movement (at which point the discursive formation opens up to allow a critique of histouricist narrative). These values are evident in the selections and glossings of writings about Hawai‘i and Oceania featured in a series of popular histories and anthologies, several of them authored or edited by Day and his colleagues. In unmasking ways in which Islanders are damagingly represented within U.S. culture, culminating in the triumphalist Cold War histourical narratives of incorporation in which Oceanians have become greeters for the tourist industry, my study recurrently risks and resists the suggestion that beneath the distorted mask can be found the true, authentic face of Island cultures. My concluding chapter, on “antitourism,” suggests ways in which Oceanian writers reject this logic of presenting the “authentic native” as itself a tourist trap, and attempt instead, in a variety of direct and indirect modes, to bring on a crisis in the reader/ tourist in the sense of a moment in which the “presuppositions of an enterprise are disproved by the enterprise itself” (Spivak 1990: 139). “Tourism,” presented here as the figure for what “antitourism” contests, extends beyond the physical impact of tourists to all (neo)colonial forms of attacking the dignity and well-being of Islanders, ranging from the obvious targets of nuclear testing and environmentally destructive development to colonial institutions which disparage Oceanian ways of knowing. Where “tourism” represents ways that Islanders are imaginatively confined in prescribed ways, antitourism is an alternative mode of seeing, always concerned with the material conditions obscured by Pacificist writing. It is part of an artistic renaissance that further enriches Oceanian cultures while functioning as a “unifying force” in the region (Wendt 1993: 19). Central to this vision is a sense that, as Teresia Teaiwa argues, “Eurocentric theories must remain ornamental to narratives that interrupt dominant historical and cultural constructions of islands as military bases and touristic sites” (Teaiwa 1994: 102). In concluding with an invocation of Oceanian voices, artistic and critical, I do not mean to suggest that “writing back” or resisting colonialism is a recent phenomenon. Hawaiian historians Noenoe Silva (2004) and Jonathan Osorio (2002) have given nuanced accounts of how Hawaiians resisted U.S. colonialism throughout the nineteenth century, making extensive use of newspapers and archival materials in Hawaiian; both clarify how, in Juri Mykkänen’s phrase, “the visibility of [Native, in particular maka‘a¯inana] resistance tactics is often low when observed through existing historiography” (2003: 169). Likewise, Vilsoni Hereniko (1994a), Caroline Sinavaiana (1992, 1999) and others have detailed forms of clowning/mimicry/ridicule of Euroamerican visitors and administrators from the earliest scenes of encounter, examples of which pervade the colonial archive. (Oceanian humor, so fundamental to Island life, is one of the most telling casualties of Pacificist discourses.) Nor do I mean to suggest that my book has attempted to provide a balanced dialogue of U.S. and Oceanian voices. The common people of Oceania resisted Euroamerican incursion everywhere it took place, regardless of the pacts that they were led into by elites. Islanders always danced, performed

Introduction 23 satiric skits, chanted, carved, and painted on barkcloth their resistance, and when writing was introduced and quickly embraced they wrote their resistance. However, detailing such cultural forms of resistance and negotiation – improvisational, synthetic, and situated, today including photography, film, rap, spoken word – would involve radically different sets of analytical procedures and research methodologies than I have employed, and would be a different project than my critique of the forms and functions of American Pacificism. Within the frame of my analysis, however, I conclude with a glimpse of artistic production that Richard Hamasaki compares to the visible tips of volcanoes, to “mountains in the sea” (Hamasaki 1993). In this metaphor, traditional Island expressive forms are seen to percolate upward in contemporary Oceanian texts through the sedimented layers of missionaries, traders, literary critics, and postcolonial theorists. Oceanian expression takes new forms without losing cultural substance, or denying the tout court value of what has crossed the beach and become part of Island cultures. My concluding chapter, then, explores strategies by which contemporary Oceanian artists sustain their critique of touristic representation while avoiding an uncritical relation to the pre-contact period. Islanders, who are now “inside” the institutions of Pacific studies and American studies in ways that erode the reductive metaphysics of opposition – most perniciously the division within Pacificism between indigeneity and modernity – draw creative materials from the wealth of inherited materials and from each other in a developing Oceanian imaginary.

1

Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be Forms and functions of American Pacificism

That great sea, miscalled the Pacific Charles Darwin, Journal of the Beagle (1832–6)

Oceania in the U.S. Imagination Get real We were always just stepping stones Erich von Daniken saw the footprints of the Gods Chris Connery saw the trademarks of capitalism Who’s going to give a damn if they don’t Can’t remember that the whole of the doughnut is filled with coconuts. Teresia Teaiwa, “Amnesia” (2000)

Since the days of the early Republic, two fundamental conceptions of Oceania – coterminous, contradictory, synergetic – have been entwined in the U.S. imagination. On the one hand, “Pacific” islands are envisioned, economically and geopolitically, not as ends in themselves, but as stepping stones (provisioning and refueling stations, colonial outposts, communication centers, military bases) or passages (shipping lane protectors) toward the wealth of the Orient and the Indies. Such a vision shaped the U.S. relation to Oceania first in the China trade, in which private interests conflated with economic nationalism, and later in colonial ventures framed in terms of geostrategic needs. On the other hand, Pacific islands are imagined as ends-of-the-earth, cultural limit-cases unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity, whose unfamiliar natives are compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans. In the stepping-stones narrative, versions of which have prevailed in U.S. policy in Oceania for over two hundred years, the islands are remote dots in the vastest of watery expanses, valued primarily for the quality and location of their harbors (Pearl, Apra, Pago Pago) and natural resources (sandalwood, guano, bêche-de-mer, pearl and pearl shell, copra) to be traded in Asia. At the same time, the islands function as places for scientific discovery, soul-saving

Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be

25

and civilizing missions, manhood-testing adventure, nuclear testing, and eroticized furloughs between maritime work or warfare, all activities linked to U.S. subject formation and performance of national identity in gendered terms.1 Within both of these overarching narratives the specificities of Islander histories and cultures, along with the Islanders’ political rights, are subordinated. Timothy Dwight’s “America; or, A Poem on the Settlement of the British Colonies” (1780) subordinates “savage nations” as it apostrophizes the new Republic: Hail land of light and joy! thy power shall grow Far as the seas, which round they regions flow; Through earth’s wide realms thy glory shall extend, And savage nations at thy scepter bend. Around the frozen shores thy sons shall sail, Or stretch their canvas to the ASIAN gale. In “The Errand Bearers” (1860), Walt Whitman, extending Thomas Jefferson’s idea of America as an “empire for liberty,” writes similarly of “The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast beyond, / The coast you henceforth are facing – you Libertad.”2 Such passages, prosopoetically figuring the U.S. as “a new Empire, grander than any before,” tend to be read today as early Republic “Orientialism” that “linked nationhood with command over the Orient” and accompanied the U.S. “race to the Orient” (Schueller 2001: 2, 23). From an Oceania-based viewpoint – one informed by the on-the-ground perspectives of Oceanians and by the continuing project of Pacific studies to become decolonized – this highlights the hold of what might be considered a repeating series of opening accounts toward Asia. In this narrative, Oceanians are bent to U.S. will, adopted as “wards of Uncle Sam” (as many popular magazines put it), and displaced to the recreational margins of the national imagination, though not without occasional liberal handwringing. What Renato Resaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia,” a way to maintain “one’s innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed” (Rosaldo 1989: 70), is a prevalent half-tone in writing about Oceania, beginning in the early nineteenth century with analogies to Native Americans. “Polynesia, the dying civilization,” wrote James Michener, “haunts the minds of white men who destroyed it” (Michener 1951: 44). The wake of this narrative, which hides complexities in the past and present, is a jumble of temporalities and spatialities constructed over the developmental narrative that underlies colonial discourse in general. As Anne McClintock argues, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “historicism,” the notion of progress depends on a background of “archaic time” against which “to identify what is historically new” (McClintock 1995: 358). Oceania is imagined at once as “Stone Age,” atavistic, or lotus-land outside Western time, and also claimed as America’s “ocean of the future.”3 According to rhetorical needs, Oceania is imagined as proximate (“The Pacific is our natural property,” wrote John La Farge, “our great coast borders it for a quarter of the world” [La Farge 1912: 278]) or distant (“strange, fantastic places over the rim of the world” [O’Brien 1922a: 7]). The developmental ideology

26 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be that backs this thinking has held virtually every U.S. writer about Oceania. Whereas some authors make romantic comparisons, such as Emerson’s juxtaposition of the “thinking American” (who has lost aboriginal strength) and the hearty, “naked New Zealander” (Emerson 1982: 48), others write from overtly socially Darwinistic viewpoints, such as Jack London with his “Inevitable White Man” prevailing over hairy, “worse than naked” natives (London 1967). In “Salute du Monde,” Whitman more typically envisions Oceanians as among the “benighted” of the earth, but extends the hand of friendship to “you Feejeeman! . . . away back there where you stand, / You will come forward in due time to my side” (Whitman 1965: 148). Through this pervasive scalar model, Oceanians are seen as remnant cultures “centuries behind us in the life-struggle, the consciousness struggle” (Lawrence 1961: 137). There is a clear connection between such deeply ingrained views and the geostrategic line that runs from Jefferson and John Quincy Adams through Teddy Roosevelt – “I wish to see the U.S. the dominant power of the Pacific Ocean” (quoted in Beale 1989: 5) – to Richard Nixon’s sense that as Europe withdrew “the remnants of empire” the U.S. became the “Pacific power . . . both our interests and our ideas propel us westward across the Pacific, not as conquerors but as partners” (quoted in Drinnon 1980: 445). From the overthrow of Hawai‘i onward rhetoric such as that of senator Albert J. Beverage became normative: “The Pacific is the Ocean of the commerce of the future. Most future wars will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world” (quoted in Fredman 1969: 36). These viewpoints ground Cold War paternalism, with its stated civilizing mission to bring “them,” however traumatically, along with “us” into civilized modernity, backing the ambition of military control. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, while much of the world was decolonizing, U.S. imperialism increased in the region with the goal of maintaining “the Pacific as an American lake free of communist influence” (Weeks 2002: 93; Meller 1968). In addition to Hawai‘i, Guam, and American Samoa, the U.S. administered large sections of Micronesia: “It will be useful for some time to come,” said Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1967, “for American power to be able to control every wave of the Pacific” (quoted in de Riencourt 1968: 194). Along with the economic dependency that eventuates (in places such as Palau) from government military contracts, a contemporary, ongoing example of non-territorial economic-military imperialism is the U.S. bankrolling of Indonesian repressive actions in Western Papua.4 From the Cold War onward, such imperialistic actions have increasingly been obscured by tourism. As the U.S. broadened its military scope of operations in Oceania, state-sponsored mass touristic promotion intensified. While the U.S. tested weapons in Micronesia (1946–58), using Marshallese as unwitting participants in “human radiation experiments,” islands were promoted as antidotes to civilization, with Islanders figuring as “primitive” reflections of jaded U.S. citizens. Teresia Teaiwa has developed the term “militourism” both to describe a tourism whose stability is underwritten by military presence while the “tourist industry masks the military force behind it” (Teaiwa 1999: 252; see also Enloe 1989), and to

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suggest a symbiotic, gendered connection between invasive military and touristic drives, in which sites of cruelty and violence are turned into sights of voyeuristic fantasy. For instance, in discussing the genesis of the term bikini for swim wear and its links to the nuclear testing on Bikini atoll, Teaiwa argues that, “by drawing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body, the bikini distracts from the colonial and highly political origins of its name” (Teaiwa 1994: 87).5 Such competing drives behind “South Pacific” discourses serve to displace or deflect any consciousness or introspection about the political reality of ongoing U.S. colonialism in Oceania. As Haunani-Kay Trask argues, the fact that “to Americans Hawai‘i is an escape into a state of mind” is connected to “the ideology that the United States has no overseas colonies and is, in fact, the champion of selfdetermination the world over” (Trask 1993: 180). The double logic that the islands are imagined at once as places to be civilized and as escapes from civilization informs at all points what I describe in this book as American Pacificism. This involves the co-presence of the nationalistic stepping-stones narrative with a nostalgic, oneiric, cover story that it never displaces; rather, the two hands wash each other clean. The weave of narratives at once naturalizes and neutralizes knowledge of the effects of U.S. trajectories into Oceania. In the dominant attitude toward Oceania, the two narratives move in alliance, with the stress always on commerce and democratic character-building. From generation to generation, Pacificist U.S. views of Oceania have had iconic public advocates – from John Ledyard to Matthew Perry to James Michener, often acting through knowledge-producing institutions, from government-sponsored expeditions to museums and think-tanks, such as the East–West Center, established during the Kennedy era for theorists and planners of the Asia-Pacific region. Knowledge production backs commercial, patriotic aspiration. In 1783, Ledyard, the iconic “American Marco Polo” who sailed with Captain Cook and later lobbied Thomas Jefferson in Paris to invest in trans-Pacific expeditions that would link the U.S. commercially to Asia, offered his narrative of Pacific travel to the public. Replete as it was with liberal philosophical asides about Islanders, his account was presented “as essentially usefull to America in general but particularly to the northern States by opening a most valuable trade across the north Pacific Ocean to China & the east Indies” (Ledyard 1963: xlv). In the mid-nineteenth century Matthew Perry forecast that “The People of America will, in some form extend their dominion and power until they have brought within their mighty embrace multitudes of the Islands of the great Pacific, and place the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia” – for Perry, because this followed the will of “an over-ruling Providence,” the U.S. probably “could not, if we would . . . avert our ultimate destiny” (quoted in Perry 1994: 84–5). Writer after writer has echoed this viewpoint, as in Mark Twain’s trade-oriented description of Hawai‘i as “a half-way house on the Pacific highway” (Twain 1975b: 233). In the 1950s, University of Hawai‘i administrator William George spoke of the institution as “the central pier of a bridge, one span of which would extend from the continental United States to Hawaii, and the other span from Hawaii to the Orient” (quoted in Quigg

28 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be 1986: 16). An article in Newsweek, characteristically disavowing U.S. colonialism, claimed that Hawaii will be the first state with roots not in Europe but in Asia. This is bound to have a profound effect on America’s future in the entire Far East . . . In Asian eyes, the U.S. is the land of the white man, and all too frequently it is tarred with the brush of ‘colonialism.’ Hawaii the 50th state could change all this. (quoted in Klein 2003: 251) Such liberal racism vis-à-vis Oceanians is characteristic of Michener, the selfdescribed “cultural geographer” of Asia and the Pacific during the Cold War period (Grobel 1999: 168), who, as journalist, pundit, advisor to the State Department and various corporations, and bestselling author, exercised enormous influence. While a career-long social progressive and anti-racist, Michener habitually dispels any notion of indigenous rights in promoting East–West relations. His anti-racism thus serves the colonial agenda vis-à-vis Oceanians, reflected in U.S. linguistic epistemology, which turned “lands” into “property” and “kinship” into “citizenship,” and disguised Native–Settler politics in rhetorics of multiculturalism. Through thus redefined terms of citizenship and subjecthood, as J. K¯ehaulani Kauanui has demonstrated, Islanders became racially assimilable (legislated out of rights through blood-quantums), as opposed to the Asians with whom the U.S. state sought co-prosperity. Michener’s characteristic strategy in this is to approach islands from the perspective of the long view, beginning with the formation of the islands out of volcanic activity and coral polyps, a context against which all forms of settlement are first equated, and then seen as evolving along either the progressive path of democratic capitalism or the regressive path of communal ownership. Thus his vision of the adoption into the U.S. family of a “South Pacific” island (Hawai‘i, although it is in the North Pacific) with “Asian roots” dissolves U.S. colonialism in a vision of racial harmony to come, and is a clear instance of what Rob Wilson describes as “the U.S. white settler imaginary and its own grand will to democratic-commercial sublimation into itself” (Wilson 2000a: 124). Michener splits contemporary Islanders from their relation to place and history, describing Oceanian cultures as in any event dying or assimilating before “the onrush of white civilization,” in part because Islanders are outwitted and outworked by Asian settlers (Indians in Fiji, Chinese in Tahiti, Japanese in Hawai‘i) (Michener 1951: 44, 64). He envisions Polynesians as soluble within the democratic Asia-Pacific melting pot. In the blockbuster novel Hawaii (1959), this produces the ideal of “the golden man.” For Michener, the islands were valuable as “Pacific approaches” to Asia. The “South Pacific,” he concluded in Return to Paradise, “has become the meeting ground for Asia and America. . . . There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America” (Michener 1951: 436). At the same time, while calling the region “a backwash in the world’s eddies,” Michener argues of Oceania that “These trivial islands have imposed

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on history the most lasting vision of earthly paradise” (ibid.: 45). Michener perpetuated this in the image of Bali Ha‘i, a gauzy version of Bora-Bora (where soldiers maneuvered not to be sent home), although Bali Ha‘i was the name of a “most miserable Melanesian village” in the Solomon Islands that Michener described as “filthy, unpleasant” (Michener 1992a: 91). Bali Ha‘i beckons tourists to this day: “Here I am, your special island / Come to me, come to me.” Oceanian peoples and lifeways could be little more than backdrop, or furnishers of curios (shrunken heads, grass skirts, boars’ teeth), in such a directioned narrative as South Pacific (1947), in which young Liat, “a true gem of the Orient” (Michener 1951: 183), embodies the spirit of Bali Ha‘i. In Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, and the play and movie inspired by its stories, significant exchange, economic and libidinal, must take place between U.S. agents and Asians, in particular Tonkinese (indentured labor from the Gulf of Tonkin), along with French plantation owners. Clearly, as Cristina Klein argues, this enacted “a variation of the U.S.–French– Vietnamese relationship that was being forged at the time” (Klein 2003: 167).6 Michener’s views were pervasive among Cold War scholars, writers, and regional planners, who shared a tendency to recall selectively the scope of nineteenth-century U.S. involvement in Oceania and to read it backwards and forwards as legacy of connection and prophecy of possession. That such a legacy required recollection suggests something of the postwar investment in reasserting the teleology of progressive U.S. Westward destiny monumentalized in such paintings as Thomas Cole’s “The Course of Empire” (1836) or Emanuel Gottlieb Luetze’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (1861). The alternative to this linear march would have been to acknowledge a multidirectional impulse toward empire from the birth of the Republic forward, or a nineteenth-century embryonic version of world-integration through multidirectioned capitalism, or what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as “a decentered . . . apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri 2000: xii). The “early and extensive” (Dodge 1966: 51) U.S. commercial involvement in Oceania before the settlement of most of the continental West, from the 1790s onward, has been widely documented, but has had minimal effect on the “Westward Course of Empire” narrative, which seems as necessary to the proponents of U.S imperialism as to its critics.7 (In 1801, for instance, Edward Fanning describes entering a remote harbor in which he found “a small fleet of American sealers, being five ships and a schooner, from whom we learned there were upwards of thirty sail of American sealing vessels on this coast” [Fanning 1970: 306]). In actuality, the continental West was circled and linked to world markets in part by labor from Asia and Oceania. A whole U.S.-Pacific system of commerce and settlement functioned on a broad scale throughout the region from 1812 through the Civil War around the whaling industry (along with sandalwooders, sealers, bêche-de-mer traders), involving agents, communication networks, a consular system, and state-sponsored military protection, along with the missionaries who trained Island missionaries who fanned out, spreading trade and establishing U.S. influence throughout the Islands. Long before San Francisco became a commercial

30 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be center or California a U.S. state (1850), Honolulu was the business hub of Oceania: for a Honolulu resident the gold boom caused a bust in the Honolulu housing market, pulling away both settler–traders and laborers ( Judd 1966: 253). By then maritime industry centers such as Sag Harbor and New Bedford (a section of which was called “New Guinea”) had substantial communities of Oceanians. Thousands of Oceanians, comprising roughly one-fifth of the U.S. maritime (see Denoon et al. 1997; Chappell 1997), used the industry to move themselves to and from their home islands, or formed settlements in the West from what is now southern California to Alaska. Much of the U.S. “West” was settled from the “East” and the ideological foundations that would lead to the seizure of the West are connate with the ambition for transnational commercial development in and across Oceania. There was a literal sense in which a mid-nineteenth-century writer such as Thoreau could write, in The Maine Woods, “We have advanced by leaps to the Pacific, and left many a lesser Oregon and California behind” (Thoreau 1985: 655).8 Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. writers drew parallels between the opening of Oceania and the settling of the West. Herman Melville most famously echoed this connection in Moby-Dick (1851), drawing analogies between the ocean and fields of wheat, while referencing Native Americans. (From Cook’s journals on, Oceanians were often referred to as Indians, a fact that resonates differently in U.S. contexts than in his own.) The sense of the applicability of challenges, policies, and principles from one frontier to the other has always been accompanied by the vision of U.S. commercial extension as ideologically distinct from European colonialisms. The U.S., according to the Monroe Doctrine, had no overseas colonial ambition, and in the course of settling the continent (rather than administering non-contiguous lands) expressed a moral obligation toward those it displaced, whose dependency, assimilation, or diminution (“vanishing”) were considered inevitable byproducts of progress. In his 1828 Letter to Congress, for instance, John Quincy Adams wrote how “appropriating to ourselves” NativeAmerican hunting grounds had “brought upon ourselves the obligation of providing them with subsistence” (Adams 1897). The relation of Oceanians to “American Indians” was sensed acutely by Oceanian intellectuals and political leaders, from Kamakau, who wrote in 1841 that, “if we do not gather these data now, after many generations our children would be like the American Indians – a race without a history” (Kamakau 1961: iv), to Kauikeaouli (who invoked the destruction of “red skins” as a cautionary example for Oceanians), to Lili‘uokalani, who saw Hawaiians being “relegated to the condition of the aborigines of the American continent” (Lili‘uokalani 1980: 369). Over a hundred years later, anthropologist and planner Douglas Oliver would write of the Micronesian Islands as additions to the U.S.’s “South Sea Island real estate” that entailed obligations: “now they are in our care, for better or worse. And whether we like it or not, satisfying our strategists has imposed upon our government the awful responsibility of preserving some sixty-five thousand brown-skinned islanders” whose ways of life “in some respects . . . are as different from ours as stone axe is from atom bomb” (Oliver 1961: xvii).

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During the Cold War, the reactivation of frontier analogies and Westwardmoving explanations of history took on a new geopolitical urgency, in keeping with the U.S.’s new role as superpower, culminating in J. F. Kennedy’s description of Oceania as “the New Frontier.” This is reflected in poet Charles Olson’s insistence that Oceania is “part of our geography, another West, prefigured in the plains.” In the U.S. imagination, Olson argues, “The Pacific is . . . the Plains repeated, a 20th century Great West. Melville understood the relation of the two geographies”; he understood that “America completes her West only on the coast of Asia” (Olson 1947: 13, 114, 117). Scholars of Westward expansion, such as Paul Fussell, are so imbued with this understanding that they can see little more in Oceania than repetitions of the continental context in which Islanders “immediately conjured up that arch savage, the American Indian.” Through such reading, Melville’s Tommo and Toby, lost in the Marquesas, become “‘pioneers,’ who hack their way through a forest of cane (as if Nukuheva were Kentucky), and encounter Niagras of waterfalls” (Fussell 1965: 236). In this spirit, Life magazine writer A. B. C. Whipple argued that, “If the U.S. Government had had the foresight in the Pacific that it had in the American West, we would not later have had to win back from the Japanese many islands that were discovered by American whalemen in the first place” (Whipple 1973: 9). Whipple’s ideas about Oceania in Yankee Whalers in the South Seas are thoroughly conventional in being relentlessly bifurcated, poised between, and ambiguously embodying, attraction and repulsion, hospitality and hostility. His history of pioneering whalemen goes on, in its amiably jingoistic, juvenile mode, to describe the Islanders that whalemen encountered as at once “kind and cruel, friendly and suspicious, sentimental and bloodthirsty.” He notes that, for whalemen, they were invariably called “the cannibals,” “whether they were actually cannibals or not” (Whipple 1973: 72). In writings such as Whipple’s, based on selective and sensationalized readings of validated texts within the American Pacific archive, Islanders are recurrently divided between “hostile” or “friendly” natives (generally, the darker, the less hospitable), or between peoples who are extravagantly fearsome (cannibals, against whom preemptive violence might be required, and to whom civilization must be brought) or extravagantly friendly (generous hosts, who offer to share the bounty of idyllic islands, or swim out to the ship seductively). These poles do not line up schematically. Hospitality, for instance, does not equal friendship. However, tilted slightly, they produce in my analysis “cannibalism” and “tourism” as grounding metaphors for U.S. perceptions of Oceania. They are at once linked to each other (co-present at any moment) and sequenced (with touristic development figured as a rechanneling of violence into “hospitality”). The two are less binaries than indexes of a residual splitting within national desires and imperial rhetoric, in which an aggressive hunger for conquest coexists with an anxious desire to be welcomed and embraced as innocent or benevolent. “Behind the white American’s nightmare that someday, no longer tourist, inheritor, or liberator, he will be rejected, refused,” writes Leslie Fiedler, “he dreams of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended” (Fiedler 1948: 670–1). Both “cannibalism” and “tourism” – savagery and/or the Happy Valley/

32 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be paradise – are about modes of seeing, or about how socio-politically invested preconceptions structure perception. There is no contradiction in the impulses that allow scholars and literary tourists to speak of finding “an earthly paradise among the cannibals of Typee” (Sedgwick 1944: 25). “Cannibalism” as trope can be threatening or exotic according to the angle and desires of the perceiver. The “cannibal” has always been as much a feature of escapist reading (thrill without risk) as the “brown maiden.” “Where is the boy who has not dreamed of cannibal isles,” wrote Frederick O’Brien in his bestselling White Shadows in the South Seas (1919), “where naked brown men move like shadows through unimagined jungles, and horrid feasts are celebrated” (O’Brien 1921a: 6–7), without suggesting why this should be so. In the mid-twentieth century, Robert Dean Frisbie, who struggled for decades in the islands with his ambition to write a great novel about Oceania, complained that from a market point of view it had long been virtually impossible to write outside of binaristic boundaries: In the South Pacific, from Easter Island to the Marshalls, are lands as dissimilar as Siberia and Panama; but in the books about them two notes prevail: first, that of lushness, sensuality, and security; second, that of disease, hardship, and danger. This is unavoidable, for the reader will accept only the brown maidens and free lunch of Polynesia or the cannibals and square ginface of Melanesia. If a South Sea author wishes his book to sell he must emphasise either the amenities or the asperities of island life, seasoned with love and thrills; for a good South Sea book is avowedly escape reading, and as such it exerts a healing effect on the frayed nerves of civilized man. (Frisbie 1993: 6)9 Not surprisingly, Frisbie was known to the U.S. public mostly as the author of a series of exotic articles on island life in the Atlantic Monthly. Some mixture of love and hate, of Freud’s side-by-side “contrary impulses,” seems to be fundamental to all forms of racism, particularly where the raced “other” is imagined as an earlier version of the self. However, the bifurcation of Oceanian peoples in U.S. discourse develops in and against particular historical formations, informed by internalized censorship and self-fashioning. Anxiety about market-driven constraints on representing Oceania has been felt by U.S. authors from the early nineteenth century onward, since shipboard narratives were retailed by their authors as commodities as much as informational texts. Often they were “got up” after the fact with the help of literary hacks, whose job it was to market texts that could at once pass for authentic and fulfill increasingly inflated desires for exoticism. For all the professions at the beginning of these narratives to patriotic duty and service to the country, their cultural function might be understood as what tourism theory calls “edutainment.” Almost invariably they acknowledge that the market is saturated and that they would not enter it if they did not have something at once novel, informative, and useful to offer the country. At the same time, what they communicate in the process of disseminating

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knowledge about the islands is informed by perceptual and ideological pressures and the decorums of self-presentation before the home audience, including normative ideas about gender, masculinity, race, nation, and the “civilizing” project. What is most striking is how unavoidable it seems for writings to be drawn, at the points of both conception and reception, toward the semiotics of tourism. In “The Semiotics of Tourism,” Jonathan Culler argues that the language of tourism, which cannot be adequately separated from the language of travel narrative, foregrounds “the difficulties of appreciating otherness except through signifying structures that mark and reduce it” (Culler 1988: 167). In other words, representation tends to delimit what can be thought about its object, generating lines of invested misrecognition. As Said demonstrates, intercultural representation inevitably involves “corrections upon raw reality” toward prevailing cultural needs. These corrections amount to disciplined distortions in that they are promoted by institutions and acquire vocabularies outside of which it becomes difficult to perceive (Said 1979: 67–8). The positions occupied by the Orientalist and the Orientalized structurally restrict their modes of reacting to each other or of aligning themselves in resistant formations within or between or beneath the logics of colonial state apparatuses. Like many critics who are theoretically indebted to and politically moved by Said’s work, my own approach to colonial representation differs from Said’s on several points.10 In indigenous contexts, for instance, his anti-essentialist secular rationalism seems unproductive where it insists on a false binary. Said maintains that the Orientalized subject must be a “constituted entity” since “the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically ‘different’ inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture or racial essence proper to that geographical space is a highly debatable idea” (Said 1979: 322). The critical fallacy is that one must believe in either a “constituted entity” based on dubious appeals to racial essence or an authenticated, authoritative “real.” One might instead recognize the indigenous claim to a genealogical relation to land – in which genealogy is a principal form of history – whose significance indigenous peoples themselves determine collectively, often through formal tribal procedures, as a valid epistemological approach. “They” can and do represent themselves (and have always done so), although often they have been able to be heard or institutionally validated only within languages amenable to the cultural logics of the colonizing power and/or postcolonial or postnational theory. The critique of Orientalism in this sense, as Nicholas Thomas argues, is not “empowering” to those it defends and does not acknowledge “the autonomous complexity of nonEuropean cultures. The tendency is to insist upon the will to dominate in imperial culture . . . without investigating the ways in which the apparatuses of colonialism and modernity may have been compromised locally” (Thomas 1997: 2–3). In these senses, where Orientalism itself slips toward tourism, tourism theory becomes a useful framework for investigating the forces that work through various forms of critique, whether in fiction or scholarship. Tourism theory keeps in view the pervasive commodification and aesthetically reductive dimensions of representational practices, including “cannibal discourse” as a representational staple of

34 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be the West. “Cannibal” discourse, or cannibal tours, the base-line of much Pacificism, marks a scene of consumptive energies. From this viewpoint, as Dean MacCannell argues, modernity is characterized by pervasive guilt and mourning for its own rechanneling of the cannibal instinct into new forms of ruthless incorporation. In reading Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours, a film documenting wealthy Europeans touring the Sepik River valley in search of vestiges of cannibalism, MacCannell argues that tourism is the sign of capitalism as a total, pervasive social fact (MacCannell [1992]). The triumph of modernity and consumer logic is signaled by the participation of indigenous peoples in marketing simulations of their now expired primitivity (“the past is preserved as the destruction of the past” [Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: xv]). Fourth-worlders are in the First World and vice versa. There is no more primitivity or “authenticity” to be had. Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be. This would suggest that one might go quite a bit further than Pacific historian K. R. Howe does in exploring the implications of his observation that “The discourse of early twentieth-century Pacific tourism stands in conscious contrast to the nineteenthcentury fears about the dangers of culture and nature in the Pacific” (Howe 2000: 23). In what I discuss in this book as American Pacificism, the Freudian paradigm – “where id [primitive energy] was, there the ego [commercial rationality] shall be. It is a work of culture” (Freud 1977: 71) – has functioned pervasively as a particularly damaging regional variation of broader developmental narratives that justify colonialisms. This is, in another form, the regressive, bifurcating narrative, ambivalent about the inevitability of indigenous demise, that recognizes indigeneity only as pre-industrial lifeways or their simulated versions.

Toward a definition of American Pacificism A SAVAGE CAN’T LIVE IN AMERIKA! and Amerika i tell you is EVERYWHERE Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, “A Savage Can’t Live in Amerika”

Certainly no U.S. government official, ship captain, missionary, scientist, or novelist could be free of the network of conceptions about Islands and Islanders that preceded U.S. state formation and that were subsequently reinflected by nationalistic socio-politics in the voluminous writings that informed an emerging American Pacific archive. Any literate U.S. citizen from the nineteenth century onward was raised on a steady diet of narratives accompanied by pictorial images of Islanders, generally set against other “primitive” peoples in a comparative frame as part of a hierarchical grammar of races, as Bruce Harvey has elaborated in

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American Geographics (2001). Schoolchildren studied McGuffey readers packed with moral lessons derived from the experiences of white men in exotic places. In Euroamerican ethnological texts Polynesians, who generally stand in for the South Seas, are relatively high up on the “Aesthetic Tree of the Human Race” and “Morphological Tree of the Human Race” (McClintock 1995: 38). The “Punaluan marriage,” which Friedrich Engels develops based on information from Hawai‘i, is seen as a middling stage of human family development toward modern capitalism, as indigenous “feudalism” was often presented as midway along the route from hunter-gatherer to industrialism. (By inventing “feudalism” in the Pacific, Trask demonstrates, “Western scholars quickly transformed a spiritually based, selfsufficient economic system of land use and occupancy into an oppressive Medieval European practice” [Trask 1993: 150].) Images of Islanders pervaded U.S. culture in the nineteenth century, including newspaper items, trade and consular reports, magazine articles, missionary and explorer narratives, paintings, plays, poems, material artifacts in museum exhibitions from the Smithsonian to Barnum’s hooplaed Fiji cannibals, scientific and pseudo-scientific monographs, photographs (Barnum’s “cannibals” posed for photographer Matthew Brady in 1872), sensational pamphlet novels, popular lectures by authors such as Herman Melville or Mark Twain, and ballads, such as the enormously popular “King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands.” This song, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and referred to in the first chapter of Thoreau’s Walden and in Melville’s Typee, is played by the Wilkes expedition band to the chiefs of Fiji and hummed by Joshua Slocum on his sail around the world. The extent of the imaginative hold that such songs and images about Islanders had throughout the culture is clear in the personal letters and diaries of every nineteenth-century writer – among Emerson’s favorite tunes from youth was “The Banquet Song of the Tonga Islands.” Literary texts absorb and refigure these forms and tropes, in effect representing the processing and reproduction of the cluster of popular and scientific knowledges circulating at a given time, providing complex indexes of the imaginings of Oceania. They may be from a patrician point of view, as in James Fenimore Cooper’s Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater, a Tale of the Pacific (1847), with its “kanakas” threatening settlers before being incorporated as laborers on the plantations of an idealized U.S. colony in Oceania, or from before the mast, as in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), with its intimate accounts of living with kanaka (the Hawaiian term for “person” that became the generic and later derogatory epithet for all Oceanians) in the hide-tanning camps of California, or from a frankly homosexual view such as that of Charles Warren Stoddard, who idealized the islands as sites for male desire. More typical and representative are the liberal confusions of Emerson’s journals and essays, in which he revealed his lifelong, anxious, racially hierarchical meditation on the meaning of progress, concluding that civilization necessarily purchases moral advancement with the loss of physical vigor. As he wrote in the “Power” section of The Conduct of Life (1860), the “energy . . . in the civil and moral

36 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be man” outweighs the value of “all the cannibals in the Pacific” (Emerson 1860: 49). At the same time, he wrote in his journal, “Let us wait a thousand years for the Sandwich islands before we seize them by violence” (Emerson 1960–82: 16.9). The islands come up reflexively as limit cases in asides, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where a character refers to New Orleans as so wicked it is “most equal to going to the Sandwich islands,” and a rearranged hat is described as giving a slave an air of “defiance, quite equal to that of any Fejee chief ” (Stowe 1981: 245, 100). Such references are continuous with the deforming and caricaturistic visual images of Islanders in texts such as Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), or in political cartoons, such as the tattooed man series attacking presidential candidate James Blaine, in which the man’s political deeds are tattooed on his body, or cartoons that presented Lili‘uokalani as African American. Such views surface in political speeches, as when, in the course of debating Lincoln, Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas argued that “Lincoln’s belief that the Declaration of Independence applied to people of color would make the debate’s listeners, who sometimes chanted ‘White men, white men’ during his speeches, the equals of Fiji Islanders” (quoted in Roediger 1991: 144). Similar comments pervade the correspondence of those involved in policy-making in Oceania, in personal letters to their friends, in state documents, and in public statements. Thus what Said argues of the range of advisers on U.S.–Arab relations – “The Middle East experts who advise [U.S.] policymakers are imbued with Orientalism, almost to a person” (Said 1979: 321) – is true for Oceania.11 The theoretical category of archive – whether as Foucauldian “system of enunciabilities,” Derridean “fever” (destructive forgetfulness), or what Ann Stoler calls an institutionally sanctioned “hierarchy of credibilities” – would seem to enable an analysis of the ongoing traditions of imagining Oceania as another variety of Orientalism. Said’s political analysis, with its emphasis on ways in which texts reflect and inform the cultural dialogue about imperial policy, crucially links Orientalist styles of thought and assertions of intellectual authority to nationalist institutions. With his eloquent descriptions of how “textual attitudes” produce ideological consensus and tradition, Said provides invaluable starting points for students of colonial representation. However, for several reasons Orientalism is a problematic heading for analyzing the forms and functions of representations of Oceanians in U.S. culture.12 For one thing, given the centuries-long and ongoing displacement of Oceanian priorities and history by discourses about the Orient, and the tendency of the study of Orientalism to stretch right over the Pacific, the term “Orientalism” seems inappropriate, laden with geographical associations that historically marginalize Oceania under the rubric of the Orient. As Paul Sharrad observes, when one picks up an “article or book that trumpets its explication of ‘the Pacific,’” it almost invariably refers to “the economic miracle of Korea, or Japan” (Sharrad 1994: 597). This “rim-speak,” Rob Wilson notes, contains “little Pacific content” (Wilson 2000a: 111). Recurrently, Asia-Pacific constructions are ways of “getting over” (on) or dematerializing Oceania, whether invoked by proponents or opponents of neoliberal globalization. In the phrase Asia-Pacific, writes Epeli Hau‘ofa, Islanders “are an appendage (or perhaps the

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appendix) of Asia, and in APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Coprosperity] we do not exist” (Hau‘ofa 1997: 130). American studies today are saturated with applications of Edward Said’s thoughts on Orientalism to non-European groups subjected to Euroamerican imperialism. Most of these concentrate on areas ranging from Northern Africa to the Far East. In the past few years, for instance, significant books on U.S. relations to or constructions of “Asians” include Douglas Little’s American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945; Malini Johar Schueller’s U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890; Cristina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961; Mari Yoshihara’s Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism; J. K. W. Tchen’s New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882; and the collection Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930 (edited by Holly Edwards). Likewise, the framework of Orientalism informs discussions of internal colonization on the U.S. continent. For instance, Ernest J. Wilson III argues that “The Black community has been subjected to a kind of internal Orientalism. Its members too have been defined as ‘The Other,’ to be feared and controlled” (E. J. Wilson 2000: 243). Toni Morrison is the most striking expositor of how the free, individual “American” identity has formed in opposition to unfree, deindividualized African Americans, although she avoids Orientalism as an explicit framework. While the description of Schoolteacher’s “knowledge” in Beloved seems like a reading of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia through Said and other critics of colonial representation, Morrison specifies her focus by insisting on the term “Africanist presence.” Studies of U.S. Orientalism taken together suggest how easily in U.S. multicultural contexts the emphasis on a particular racial formation can obscure or diffuse both the workings of other racial formations (such as Native/Settler), and the circulations of discourses within all such formations, in which “Orientalisms” at home and abroad may reinforce each other. From an Oceania-centered viewpoint, the underlying equation of Orientalism with the Orient, and the generality of Orientalism when delinked from specific geographical associations, can occlude the workings of coterminious and linked Pacificisms, and even in the process collude with state Orientalism in obscuring Oceanian priorities. Such a critique could, of course, be extended to U.S. continental politics as well. For instance, as invaluable an intervention as is Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and as much as its concern for the ethics of imaginative work inform my own, it subsumes Native Americans and all other U.S. minorities into the black–white paradigm. Oceanian characters, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s Nu-Nu in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or Herman Melville’s Queequeg in Moby-Dick, are discussed as “black.” Arnold Rampersad likewise considers all of the Oceanian figures in Melville’s works as “black,” and even attributes this position to C. L. R. James by supplying the brackets to a quotation that credits Melville with taking “them [his black characters] over into the world he saw ahead” (Rampersad 1997: 167; James 1953: 44). This subsumption of Oceania into Africanist frameworks is common to African-

38 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be American scholarship, in its offhand and conventional references to Oceania. For all Frederick Douglass’s visionary, anticolonial indictments of world politics, Oceania seemingly remains unreal to him: “Intelligence is penetrating to the darkest corners of the globe . . . the far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet” (Douglass 1999: 205). Leslie Fiedler in this sense accurately describes the tendency in U.S. racial politics (by both whites and non-whites) to see all non-white subjects as black: “I say Negro . . . because [whether Indian or Hawaiian] the Negro has become more and more exclusively for us the colored man” (Fiedler 1948: 668). This is in a sense continuous with the practice evident in Carolyn Karcher’s ground-breaking Slavery Over the Promised Land, which reads Melville’s texts as generalizing “about slavery by analogy.” Thus, “instead of making American Negro characters his primary vehicles for challenging his compatriot’s anti-Negro prejudices, he created fictional counterparts for them among the South Sea cannibals, American Indians, native Africans . . . he had encountered on his voyages” (Karcher 1980: 2).13 To see works such as Poe’s Pym as primarily a commentary on Southern slavery, despite its explicitly South Seas location, or to see Queequeg as black, or to see the Taipi as analogies for U.S. slaves, are examples of how liberatory criticism can, in some contexts, participate in American Pacificism in the sense that the specificities and complexities of indigenous cultures and Oceania-based intercultural encounter are subordinated to other agendas. For all its aura of objective research, this happens as pervasively in secondary textual engagement of Oceanians – in literary/cultural scholarship – as in primary narratives of encounter, fiction or non-fiction. Where the latter, particularly travel narrative, has received extensive critique, my analysis centers as much on scholarly narratives. In my reading these constitute secondary or tertiary forms of American Pacificism that (mis)read sources (take secondary sources for primary ones) through agendas unrelated to Oceanian interests. In critiquing the American Pacific archive through the category of American Pacificism, I insist upon an Oceania-specific definition of U.S. encounters in Oceania in the context of nation- and empire-building. In this analysis, the European Pacificisms that precede and inform U.S. image/knowledge-formation about Oceania – such as those analyzed in works such as Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) and Rod Edmond’s Representing the South Pacific (1997) – are reinflected and acquire new resonances in relation to U.S. sociopolitical formations. My preference for the deceptively quiet term “Pacificism” to describe multiply split U.S. logics aims to foreground the alluring, muting, quiescent quality of a touristic glossing over of a violent legacy of encounter. “Pacificism” pacifies, as Orwell notes: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the country side, the huts set on fire . . . this is called pacification” (Orwell 1961: 363). There are, of course, more complex Pacificisms that involve varieties of sustained engagement with Oceanian cultures, or that break from preconceptions through established relations, such as friendship, marriage, collaboration. However, Pacificisms are so alluring that they filter

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through even these complex forms. Their characteristic forms juvenilize, exoticize, and retreat from their own messy insights into intercultural relation, converting and splitting them into positive or negative fantasy. This vulgar Pacificism denies or guards against the material history that informs its production, repressing the senses in which it is in part an effect of an interaction. To invoke one of Wilson’s chapter titles in Reimagining, Pacificism facilitates “Forgetting Colonialism in the Magical Waters of the Pacific.” These dynamics, by which the complexity of U.S. encounters with Oceanians are pacified into the stuff of tourism, are central to American Pacificism, and quite unlike the dynamics of U.S. Orientalisms in the Near and Far East. Additionally, American Pacificism is distinguished from its European counterparts by its entangling of the stepping-stones narrative (islands in Oceania had no such function in European Pacificisms) and the oneiric cover story of islands that at once safeguards this passage and seeks to establish fraternal settlement over a long duration to stabilize the region for brief battery-charging forays for countrymen. The dynamics of providential exceptionalism implicit in the stepping-stones narrative are shot through as well by anxious, split rhetorics. On the one hand, Islanders participate in their own transition toward modernity and democratic “rationality”; on the other, they are experienced through the discourses that circulate around Indian removal and slavery debates into the Pacific, where they mix with fantasies (of touristic vacation) and phobias (of cannibal aggression) to form a tenacious set of tropologies. Against these contexts, the bifurcated fear/friendship fantasies that pervade the archive can be heard as the in–out rhythm of a particular imperial breathing, sometimes relaxed, sometimes heavy, sometimes catching at pinch-points of cultural anxiety, sometimes guilty, generally convinced that the necessity of aggressive actions will become evident from the vantage point of their democratic result. The U.S. body politic breathes out acts of imperial violence and inhales professions of an idealism about a non-agressive, care-based, non-colonial, fraternity-seeking relation to Islanders. In this, the bifurcated archive reflects to an uncanny degree the perceptual and ideological drives, anxieties, and doubts of those individuals and institutions who have constructed and perpetuated it. Much of the nervous humor and eroticism plays around “cannibalism,” around male anxiety about whether Islanders want to love you or eat you, or whether the latter is the sign of the former, as in Daniel Bergan’s and Caleb Crain’s suggestion that cannibal discourse is a coded analogy for homosexual panic. This panic involves an attraction to something that one is supposed to find repulsive, which causes a loss of control (Crain 1994: 32; see also Torgovnick 1990: 182). The resultant confusions might be approached as reflexes of unresolved tensions among national (masculinist) drives, causing “attacks” in which something the subject tries to feel about the object is blocked, rebounds, backfires, and ultimately must be pacified within the touristic languages of Pacificism.

40 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be

Melville studies/American studies and Oceania: an abbreviated tour In the next great move of imaginative conquest, Americans turned to the sea. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature Melvilles and film-makers tell that my pre-European ancestor was the ‘noble savage.’ Albert Wendt, “‘Me, Adam’” (1974)

In part because of the ways in which they embody and comment on the dynamics of American Pacificism, Herman Melville’s hypercanonized Pacific writings, and in particular Typee (originally published as part of a series called the Colonial Home Library), with its book-length inside narratives performing an alternation between panicky cannibal frights and touristic, carefree fantasy, have become the founding texts for literary American Pacificism. Typee and Omoo were central to Melville’s canonization, providing a “model of the correct relation to the primitive” for figures such as Carl Van Doren, who believed Islanders were “irresponsible natives hovering between cannibalism and a half-comprehended Christianity” (Lauter 2001: 207–8). That so many of the patterns of thought in American Pacificism are anticipated in Typee, I argue, is less purely a testimony to Melville’s inventiveness than a result of an in-cite-full archival methodology that relentlessly refigures the common motifs of his day. At the same time, that a book which describes the decisive moment of colonization in the Marquesas and Tahiti – a period of massive depopulation and fragmentation in the islands – should occupy the dubious position of a founding touristic text reveals the heart of American Pacificism, and suggests the dangers of contributing to the ignorance one combats when it comes to representing an area as saturated with touristic associations as Oceania. Nearly every U.S. writer on Oceania recalls reading Melville as the principal motivation for going to the islands and uses his writings as a touchstone. In the words of A. Grove Day, “for years no one could see the Pacific through any eyes but Melville’s”; “Melville’s second book [Omoo] almost became a tourist guide to the region” (Day 1987: 5, 76). Among the fiction writers who follow in Melville’s wake, and scholars such as Day who tread in the textual tracks of Melville’s disciples, what is crystallized in their imagination is rarely Melville’s indictment of colonialism and U.S. imperial rhetorics, but rather a handful of exoticizing images, “purified by time and washed free of fear” (Martin 1986: 39).14 Likewise, nearly every work that has treated U.S. imperialism in Oceania from the junction of U.S. literary and cultural studies begins with a reading of anti-imperial passages of Melville, projecting the viewpoints of each reader’s era onto Melville’s texts. So Melville remains our contemporary: a multiculturalist or avant-la-lettre postcolonial, poststructuralist theorist. Thus from generation to generation, no U.S. writer has been more influential

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than Melville in reflecting and (re)establishing the basic patterns through which Oceania came to be perceived. From his time, when “Marquesan Melville” was a household name as the author of South Seas romance, to the Melville Renaissance when Melville was lauded in articles with titles such as “The Man that Found the South Seas” (Lauter 2001: 204), Melville’s name has been indissociable from Oceania. In courses all over the U.S. (and elsewhere) for at least sixty years, Melville is the key figure in representing Oceanian cultures to students of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. Queequeg the friendly cannibal, a farago of Oceanian signifiers without being from any “true place,” remains the single iconic, pan-Pacific Islander in U.S. popular culture.15 Thus Paul Theroux, in The Happy Isles of Oceania, could assume wide comic recognition when referring to Fijians as a “race of Queequegs, proud of their cannibal past” (Theroux 1992: 219). To the extent that students of U.S. literature receive a keyhole “peep of Polynesian life” (Typee’s subtitle), it is in all likelihood through their exposure to Melville’s pseudo-ethnologizing texts and scholarly responses and reframings of them. Insofar as there are references to Oceania in founding texts of American studies, such as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence, and Richard Drinnon’s Facing West, it is largely with reference to Melville’s texts. Likewise, where nineteenthcentury U.S. activity in Oceania is touched upon in New Americanist scholarship, as in John Carlos Rowe’s Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism and Bruce Harvey’s American Geographics, it is disproportionately in terms of contextual readings of Typee. This seems largely the case for international scholarship on U.S.–Pacific relations as well. Melville and Melville studies might in these senses be taken as a metonymy or cunning duplicate for American studies vis-à-vis Oceania. It thus seems worthwhile to take an abbreviated tour of how Oceania has been represented in Melville studies. In the terms of this analysis it is not a question of whether Melville scholars, in the course of discussing Melville’s Pacific fiction, set out to represent Pacific Islanders or make statements about their cultures per se. Representation does take place in writings where Oceanian interests are at stake, and imaginatively apprehends islands as spaces of U.S. activity. However consciously, Melville scholars make assumptions about Oceanians, which inform assumptions of their readers, and the ignorances they display in the process have structures that go beyond incidental error. In analyzing the dissemination of views of Oceania through “Melville,” the question is neither what Melville’s texts “actually say” about Oceanian peoples and places, nor how and in what ways Melville “cares.” (If care is related to cultural knowledge – familiarity with languages, customs, institutions – missionaries cared more than Melville.) A corrective reading in this context, were it possible, would pull away from attention to the demonstrable field-wide ignorance that Melville’s texts perpetuate, though in a few instances they enable contestation in the imaginations of his readers.16 Whatever Melville meant by the statements he makes about Oceania (almost all of which are densely, multiply citational, rather than primary descriptions), that is, they have either been literalized by many of his scholarly interpreters, without the archival evidence or literary scholarship customarily required, or pressed into

42 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be metaphoric service in ways that mystify or leave in place erroneous beliefs and attitudes about Oceanian ways. Melville himself was, as his autoethnographic moments assert, guiltily aware of the senses in which he bartered in representations of Islanders, as Islanders themselves bartered in culture in the disrupted scenes following colonial incursion. That Queequeg has “bought up a lot of ‘balmed New Zealand heads” and “sold all of ‘em but one” (despite the fact that the “market’s overstocked”) links the Western-inaugurated commercial trade in human relics with Melville’s own reflections on his early career. While the comic scene to some extent masks the historical processes – the New Zealand musket wars that were tragically escalated by the colonial obsession with skulls as “great curios” – behind Queequeg’s head-peddling, Melville discerns a pervasive globalization of trade. In Melville’s pun, the recent ex-cannibal, like Michener’s Bloody Mary, now runs a “cannibal business” that seems the direct precursor of the souvenir business of contemporary tourism, in which Fijians market “cannibal chutney” and relish hoodwinking tourists with “cannibal forks.”17 Melville’s handling of “cannibalism” in particular has generated a seemingly unending chain of ignorant, nervously comic citations, often presented as fact. Nearly all Melville scholarship assumes Taipi cannibalism as a widely practiced element of culture. In egregious cases, Taipi are described as eating their own wives and babies because they enjoyed the taste.18 Though Melville clearly meant to trouble the discourse of cannibalism from the inside out, the degree of his failure in doing so in the public sphere raises serious questions about whether, in attempting to complicate Pacificist views, he inadvertently consolidated them. The epithets applied to Melville – “the man who lived among the cannibals” or “apostle of cannibalism” – that he found so odious during his lifetime (Herbert 1980: 182–8) remain pervasive, as in anthology headnotes such as that in The American Tradition in Literature, which states that Melville “spent a month among the handsome Marquesan Taipis, whose free and idyllic life was flawed by their regrettable habit of eating their enemies.” What is striking is the unconscious investment that American studies have in viewing Oceania through a mythic Melville without feeling any need to read contextually about Oceania, leaving and wanting no grounds from which to evaluate Melville’s statements about native practices. This is certainly part of what has always been at stake in the obsessive interest in the degree of Melville’s accuracy and integrity as a cultural translator. The revived question of whether Melville was ever in fact in Taipivai – without any concomitant articulation of why it matters – has a pathos, given that from its inception Melville studies have been invested in some notion of Oceania as, pace Charles Olson, “part of our geography” (Olson 1947: 13), and the fact that, by extension, Melvilleans express an emotive familiarity with Oceania. Melville’s growth – psychological, sexual, political, or aesthetic – is expressly connected to his experiences in Oceania. Hence the title of the chapter on Typee and Omoo in Edwin Haviland Miller’s Melville: A Biography (1975), “A Child in Cannibal Land,” or Natalia Wright’s assertion that Polynesians represent a state that, “though immature is idyllic, outgrown but loved and longed for” (Wright 1949: 56), or John

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Bryant’s sense of Taipivai as an arena in which stages of Tommo’s sexuality are played out (Bryant 1996). Such an aura of developmentalism informs at multiple levels the linkage of Melville/American studies with Oceania, a telling instance of which may be found in D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). In addition to its theoretical contribution to New Critical reading, the book participated in reorienting U.S. literary study toward its delimited sense of American Renaissance classics as decisive expressions of U.S. thought. Lawrence’s canon anticipates the Cold War canon, authorized by F. O. Matthiessen and purveyed by figures such as Richard Chase and Alfred Kazin, that dominated U.S. literary study for half a century. While idiosyncatic, poetic, and “small,” Studies in Classic American Literature remains popular. Its apostrophe of Melville certainly contributed to the “Melville Revival” that eventuated in Melville’s hypercanonization. It is significant that Lawrence, following the general appraisal current through the 1920s (during which there was what Van Wyck Brooks called a “vogue of the South Seas” [Parker and Hayford 1970: 145]), centralizes Melville’s “Pacific” fiction and his relation with Oceanians and that Lawrence’s views of Oceania exemplify the vulgar Pacificism that sanctions a consequential U.S. critical ignorance. For Lawrence, Oceania is counter to modernity. The Pacific is older than the Atlantic or Indian oceans in that it has “not come to any modern consciousness” (Lawrence 1961: 132). As U.S. writers with their “isolate” and “killer” soul struggle into “the next great phase,” Islanders remain “uncreate [sic].” Since Oceanians have “slept” through the convulsions of modernity, they continue to exist outside of Western time: The Maoris, the Tongans, the Marquesans, the Fijians, the Polynesians: holy God, how long have they been turning over in the same sleep, with varying dreams? Perhaps, to the sensitive imagination, those islands in the middle of the Pacific are the most unbearable places on earth. It simply stops the heart, to be translated there, unknown ages back, back into that life, that pulse, that rhythm. The scientists say that the South Sea Islanders belong to the Stone Age . . . The heart of the Pacific is still the Stone Age; in spite of steamers. (Lawrence 1961: 133) For Lawrence, Oceanians remain impervious to history: “Samoa, Tahiti, Raratonga, Nukuheva: the very names are a sleep and a forgetting” (Lawrence 1961: 134). It is of course Lawrence who has the epistemological privilege of avoiding history in mythic readings that elide the materiality of the conversion of indigenous institutions and tribal systems into colonized nation-states and the decimation of Oceanian peoples, largely through introduced diseases. (In the Marquesas the population went from “an estimated 100,000 at its height to 4865 in 1882” [Herbert 1980: 19].) But it is Lawrence’s description of Oceanians as intellectually unconscious that is most representative of the ignorance informing Pacificisms. (Historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote that “The islanders love

44 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be sleep, and they sleep without knowing it. Sleeping or waking is the same to them if they have enough to eat” [Bancroft 1915: 528].) For Lawrence, to “go back” to the South Seas is to enter an intellectual “vacuum.” This representation of Oceania became pervasive in mid-twentieth-century Melville criticism, in which, in answer to the question of why Melville would leave such an idyllic paradise, scholars described Marquesan life as physically robust, spontaneous, instinctive, but mentally vegetative and thus ultimately intolerable to an extravagant thinker like Melville. “For all its charm and its ingratiating ways,” writes William Ellery Sedgwick, “Typee is sub-human. A man cannot reside there but at the price of undevelopment. . . . One cannot stay long. . . . For all its loveliness it is wanting in the elements of man’s intellectual and spiritual consciousness” (Sedgwick 1944: 36, 30). That such astonishing statements about Oceania met no objection from within American studies even as political, touristic, anthropological, and literary interest in Oceania was increasing suggests how structurally possible it has been for Americanists to write without even a minimal awareness of Oceania as a space of struggle, creativity, and innovative response to Western incursion. Much of the early Melville studies ignores the critique of U.S. destructiveness in Lawrence’s analysis (“Destroy! Destroy? hums the under-consciousess,” Lawrence writes) and moves in unreflective alliance with the soft primitivism embedded in his views. In Marquesan Encounters (1980), one of the few Americanist books to regard research about Oceanian cultures and history as relevant for approaching U.S. activities in Oceania, Walter Herbert cites D. H. Lawrence’s views and then notes (in a footnote) that, “With varying emphasis the same scalar relation between Marquesan life and Western life is present throughout the critical literature on Typee” (Herbert 1980: 223). The diagrams of oppositions found in a work such as Milton Stern’s The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville are a virtual blueprint for American Pacificist literary reading. Stern sees the relation between Euroamericans and Taipi as an “opposition of mind and body, mind and heart,” and presents a list of binaries, including conquest/submission, ultimate doom; quest, mobility/seclusion, immobility; consciousness/unconsciousness; attempt to conquer nature/integration with natural environment; artificiality, complexity/ naturalness, simplicity (Stern 1957: 31). Such essentializing views about Oceania are undergirded by Freud’s and Marx and Engels’s understandings of developmental history. As appeals to the “natural” generally do, they obscure the complexity of Oceanian social forms and their transformations through the colonial period. In a society dealing with forms of segregation that indexed traumatic tensions in social progress, and that periodically reached boiling points, Oceania remained a racial context in which such notions of archaic time could exist. One might posit that this resonated and converged with the widespread retreat of American studies into analyses of “American pastoralism” and nostalgias for agrarianism, which Leo Marx describes as the “redemptive journey away from society in the direction of nature” (Marx 1967: 69). There is a continuum between this retreat and the vogue of plays such as Bird of Paradise (1912), with its songs “I Want Some More Samoa” and “Pagan Love Song,” and post-World War I films about Oceania such as Robert Flaherty’s

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Moana or plays such as Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, with its recurrent references to Islands imagined after a reading of Typee. While this emphasis was in some senses a reflex of the Americanist avoidance of race as relevant to the study of literature that ran through the Civil Rights period, it cannot really be said that Lawrence, Flaherty, and others were avoiding “race.” Lawrence explicitly names peoples (Maori, Tongans, Marquesans, Fijians) as utterly remote, uncultured forms of humanity, somewhat as Conrad described Africans as inhabiting prehistory. Rather, vis-à-vis Oceania, twentieth-century American studies could and did move in alliance with racial views of the mid-nineteenth century in ways that would have been unacceptable toward African or Native Americans. During the 1960s, when Melville acquired heroic status for his prescient critique of racial politics in U.S., the analysis was never extended to Oceania, except insofar as it provided analogies for slavery and Indian removal (Dimock 1989; Karcher 1980), or insofar as Melville was valorized for his ability to embrace what was furthest from the norms of his society – the Polynesian “cannibal.” If Lawrence complicates the idealization of “golden-limbed, laughing, graceful” Islanders “who will call you brother” (Lawrence 1961: 136), most Melvilleans who followed his temporalizing logic were more romantic, with an utterly different effect from Conrad’s “howling” Africans of remote human kinship. One can hardly imagine any critic describing Heart of Darkness in the terms used by Lewis Mumford, an important early figure in American studies: “One reads Typee, and life suddenly shows a new vista. Adventure is possible: Eden is real” (Mumford 1969: 45). Mumford’s assessment could be found on the back of the Signet Classic edition of Typee through the 1990s. That these views were not a new thing, but a reactivation of a critical legacy of cleansing Typee and Omoo of their socio-political commentary that began within several years of their publication in both England and the U.S., indexes deeper structures of feeling. To compare reviews of Typee and Omoo with the accounts of the books given in the course of reviews of Melville’s writing and Moby-Dick a few years later is to become aware of the touristic desires that Melville stimulated almost immediately, and continues to stimulate (Melville was acutely aware that this was the effect of his books, and was disparaging toward them: “what reputation HM has is odious, to go down as the man who lived among the cannibals” [Melville 1993: 193]). While many of the first reviews of Typee objected to his attack on missionaries, and his immorality on sexual matters, within a few years critical recollection of the books lauded their fresh, entertaining, racy, idyllic presentation of a sojourn with the Taipi who, as Melville recklessly put it as part of his polemic against ignoble civilization, existed in a “state of nature.” Reviewers continued to wish for “Typee” and missed it when Melville’s work turned overtly speculative. As a reviewer for Today: A Boston Literary Journal wrote, “the expectations of pleasure excited by the memory of that book [Typee] have always been disappointed as we have read those which have followed from the same pen” (Parker and Hayford 1970: 84). A close reading of such reviews suggests that critics in Melville’s time preferred the earlier books not because they did not understand the later ones, but because they did, and disliked them on political and aesthetic grounds. (This would

46 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be shift emphasis from the image of Melville as misunderstood genius to the massive desire his readers felt toward South Seas romance, of which Melville had provided the most fulfilling tastes.) The nature of the pleasure critics desired from Melville had to do primarily with touristic scenes, lively snapshots of unsullied Oceania, which, crystallizing in memory, exceeded the complexity of the books themselves (particularly Omoo, in which colonialism has more massively altered indigenous practices than in the ignorant, idealized portrayal of Taipivai). This snapshot approach, with select passages and tableaux foregrounded (most notably in illustrations, such as John La Farge’s “Fayaway Sails Her Boat,” of Fayaway, based on a Samoan model, using her tapa [barkcloth garment] as a sail on Tommo’s invented lake), characterizes references to Typee from Charles Warren Stoddard, Jack London, and Henry Adams to contemporary writers. Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle, “As a book to hold in one’s hand and pore dreamily over of a summer day, it is unsurpassed.” Hawthorne wrote, anonymously, in the Salem Advertiser, “we are acquainted with no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life” (quoted in Miller 1975: 118). In other words, Typee has always been read touristically, and what Mumford concludes has been quite literally true: “Typee is a book to make one go visiting tropical islands, a book to make one question the well-arranged career. . . . A scholarly boy reads Typee, and engages a berth for himself on a ship” (Mumford 1969: 45). In this strain of American Pacificist response, even the specter of “cannibalism,” which Lawrence called the “fly . . . in Paradisical ointment” (Lawrence 1961: 135), takes on a touristic dimension, in which what threatens is pacified, exoticized, and wrapped in ambivalent humor. Contemporary reviewer Charles Fenno Hoffman stressed the non-threatening dynamic: “the men eat their enemies, and entertain their friends with the freest hospitality”; Margaret Fuller spoke of “the Happy Valley of gentle cannibals” (in Branch 1974: 69, 77). The “amiable” cannibals in this Typee will not eat you, though they may excite you into thinking they might; rather, their cannibalism functions to guarantee their primitivity or aura of representing a place in which appetites may be fulfilled unselfconsciously. As a British reviewer joked, while Queequeg “turned out to be a cannibal,” he was “as sweet-tempered a savage as if he were a vegetarian” (Parker and Hayford 1970: 8). Whatever the nature of these “children of nature,” they treat Tommo like generous hosts, ministering to his every need. This is one source of the sorrow that Tommo expresses at the outset of Omoo in his backward glance at the island where he has just killed a chief to escape: “with home and friends once more in prospect” he “nevertheless felt weighed down by melancholy. . . . It was the thought of never more seeing those, who . . . treated me so kindly” (Melville 1968b: 7). One can see here how Lawrence arrives at the moral of the story: “The past, the Golden Age of the past – what a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas” (Lawrence 1961: 139). The islands are idyllic to visit, but to stay too long would be to risk “going troppo” (Thomas and Eves 1999) and to evade the complexities of “modern” home and work life. In the multiple gendered economies of this touristic perception, South Seas narratives

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guard against commitment by taking on the structure of an illicit or coming-of-age affair. This touristic desire merges during the founding period of American studies with a sense of psychoanalytic developmental narrative that, as suggested, could no longer publicly be applied to non-white groups in the U.S. In the nineteenth century, representations of Islanders, Native Americans, and African Americans were linked, circulating, made to comment on each other. However, in pre-Civil Rights twentieth-century Americanist work this polemical comparativism receded, with Oceania preserved as a space distant from domestic racial struggles. Islanders remained appropriable to a wide range of messily connected, even contradictory uses, from being counterpoints to U.S. society (outside of history and racial strife), to being representatives of freer psychic or sexual states (as in Mead’s romantic anthropology), to being models for how non-whites could be assimilated in ways that proved the trumping power of U.S. civilizing ideals over the most atavistic peoples. Rod Edmond has effectively described a counter-discursive emphasis in colonial discourse. However, in the reception of the imaginative writers through whom Islanders are seen, from Melville’s “fatal embrace” to Twain’s periodic laments at Native demise through London’s “diseased Oceania” and O’Brien’s “colonial decay,” the material consequences of the Islanders’s engagement with Euroamerican modernity remains largely sublimated in the U.S. imagination. Despite the devastation of Island societies, and even the Cold War rhetoric of benevolent incorporation or wardship, the “Last of the Mohicans” syndrome never quite predominates in relation to Oceania. Even a critic such as Richard Slotkin, for all his pointed critique of the violence of U.S. imperialism, wrote of Oceania (represented by Tahiti) as a “womblike haven of an innocent childhood, ruled and ordered by a maternal figure” in which the exiled soul stays its hunger for refuge, peace, and completion. To leave the maternal home for the life of a mature man, or to allow the soul to venture out of the secure solitude of the ego’s mental Tahiti in search of human love, is to immerse oneself in the destructive element, to expose oneself to passion, degradation, and dissolution. (Slotkin 1973: 541)19 In reading Oceania through Melville’s texts, generations of American studies scholars draw vulgar Pacificism – most strikingly Cold War Americanists, during a time of heightened imperial expansion and world-splitting metaphysics – from Melville’s self-consciously complex Pacificist texts. That this twentieth-century body of criticism should be so deeply invested in ignorant positions, so fully aligned with nineteenth-century views, suggests the tenacity with which Oceania remained, and to some degree remains, a vast field for the projection of a deeply racialized and fantasmatic vision of human history.20

2

Opening accounts in the South Seas Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater, and the antebellum development of American Pacificism

. . . it [juvenile literature] enables the adult to partake of his own demons, provided they have been coated in the syrup of paradise, and that they travel there with the passport of innocence. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart How to Read Donald Duck

“News from the Feegees”: the campaign for a U.S. Oceanian expedition they [Americans] will one day become the foremost maritime power of the globe. They are born to rule the seas, as the Romans were to conquer the world. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

In the years after the U.S. naval victories over England in the War of 1812, increased U.S. activity in Oceania inspired literally hundreds of nautical novels and short stories, along with ballads, poems, plays, pamphlets, and other cultural productions, lending some credence to Thomas Philbrick’s assertion that “before 1850 the American frontier was primarily a maritime one; that the sea rather than the continental wilderness was the principal focus of the yearnings and imaginings of the American dream” (Philbrick 1961: vi). The body of nautical literature, crucial to the emerging American Pacific archive, collectively called out for stepped-up U.S. energy, scientific exploration, and enterprise in the region, and laid the groundwork for imagining the U.S. empire-to-come as commercial, in opposition to European territorial ambitions.1 This vision would be epitomized and commented on in Melville’s telescoped history of Nantucketers as early agents of deterritorialized globalization: “two thirds of the terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires” (Melville 1988: 64). (On Melville’s ambiguous paean to these processes see Lyons [2005].) At the same time, in the narrative of a growing antebellum “Young America,”

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Oceania functions as an arena for the developing masculine national narrative in which atavistic Islanders figure as that within the self that must be recurrently colonized. Oceania in this primal scene is, as Kathy Souter suggests, a “place of violent contrasts, with no middle ground,” that restages what Melanie Klein describes as an infantile division that is not outgrown but compulsively returned to in moments of stress (Souter 1999: 109). These psychological dynamics are registered imaginatively in the U.S. national narrative, with its widening North– South rift, economic panics, racial traumas, and international conflicts, with the vast and oneiric Oceania appearing as an absorbing space within which U.S. power (naval, scientific, commercial) could constitute itself through expansion. Recurrently, as Leslie Fiedler and others have noted, the “classic” texts of U.S. literature have a juvenile cast, and wind up in illustrated forms on children’s bookshelves, thinly covering the nation’s aggressive, gendered, and raced ventures as boyish adventure. What Dorfman and Mattelart argue of juvenile literature, with its “self-colonization of [its] own imagination,” is redoubled in Oceanian contexts: “this lovely, simple, smooth, translucent, chaste and pacific region, which has been promoted as Salvation, is unconsciously infiltrated by a multiplicity of adult conflicts and contradictions” (Dorfman and Mattelart 1971). As U.S. commerce in Oceania expanded rapidly, the line between literature and non-fiction symptomatically collapsed, with novelists openly appropriating names, factual details, and scenes from non-fiction narrative, along with language that acts as if its extraordinary, hyperbolic idioms result from the attempt to be adequate to an extraordinary reality. Descriptions of Oceania and Oceanians often take on a fantastic, science-fiction quality. The most matter-of-fact men of science reflexively turn to comparisons with literature, as when Charles Pickering writes of Paumotuans, “From their wildness and their neglected persons, I thought at first we had really got among ‘savages,’ such as are depicted in the imaginations of writers; and, indeed, their miserable appearance was almost sufficient to inspire doubts about whether they could be human” (Pickering 1854: 50). Not surprisingly, when the United States Exploring Expedition was being formed, novelists Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, James Kirke Paulding, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (whose Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance thinks of joining the expedition) were among those recommended for the position of expedition historiographer (Stanton 1975: 38). Cooper, who endorsed Charles Wilkes for commander and historiographer of the expedition, would help Wilkes with details of preparing the publication. Within these contexts, nautical literature, which imaginatively recruited young working-class men into the high-risk maritime industry in part through exoticist adventure narratives, links the plot of individual advancement (upward mobility) through perseverance to the national narrative of building a spirited mercantile empire, predicated on a providential sense of destiny, honor, and purpose. This boy-scoutish narrative, in which men and the nation make themselves through being prepared, with preparation tested by Oceanian encounters, required a stabilizing, protective governmental presence in Oceania. It was urged by so many individual literary and non-literary figures that it came to seem a

50 Opening accounts in the South Seas campaign from the national unconscious. In his preface to the Narrative of the Wreck of the Essex (1821), Owen Chase characteristically apologizes for putting his work before a “public mind [that] has been already nearly sated with the private stories of individuals” in Oceania, before describing how the “energies of the capitalists” burst “out afresh” after the War of 1812, creating special needs, demands, and possibilities. Chase rehearses the commercial and scientific benefits of the U.S. presence in Oceania, and appeals to Congress for “deserved government patronage” of whaling and naval protection: “Recent events have shown that we require a competent naval force in the Pacific for the protection of [our] important and lucrative branch of commerce” (Chase 1999: 4). In many ports, he argues, “amongst mere savages, and . . . inhospitable people . . . every species of fraud, imposition, and force . . . require some competent power to awe and redress” (ibid.: 5). Chase’s conflation of privately owned commercial ventures with a broader spirit of U.S. nationalistic enterprise contributes to the “shock” his feelings receive when in an instant his ship’s “pleasing anticipations” of profit are “dejected” by a “most mysterious, and overwhelming calamity” – the seemingly providential sinking of the Essex by a whale, an event which Melville appropriates for the ending of Moby-Dick (ibid.: 22), while modeling the whale after J. N. Reynolds’s “Mocha-Dick” (1839). The tragedy for which the Essex was best known in its time, however, was a direct result of phobic ideas about Oceanians. Chase describes how the shipwrecked and starving crew would have landed in the Society Islands (Tahiti) but felt that, “if inhabited, we presumed they were by savages, from whom we had as much to fear, as from the elements, or even death itself” (ibid.: 34). Chase’s Narrative, a text made enormously popular through McGuffey readers and other schoolboy textbooks, itself illustrates how decisively the yarns, ballads, and printed accounts that circulated in maritime contexts could influence behavior. The crew of the Essex journeyed thousands of miles out of their way in an open boat and wound up committing the very cannibalistic acts they feared from Islanders on each other.2 One finds within the American Pacific archive in the period of early encounter in Oceania a striking line of aggressiveness toward Oceanians – consonant with Richard Slotkin’s idea of a violently redemptive frontier psychology and Michael Rogin’s notions of infantile regression – wherever Islanders resist the terms of U.S. commerce. The pervasive language of Islanders as friendly (hospitable) or hostile (fearsome) pivots on the success or failure of commercial relations, and a constitutive ignorance about indigenous institutions and the senses in which “Pacific Islanders saw a variety of chances to transform their lives and their production and exchange” (Denoon 1997c: 152); chiefs traded cannily, guided captains, exchanged names, and advanced their interests (Chappell 1997: 11). Fiji in particular, perhaps because when trade there succeeded it was spectacularly lucrative, became the focal point of much fascinated revulsion. In 1812 the Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette reported that Captain Rogers of Boston had sold sandalwood from Fiji in Canton at a tenfold profit, and concluded, “this is making money with a witness.” But in 1836, after thirty years of trade relations, the Lynn Record reported matter-of-factly that “Birlip, a young native of Fegee Islands . . . is being exhibited

Opening accounts in the South Seas 51 at the Baltimore Museum” (Ward 1966: 379, 392). Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery (1877) shows the duration of a set of U.S. views in which commerce is credited with discovering and “opening accounts” (economic, narrative, political) with volatile, menacing Oceanians. Starbuck describes how U.S. vessels “spread . . . rapidly to all parts of the Pacific, and hundreds of islands received their first visit from white men” in pursuit of whales, and adds that “the natives of many of the numerous groups of islands, with which the Pacific is so thickly studded, were more relentless than the waves, more treacherous than the reefs.” At the same, Starbuck notes that “in far too many cases” the “barbarities were perpetuated in revenge for injuries received at the hands of some preceding ship’s crew, but they were not punctilious as to whether the actual culprit was punished or one of his kind – they warred against the race and not individuals” (Starbuck 1989: 96–7). Despite his acknowledgement that U.S. actions contribute to the violence ships occasionally met with, itself an argument for a system of consular regulation, Starbuck’s emphasis, like that of most economically focused reportage about the region, is on Oceanian treachery. This makes even hospitality suspect. The master trope is simulated Islander hospitality and feigned friendship that turns violent when least expected. Conversely, in other contexts, as will be argued in chapter 4, Islander hospitality will be extravagantly romanticized. There is no attempt, in the face of violence against U.S. crews, to understand how Oceanian cultural beliefs about reciprocity and balance, such as utu (Maori) or uku (Hawaiian) – terms for repayment, balance-keeping, revenge – might be at work, or what factors, including violations of indigenous protocols, might have contributed to hospitality turning to hostility. In U.S. legal thought, with the central juridical emphasis on individual rights and accountability, it is prima facie barbaric or irrational for Islanders to punish one ship for what another may have done, although this is precisely what retaliatory strikes often involved (see Dening 1980: 24). Because of the emphasis on Islander treachery, and generally without reference to the fact that Islanders may be culturally required to redress some prior offence, one finds a growing wariness: “From this period to the time of the assault upon the ship, the Malays had never betrayed the least signs of treachery. But Captain Endicott was too well-acquainted with the reckless and treacherous character of these people to be lulled into security” (Reynolds 1835: 88). This resulted from intelligence reports from financial firms to their agents, which stressed in their written sailing orders that “considerable caution is necessary in intercourse with the natives either on shore or with boats in bays at a distance from the ship” (Ward 1968: 179). Ship captains, such as James Hale, were instructed to place their ships “in the same state of preparation as though you knew the Natives were hostile” (Hammatt 1999: xx). This type of policy responded to what might be called “the news from the Feegee,” a media-scare campaign which accumulated through accounts in the newspapers with headlines such as “Distressing Outrage,” which in turn fed a lobby to establish a military presence to protect commerce in Oceania (in describing a Northwest Indian tribe, Charles Pickering wrote that they were the

52 Opening accounts in the South Seas “most dangerous people in the Pacific, after the Feejeeans” [Pickering 1854: 21]). (This historical image has hardly been dispelled, with maritime historians such as Ernest Dodge asserting that exchange “was carried on during the most lawless period in these Islands [Fiji] where cannibalism was rampant” [Dodge 1966: 49].) In the 1820s, the outfitting of such an expeditionary force was discussed in Congress, and endorsed by John Quincy Adams, who argued that “a flourishing commerce and fishery extending to the islands of the Pacific and China . . . require that the protecting power of the Union should be deployed under its flag as well upon the oceans as upon the land” (quoted in Goetzman 1986: 266). Such an expedition, as Edmund Fanning later argued, would necessarily be “under the authority from the government, and the officers and men under regular pay,” as his own unsuccessful “American Exploring Expedition” (1829–30) had foundered on the tension between the aims of knowledge-gathering and the need to profit to pay the crew and the costs of the expedition (Fanning 1970: 487). However, it was a decade and several administrations before Congress dedicated $300,000 to outfit the expedition. The most ardent advocate of the expedition for the whole of that period was the charismatic and tireless sailorturned-lecturer Jeremiah. N. Reynolds, who in the preface to his Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac (1835) cites a letter arguing that, as far as public sentiment can be collected from the newspapers and from general conversation, it appears to be the unanimous wish of the nation that one or more of our ships-of-war should be dispatched . . . to look after our commercial interests . . . and punish the natives for the outrage recently committed upon the ship Friendship, of Salem. (Reynolds 1835: 20) In Pacific and Indian Oceans: or, The South Sea Surveying and Exploring Expedition: its Inceptions, Progress, and Objects (1841), Reynolds presents a compendium of memorials, reports, and resolutions in favor of the expedition; hundreds of letters from scientists and prominent statesmen relating to the planning, outfitting, and manning of the expedition; and a transcript of his own presentation before Congress in 1836, which “attempted a rapid and comprehensive review of our maritime enterprise and its results in the South Seas, Pacific and Indian Oceans; a glance at the vast field that still lies before us; at the great commercial and scientific interests involved” (Reynolds 1835: dedication). For Reynolds, the U.S. had always been “a commercial people” and it was “the dictate of common sense to protect this commerce” (ibid.). National honor and duty were at stake. As a rising world power, the U.S. was still reliant on knowledge produced by other nations. Moreover, Reynolds argued, “Almost every arrival from the Pacific brings some melancholy intelligence of shipwreck, mutiny, or massacre among the South Seas islands” (Reynolds 1841: 51). These “outrages” against U.S. ships by Oceanians, which Reynolds documents in page after page of lurid recountings, cried out for redress. As suggested, the stories Reynolds read on the floor of Congress are hard to

Opening accounts in the South Seas 53 distinguish from the fiction or scientific writing of the period, especially since novelists consistently linked their endeavor to the larger maritime nationalism, as is clear in the Introduction to Joseph Hart’s novel Miriam Coffin, or The WhaleFisherman (1834). As with Chase in his non-fiction narrative, Hart argues in his preface for a naval expedition to protect the fisheries since, as a Nantucket memorial had put it, “the intercourse maintained between different ports of the nation and the islands and countries of the Pacific ocean, has become a matter of public interest, and deserving the protecting care of the National Legislature” (Hart 1872: x). The novel – which provides names that will be picked up by Poe and Melville (Peleg, Macy, Swain, Starbuck) – illustrates the dangers in a sensational scene when the Grampus – a ship name that appears in both Poe and Melville – is attacked by South Seas islanders. “We must now fight,” exclaims a character in Hart’s stilted dialogue, “in good earnest, my boys, or be murdered and eaten by those horrid cannibals” (ibid.: 276). The Wilkes expedition, called “The Great Expedition” or simply “The Exploring Expedition,” finally sailed with six ships in August of 1838, carrying a scientific corps (known by naval colleagues as “scientifics”) that consolidated knowledges about Oceania through nineteen state-sponsored volumes that appeared over the next twenty years: the material artifacts collected would turn the fledgling Smithsonian into the national museum, and provide the basis for the emergence of U.S. anthropology (Viola 1985; Kaeppler 1985). The immediate public impression of the achievement of the expedition was continuous with the goals that had been outlined at the outset. In the July 1842 issue of the The Dial, under the brief news section “Intelligence,” an unsigned piece (now attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson) gave the following summation. The flag ship of the Exploring Expedition, arrived at New York on Friday, June 10th, from a cruise of nearly four years. . . . The Expedition has executed every part of the duties confided to it by the Government. A long list of ports, harbors, reefs, and shoals, named in the list, have been visited and examined or surveyed. . . . Several of the principal groups and islands in the Pacific Ocean have been visited, examined, and surveyed; and friendly intercourse, and protective commercial regulations, established with the chiefs and natives. At the same time, in reference to clashes in which hundreds of Fijians and Kingsmill Islanders died, Emerson stresses as well that, At some of the islands, this duty has been attended with much labor, exposure, and risk of life, – the treacherous character of the natives rendering it absolutely necessary that the officers and men should be armed . . . and at all times prepared against murderous attacks. . . . on one of these occasions, two of the officers were killed at the Fiji group, while defending their boat’s crew from an attack by the natives. (Emerson 1961: 133)

54 Opening accounts in the South Seas

Locating Edgar Allan Poe in Oceania Poe’s fantasticalness . . . seems strangely “material.” . . . Even in his most unbounded imagining, he betrays the true American. Dostoevski on Poe The whole period, American 1840, could be rebuilt, psychologically (phrenologically) from Poe’s “method.” William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

Though Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was written, in part, to capitalize on the press coverage and national excitement about the Wilkes expedition; though several of its primary source-texts include the narratives about Oceania recounted in Reynold’s Address, Benjamin Morrell’s A Narrative of Four Voyages (1832), which describes exchange in Fiji and the Solomons, and the widely recounted narratives surrounding the Globe mutiny in I-Kiribati (Kingsmill group and later Gilbert Islands); and though the novel, from its title page (which mimics Morrell’s block headings) and preface onward, announces itself to be an appropriation and absurdist parody of South Seas narrative, where Pym has been read in historical context it is generally considered as an allegory of antebellum black– white relations. Among the few exceptions to this are Dana Nelson (1993), who reads Pym in more internationalist frames, though she is less concerned with its Oceanian setting than with analyzing discursive strategies applicable to colonial motives in general, and Eric Mottram, who argues that “Pym is a mirror with a hole in it through which life itself rushes . . . but even this moment of psycho-geography has an origin outside Poe’s psyche.” Poe, that is, has “anchor[ed] his opening firmly in the economic center of America from the 1830s to the 1860s” and “it is from here that Pym makes his figure outwards” (Mottram 1975: 31, 33). That Pym’s participation in (and relentlessly juvenile parody of) nationalistic Oceanian imaginings has been repressed is in part because of the ways that Poe has traditionally been read. As Mottram suggests, in the search for his psychic depths, the surface of his texts are often ignored, despite Poe’s insistence that sometimes the “letter” is hidden in plain sight. Until recently, when the book’s racial themes received comment, it was in more psychological than material terms. For Harry Levin, “in the troubled depths of Poe’s unconscious, there must have been not only the fantasy of a lost heritage, but a resentment and a racial phobia. These impulsions seldom manifest themselves upon the surface of his writing” (Levin 1958: 121). Likewise, Daniel Hoffman argues that “It is incontestable that Poe’s island of Tsalal represents one aspect of the American South. This land that resembled a bale of cotton with its brutal pickaninnies is conceived out of Edgar Poe’s atavistic fear” (Hoffman 1972: 270). To this day Poe’s non-white characters are almost invariably thought of as commenting on African Americans, as Stanley Kaplan argued in his Introduction to Pym, in the service of pro-slavery arguments. “No early American writer,” writes Toni Morrison, “is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe” (Morrison 1992: 32).

Opening accounts in the South Seas 55 It is not necessary to contest these statements – which treat Pym’s maritime sources and direct topical references to U.S. enterprises in Oceania as ballast for a “psychic content” – to suggest that Poe’s investments in Pym are equally with the U.S. textual vogue in representing Oceanian trade and the opening of U.S. markets in the South Seas. In this sense, to read the Tsalal episode primarily as an allegory of antebellum notions of slavery involves a textual insubstantialization of Oceanians that moves in alliance with the political unconscious of American Pacificism. In fact, insofar as Pym activates Oceanian contexts, generic and historical, it could be argued that Poe (as the cartoonish adolescent “I” in an aggressive, narcissistic American Dream), his nineteenth-century reviewers, and contemporary critics all move in alliance with a rim vs. basin logic that, in emptying Oceania of any significance as a zone of cultural interaction and dialogue, plays a necessary cultural function. At the same time, Poe’s text clearly shows the textual economy of much colonial writing in its insistence that to move away from metropolitan centers of commercial empire is to regress in time and consciousness, with Melanesians as the anthropological limit. In the chronopolitics of Pym, clocks repeatedly run down (“Getting now hold of the watch, I found . . . that it had again run down”) and the increasingly disoriented protagonist winds up among atavistic and treacherous black islanders who “frequently repeated the word Klock-Klock; which we supposed to be the name of the village, or perhaps the generic name for villages” (Poe 1994: 172). It is certainly overdue, as recent transnationalist Americanist scholarship argues, to see the global and domestic arenas of early U.S. literature in clearer relation, with outward colonial aspiration linked to internal, domestic racism and colonization. Reading Poe’s parodic and thus potentially corrective or redirecting text as messily about the bursting-forth energies of trade and an emerging archive of American Pacific narrative – in which appeals to “science” are appended to commercial and psychic national drives – does not mean that Pym is not implicated in pro-slavery antebellum discourses. As its subtitle suggests, Pym may be located not only in “the South Seas,” but also “still further South.” (These phrases are from the title page of the U.S. edition to Pym. The British editions do not include the phrase “still farther South,” but use larger billboard letters to emphasize “SOUTH SEAS,” suggesting that U.S. publishers did want to see the “Southern” context as analogically referenced and that British publishers did not foreground this dimension of the book.) Rather, a “South Seas” reading suggests the significance of the displacement of antebellum debates about race into a vast, resource-rich, fantasmatic Oceanian space. Such a reading posits a circulation of racial discourses in which arguments about slavery and Indian removal color the perception of South Seas Islanders, while rhetorical debasement of natives in reports from various quarters undergird the emerging scientific racism around which paternalistic pro-slavery arguments and Indian policy arrange themselves. Poe’s Tsalalians are certainly, as Edwin Fussell argues, a confused racial farrago – “black Indians (with Polynesian overtones)” (Fussell 1965: 154) – viewed through the antebellum scientific classificatory systems, where whites occupy the top and dark races the lowest rung of the ladder.

56 Opening accounts in the South Seas In Poe’s time, indigenous peoples were characteristically classified according to their perceived social complexity, which in turn suggested the “pace” of their movement through empty archaic time into history. The presentation in Pym of Tsalalians as inhabiting dwellings more “miserable [than] those of even the lowest of the savage races with which mankind are acquainted,” then, speaks not so much of a black–white schism as of a world where degrees of difference are universally inscribed and reflected in social organization, with one pole represented in Pym’s penultimate moment by “the hue of the skin” of a figure “of the perfect whiteness of snow” (Poe 1994: 172, 206). In Pym, where the names of characters, places, and events are linked to the American Pacific archive, these questions of racial graduation and degree of civilization are messily imbricated in the antebellum drive toward a globally articulated market economy. That Poe has his sights on trade, including the sensation-loving contemporary marketplace which his reviews and criticism at once disparage and desire, is suggested through the introduction of the book’s principal characters. Pym’s father is “a respectable trader in sea stores” in Nantucket, center of the whaling industry and of investment in Oceania, and his grandfather has “speculated very successfully in stocks of the Edgarton New-Bank.” Of Peters, Pym writes, “His father was a fur-trader, I believe, or at least connected in some manner with the Indian trading-posts on Lewis river” (Poe 1994: 57, 87). (From among the books “thoughtfully provided” in the hold of Grampus, Pym will select “the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Columbia” [ibid.: 70].) Augustus is the son of a sea captain who “had been on a whaling voyage with his father in the John Donaldson, and was always talking to me of his adventures in the South Pacific Ocean [involving] natives of the Island of Tinian, and other places he had visited in his travels” (ibid.: 57). To Poe’s audience all the details of these descriptions might have activated specific contexts. While Poe scholars provide no source for the name of the ship, one likelihood, given my argument about Pym as commentary on Jacksonian wildcat financial adventurism, would be John Donelson, the patriarch of the Donelson clan into which Andrew Jackson married, who was much involved in speculations over Indian lands (Rogin 1991: 81–4).3 Augustus’s stories motivate Pym to go to sea, even though Pym believes “more than one half of them” to have been “fabrications” (Poe 1994: 57). This emphasis on the alluring power of story, repeated at several points in Pym, parodies the frequent attestations of naval officers and writers of being drawn to the sea by imaginative literature. Reynolds spoke before Congress as having “at an early period . . . imbibed a relish, perhaps accidentally, for books of voyages and travels” (Reynolds 1841: 5). Poe in other words relishes the fact that fiction, claiming truth, directs the imaginations of individuals, who then exert force in the material world, until, vis-à-vis Oceanians, the nation in effect was held by forms of structured fantasy. Fabrications or otherwise, Augustus’s stories are shown as entering and transforming Pym’s cognitive reality. His Oceanian fantasies involve “shipwreck and famine . . . death or captivity among barbarian hordes” – fates he quickly acknowledges as “desires” (Poe 1994: 65). Pym will at once materialize these desires and expose them as psychic props within aggressive material ventures. After the

Opening accounts in the South Seas 57 crew of the Grampus mutinies, half of the men want to be pirates “at some of the West Indian Islands,” while the others are “bent upon pursuing the course originally laid out for the brig into the South Pacific; there either to take whale, or act otherwise.” The call to piracy loses out, which is to say that the text chooses adventure and trade in Oceania over piracy around slave colonies. This is because Peters dwells “on the world of novelty and amusement to be found among the innumerable islands of the Pacific, on the perfect security and freedom from all restraint to be enjoyed, but, more particularly, on the deliciousness of the climate, on the abundant means of good living, and on the voluptuous beauty of the women,” descriptions that take “strong hold upon the ardent imaginations of the seamen” (ibid.: 93).4 In the exorbitantly closeted world of Pym, in which Pym is repeatedly, literally, confined and released, the few sentences on women are openly self-mocking. Before they can meet barbarian hordes, however, the survivors of a contest between the mutineers draw the boundaries around their identity as civilized people by confronting the specter of cannibalism, which Robert Martin sees as “mark[ing] a stage – the danger of losing one’s body and soul – in the spiritual journey to the other, white side of the world” (Martin 1986: 27). Chapter 12 – in which Pym, Peters, and Augustus draw lots to decide whose body will feed the others – performs a representative U.S. psychic need for the individual to differentiate himself from the cannibals that nearly every discovery narrative has prepared him to find. Pym insists that if he and his fellows were “possessed of sufficient strength of mind” they would not even entertain these “bloody and cannibal designs,” and implores Parker, who proposes them, to abandon them in the “name of everything which he held sacred” (Poe 1994: 132). As if to stress that this scene has been about demarcation – in addition to a literalization of both Pym’s desires and those Poe attributes to his readers – it becomes clear that the cannibalism was unnecessary, since the ship’s keel is covered with eatable barnacles, resembling the abundant bêche-de-mer they will find in Tsalal (that evoke the Fiji trade). Parker, who proposed cannibalism, is eaten as if in retribution for acceding to cannibal “logic.” Pym and Peters are finally rescued by the Jane Guy, of Liverpool, “bound on a sealing and trading voyage to the South Seas and Pacific.” Though “deficient . . . in that spirit of enterprise which is here so absolutely requisite” – “here” being the South Pacific, which, according to this alter ego of a U.S. writer, requires a Yankee spirit of enterprise – the British Captain Guy “was invested with discretionary powers to cruise in the South Seas for any cargo which might come most readily to hand. He had on board, as usual in such voyages, beads, looking-glasses, tinderworks, axes, hatchets . . . calico, trinkets,” to trade with Islanders who value them. For the purposes of such South Seas trade, Pym observes, “it is absolutely necessary that she should be well armed,” and then expresses disappointment at the Jane Guy’s preparations (Poe 1994: 147, 148). After an “occasional meeting with whaling-ships,” and after looking for seal – Pym and Peters are only able to “procure three hundred and fifty skins in all” [ibid.: 149, 154] – the Guy’s crew falls in among the Islanders of Tsalal, or the Solomon Islands, with whom they seek to establish a trading post.5

58 Opening accounts in the South Seas Critics consider the Tsalalians – called in turn “islanders,” “savages,” “natives” – to be images of “Africans” because they are described as being “jet black, with thick and long wooly hair” and “thick” lips (Poe 1994: 168, 174). Certainly, the Tsalalians remind Pym of Africans, and in Poe’s primary source for describing them, Benjamin Morrell’s Four Voyages, they are “as dark-skinned as Africans” (Morrell 1970: 395, emphasis mine). But the Tsalalians are also other than anything with which Pym has been “formerly conversant,” in a country “differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men” (Poe 1994: 171). Before concluding that Pym/Poe is psychically “carried back to Ole Virginny” (Fiedler 1966: 398), then, one should note that Poe largely follows Morrell’s descriptions of Melanesians in these passages and, further, that there has been a widespread and persistent tradition, extending from the early discovery narratives through Poe’s surreal savages to Jack London’s “bestial . . . ugly and apelike” Solomon Islanders (London 1911a: 3) of demonizing Melanesians as part of the project of constructing romantic images of noble Polynesian savages (Kjellgren 1993). Descriptions like that of the black teeth of the savages are often read as evidence of Poe’s Manichean racial polarizing, or even of his wild imagination, but such language is commonplace in the American Pacific archive, with its fascination with details of Melanesian difference. Amasa Delano, for instance, describes the habit of chewing betel nut as “prevailing all over the eastern islands”: The nut produces in the mouth a crimson liquor which looks like blood when it is thrown out. When it is mixed with other substances . . . it leaves the mouth and the teeth black, an effect which the natives consider as a beauty, and think that white teeth should be the privilege of only brute animals. (Delano 1994: 21, 69) Perhaps Michener’s Bloody Mary, named for the red spittle from chewing betel nut, has “funereally black” teeth (Michener 1951: 153) for the same reasons as the Tsalalians.

Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin Morrell, and James Kirke Paulding: the poles of U.S. ambition and failed parody . . . readers find themselves caught between their desire and reality, and in their attempt to escape to a purer realm, they only travel further back into their own traumas. Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck

To read Poe as Southerner for the purposes of convicting him of racism reproduces a pattern of quarantining race issues to “the South,” obscuring how, as Dana Nelson notes, a “growing eagerness to substantiate Anglo racial superiority was not particular to the South” (Nelson 1993: 93), but a fundamental aspect of U.S. empire-building. What emerges from seeing Pym both as a text about South Seas

Opening accounts in the South Seas 59 “energies” (a euphemism for commerce) and one illustrating the antebellum racial discourses underpinning both pro-slavery and Indian removal arguments is the degree to which Southern and national interests are entwined. Where indigenous peoples are involved, sectionalism gives a false sense of balanced debate when actually exploration in the U.S. – whether conducted in a scientific, commercial, or metaphysical register – always proceeds “through” the Native, with its logics shaped and confirmed by the nature and necessity of the encounter. In this sense, the Wilkes expedition sutured North–South divisions along the axis of race. The concluding sections of Pym, on the other hand, in which commercial ventures are set aside for the more nationalistic/metaphysical polar expedition (there is no clear profit motive), likewise suggest that ultimately the higher ambition is an enlightened and whitened U.S. democratic ideology that will extend its principles from pole to pole.6 Such senses of sectionalist and globally reaching imperial mission are consolidated and embodied in the person of James Kirke Paulding, author of backwoods texts involving ring-tailed roarers and howling Indians, and of Slavery in the United States, a defense of slavery on biblical grounds that Poe allegedly reviewed favorably (the review’s authorship is disputed). For the purposes of reassessing Pym it is worth foregrounding ways in which Paulding’s interests in Oceanian transactions intersect with Poe’s. This involves recalling the immediate context of Pym, which was the approval by Congress of the South Seas expedition in May of 1836. While composing Pym, Poe reviewed two books by J. N. Reynolds, whom Poe knew, admired, identified with, considered “The Father of American Exploration,” invested with sublime aspirations, and directly references at several points in Pym.7 Catching the spirit of Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs and Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas, Poe argued in his review of the books that “all of which is now in operation, is but a dim shadow to the mighty results which may be looked for, when this vast field for national enterprise is better known” (Poe 1984: 1228-9). In an uncharacteristically straight-faced and jingoistic mode, and sounding like the Cold War planners of the next century, Poe declared that “Our pride as a vigorous commercial empire, should stimulate us to become our own pioneers in that vast island-studded ocean, destined, it may be, to become not only the chief theatre of our traffic, but the arena of our future naval conflicts” (ibid.: 1231).8 One of Paulding’s first jobs as secretary of the navy – a position he accepted after Washington Irving declined it – was to provide sailing orders for the Wilkes expedition.9 Based on a variety of other people’s research and his predecessors’ drafts, the “Wilkes letter” stresses the “important interests of our commerce embarked in the whale-fisheries, and other adventures in the great Southern Ocean” (Paulding 1962: 223) and emphasizes that “The Expedition is not for conquest, but for discovery. Its objects are all peaceful; they are to extend the empire of commerce and science.” Wilkes was ordered to explore and survey the South Ocean “with a view to ascertain its resources and facilities for trade” (ibid.: 227, 223). His team of scientists, cartographers, and ethnologists were to map coastlines, inventory resources, seek treaties regulating trade with Islander chiefs

60 Opening accounts in the South Seas (establishing protective measures and protocols for exchange), and finally to explore Antarctica. Like Poe on Reynolds, Paulding both considers “enlightened liberality [as] the truest economy” (Poe 1984: 1230) and suggests the need for a more permanent military presence in Oceania. In Fiji, Wilkes was instructed to pay particular attention to selecting a “safe harbor . . . it being the intention of the government to keep one of the squadron of the Pacific cruising near these islands in future.” He was then to “ascertain the disposition of the inhabitants of the islands . . . for commerce, their productions and resources,” and to teach Islanders “modes of cultivation . . . encouraging them to raise hogs in greater abundance” (Paulding 1962: 224, 225). Paulding’s instructions reveal the general Jacksonian disposition of naval policymakers. While confident of U.S. benevolence, and secure in his fact-based understanding of the nature of the savage, his letter is riddled with what, given their prevalence in the archive, seem formulaic contradictions. It seems to recognize that Islanders have systems of knowing that could be considered cultural, and reminds Wilkes “that we seek them, not they us, and that if we expect to derive advantages from the intercourse, we should endeavor to confer benefits in return” (Paulding 1962: 227-8). The sentiment is crucial to the expedition’s selfunderstanding; as Mary Louise Pratt puts it, “reciprocity has always been capitalism’s ideology of itself” (Pratt 1992: 84). In proceeding, Paulding follows writers of the period in echoing John Locke’s notion of savages as having “no particular propertie in any part or parcell of that countrey, but only a generall residencie there” (quoted in Cheyfitz 1991: 59). Property was considered the defining feature of individuals capable of self-discipline, as evidenced by a forward-thinking work ethic. By that logic resources belonged to those who understood them: “Men established ownership in the Lockean state of nature by mixing their labor with the land. History and law did not connect them to nature” (Rogin 1991: 78). Jacksonians were thus enabled to dislodge tribal land claims, replacing them with notions of land as commodity for productive settlement and cultivation. Paulding conflates these discourses of property-unconscious Islanders with accounts of innately larcenous Islanders. Wanting Western goods, but “unacquainted with, or possessing but vague ideas of the rights of property,” Paulding contends, among savage nations “the most common cause of collision with civilized visitors, is the offence and punishment of theft” (Paulding 1962: 225). He cannot conceive of Islander notions of exchange and material objects as alternatives to his understanding of property, since doing so would jeopardize the reciprocating basis of an expandable U.S. economy. This belief causes a characteristic panic in the face of social organizations that may not desire commodity exchange as such. While he advocates tactically a policy of “kindness to the natives” and forbids “any wanton interference with customs, habits, manners, or prejudices, of the natives of such countries or islands as you may visit,” throughout his instructions he warns against considering “them” rational partners, because Islander “customs, habits” are untrustworthy. He insists that “the rights of the natives must be scrupulously respected and carefully guarded,” for instance, but places this “truth” immediately after: “Treachery is

Opening accounts in the South Seas 61 one of the invariable characteristics of savages and barbarians; and very many of the fatal disasters which have befallen preceding navigators, have arisen from too great a reliance on savage professions of friendship” (Paulding 1962: 226-7). There was of course no shortage of eye-witness testimonies of disastrous encounters with duplicitous savages to enliven Paulding’s romance-writer imagination as he articulated U.S. policy, and to impress upon him the importance of maintaining strict protocol. To some degree, policies for dealing with natives already existed, many derived from Cook’s voyages. Captain Edmund Fanning emphasizes, for instance, that, “When our ship first came in sight of the Marquesas Islands, the crew had been gathered together, in order to hear and know a set of rules and regulations, that had been prepared for our government in all our future dealings and trade with the natives” (Fanning 1970: 213).10 Many U.S. discovery and/or commerce narratives emphasize that the nature of the savage makes not following instructions disastrous. In an episode from Washington Irving’s Astoria, an account of John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading colony in the Pacific Northwest that Poe was to plunder and refigure in the Tsalal section of Pym, a crewman on watch allows Native Americans on board – against Astor’s policies, and even “very much against the advice of his Indian interpreter, who warned him against the perfidious character of the natives of this part of the coast.” Despite their “great professions of friendship” and their “signs indicative of a wish to trade,” the “natives” subsequently massacre the crew of the ship, with the exception of an officer, who detonates the ship with many Native Americans still aboard (Irving 1976: 73–4). (Morrell similarly stations a man “at the magazine with a lighted match, to be applied to the powder if the natives got command of the deck” [B. Morrell 1970: 413].) In his review of Astoria, Poe stresses, as Irving does, the scene’s moral: “The danger and folly, on the part of agents, in disobeying the matured instructions of those who deliberately plan extensive enterprizes” (Poe 1984: 624). The narratives, that is, emphasize the importance of Pacific knowledges as cumulative, and of maintaining an order steered by prior accounts. Individual reports validated each other. The resultant intertextual web of South Seas knowledges was often, as suggested, hardly distinguishable from fiction. Captains engaged in correcting or competitively rewriting each other – plagiarizing, or outdoing, predecessors in supplying information alleged to be useful to commerce – and individuals sensationalized their experiences for the market. With considerable understatement, Morrell notes in his own text, which was actually “got up” by a literary hack who ransacked prior accounts and maritime encyclopedias, that, “In order to render the following Narrative more useful to mariners, as well as interesting to the general reader, I have occasionally availed myself of information from other sources than my own personal observation” (B. Morrell 1970: xx). Captains and sailors alike knew in advance that journals were commodities to be sold along with the curios disposed of to private collections, exhibitions, and museums. Common sailors who penned pamphlets detailing their misfortunes were in a double-bind. Since they were assumed to be unlettered, their narratives would seem inauthentic if they looked too “practiced.” Captains such as Morrell – later known as “the

62 Opening accounts in the South Seas biggest liar in the Pacific” (Pollin 1976: 165) – were in a further rhetorical bind. Because their texts were often outright solicitations for commercial investors, they needed to present trade with the Islanders as safe. Exciting occupational hazards, such as cannibals, were not exactly asides, however, since journals sold better if they included sensational episodes, in which Islanders, shipwrecks, and storms were all offered up in Crusoesque detail as natural disasters. Morrell always had a business eye. In 1834 he brought back several alleged “cannibals” – including two named Sunday and Monday – who were exhibited all over the Eastern seaboard (Bogdan 1988: 179).11 Morrell’s own “selling” title page trumpets forth “NEW AND VALUABLE DISCOVERIES, including the MASSACRE ISLANDS, where thirteen of the author’s crew were massacred and eaten by cannibals.” (Not to be outdone, his wife, the plucky Abby Morrell, wrote an account of her travels with her revered husband which reported that cannibals “cut from” prisoners “while alive pieces of flesh and masticate it” [A. J. Morrell 1970: 34].) These narratives are often, like Paulding’s “Wilkes letter,” riddled with incommensurate passages, expressing liberal sentiments about Natives while stigmatizing them as cannibals. A leading man of letters and public affairs, Paulding considered himself a connoisseur of nautical narratives. In a letter to Secretary of the Navy Levi Woodbury, Paulding singled out for praise his friend David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific (1815), and also Morrell’s Narrative, a bestseller for Harper’s in 1832: Having lately read with great attention and pleasure Captain Benjamin Morrell’s Narrative of Voyages and Discoveries, it occurred to me that it would make a valuable, and appropriate addition to the Libraries of the Public Vessels & Naval Schools. The conduct of Captain Morrell during the whole course of these Voyages . . . I cannot but think affords, an excellent example to our Young Naval Officers . . . [and] furnish[es] a body of useful practical experience, equal at least, to any work of the Kind. (Paulding 1962: 126) Much of the instructions to Wilkes about commerce and native peoples might have been patterned after Morrell’s narrative, with its visions of opening up avenues “of trade, more lucrative than any which our country has ever yet enjoyed” and of “reaping the golden harvest which now awaits the sickle of enterprise in the Pacific Ocean” (B. Morrell 1970: 341, 461). Though he clearly considered Morrell exemplary, whether Paulding composed (or put the final touches to other people’s words) with Four Voyages before him matters less than what his enthusiasm for Morrell tells about Paulding’s credulity and Oceanian desires. That Morrell’s narrative could be taken as exemplary factual narrative, recommended by the Secretary of the Navy as essential reading for naval officers, suggests that the relays between imaginary worlds and government policy were real enough. Morrell’s text exemplifies an enterprising U.S. spirit that everywhere places ethnology and discovery in the service of personal, commercial ambition dressed

Opening accounts in the South Seas 63 in nationalistic terms. For Morrell, Islanders are rational, ethical beings precisely to the degree that they facilitate commerce. Obliging Islanders “are now a civilized, rational business people,” who “are very honest in their commercial transactions, carefully performing whatever they promise.” Morrell’s text is full of successful trading and celebration of items that Oceanians do not value but that can bring immense profits through the China trade. Morrell exults in “a new world of countless riches . . . treasures which lie scattered, in boundless profusion, around the shores of these highly favoured islands: treasures which are now undervalued by the natives.” In a passage plagiarized by Poe, Morrell reports: “On showing them a piece of bêche-de-mer, they gave me to understand that they could collect any quantities of it, and wondered what use I would make of it. They intimated the same also when I inquired for mother-of-pearl” (B. Morrell 1970: 372, 228, 253, 381). But Morrell also presents himself as wary of Islanders: hearing “much of the treachery of this tribe” he “resolved to place no confidence in the promises of their chief.” Suspecting that “a system of treachery” is a “part of their education” (ibid.: 204, 393), he assumes in the Solomon Islands that betrayal will be the reason if commerce fails: “I had entered into a sort of treaty of amity in commerce, with the utmost good faith on my part. How well this implied contract was fulfilled on the part of his sable majesty yet remains to be seen.” In Morrell’s retrospective narrative, Islander deception when discovered bestows post facto hostile physioganomy: “The expression of their countenance . . . when not softened by pleasure, or distorted by mirth, is extremely savage and ferocious. . . . They are extravagantly tattooed . . . in the most frightful manner, which increases the expression of ferocity to hideousness” (ibid.: 399). What follows the breakdown of commercial negotiation is therefore the reappearance of savagery: “we were completely surrounded by nearly four hundred ferocious cannibals, who were determined on our destruction, and only waiting . . . to carve us” (ibid.: 408). Extensively ghostwritten by Samuel Woodworth, who would a year later turn the book’s most lurid scene into a Broadway play, The Cannibals; or, Massacre Islands,12 Morrell’s Four Voyages was a key source for Pym. As in Morrell, when the crew of the Jane Grey admits savages on board, they at first “evinced the most friendly manner” (Poe 1994: 174). When the crew subsequently follows the Islanders ashore to their village during an “adventure,” they see “nothing in the demeanor of the natives calculated to create suspicion,” and eagerly inquire after “the chief productions of the country, whether any of them might be turned to profit.” After discovering “the ease with which the vessel might be loaded with bêche-de-mer, owing to the friendly disposition of the natives” (ibid.: 176, 177), Pym describes how the crew “established a regular market on shore, just under the guns of the schooner, where our barterings were carried on with every appearance of good faith.” Even Captain Guy enters into “negotiation” for the building of drying-stations to cure bêche-de-mer for the China trade. Pym emphasizes the business-like (e)quality of these transactions: A bargain was accordingly struck, perfectly satisfactory to both parties, by which it was arranged that, after making the necessary preparations . . . the

64 Opening accounts in the South Seas schooner should proceed on her route, leaving three of her men on the island to superintend the fulfillment of the project, and instruct the natives . . . In regard to terms, these were made to depend upon the exertions of the savages in our absence. (ibid.: 197) This description follows Morrell, who likewise describes scenarios in which the “terms” are set by visitors who, like novelists, make no attempt at understanding why or how they may be offending Island customs (waving a white flag at natives for whom the color white is taboo, for instance), or how Islanders appropriate and adapt Western objects into their noetics.13 If the Islander does not interfere with the visitor’s terms of exchange, the visitor need not consider how Islanders value what they receive: “I believe that not one of us had at this time the slightest suspicion of the good faith of the savages. They had uniformly behaved with the greatest decorum, aiding us with alacrity in our work, offering us their commodities, frequently without a price” (ibid.: 179). After the Guy’s crew is ambushed, however, Pym concludes with a Morrell-like sense of injury that “the islanders for whom we entertained such inordinate feelings of esteem were among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (Poe 1994: 180). The lesson seems clear enough: No matter how obliging savages are, no matter how well they feed you, no matter how generously and inexplicably they offer their commodities “without a price,” no matter whether “the women especially” prove “obliging in every respect,” until you are out of the port you are in danger. Pym seems at once to know this and not to know it. He asserts that the crew “should have been the most suspicious of human beings had [it] entertained a single thought of perfidy” (ibid.), suggesting the necessity of reserves of suspicion capable of withstanding kindness, since the motives for kindness must always be suspect. Of this dynamic, Slavoj Ži žek notes that the Other is “precisely a person about whom it is never clear ‘what he really wants’ – that is, his actions are always suspected of being guided by some hidden motives” (Ži žek 1989: 114). In commercial accounts, where the desire for trade remains stronger than fear of duplicity, a lot rides on circumspectness. As the Paulding letter declared, “It is the nature of the savage, long to remember benefits, and never to forget injuries” (Paulding 1962: 227). It thus must be made clear that when violence erupts it has been caused by treachery, and that violence, however motivated, will blow up in Oceanian faces. Pym characteristically displaces responsibility for violence onto savages presented as meriting no compassion and expressing none even for each other. The other narrative Paulding singles out for praise, David Porter’s Journal, claims of massacred Marquesans that, “The evils they experienced they brought upon themselves, and the blood of their relations and friends must be on their own heads” (quoted in Dening 1980: 28, for a discussion of Porter see ibid.: 28–30, and Herbert 1980: 78–117). After the Tsalalians have detonated themselves, Pym, resignifying Morrell, concludes that they have “reaped the full and perfect fruits of their treachery.” An exultant Pym reports, “Perhaps a thousand perished by the

Opening accounts in the South Seas 65 explosion, while at least an equal number were equally mangled. The whole surface of the bay was literally strewn with the struggling and drowning wretches . . . [who] made no efforts at assisting each other” (Poe 1994: 190). Like many of its source texts, Pym thus destabilizes the confidence that can be placed in cultural dialogue. It forestalls consideration of customs that might explain Islander behavior, and then withholds knowledge it has purportedly gained, positioning its readers as lacking interest in particulars: “Today, by repeated questioning of our captive, we came to the knowledge of many of the particulars in regard to the island of the massacre, its inhabitants, and customs – but with these, how can I now detain the reader?” (ibid.: 203). Paulding may have read Pym before signing the instructions to Wilkes,14 but it is clear in any event that the “Wilkes letter,” Morrell’s (doctored, opportunistic, sententious) Four Voyages, which lends itself credentials in part by reproducing official letters and documents, Wilkes’s Exploring Expedition, and Poe’s Pym belong to the same discursive formation. In these senses the “letter” of Pym performs with a vengeance the infantile and violent logic of antebellum Oceanian policy in plain sight. That this occurs in spite of the fact that Pym is a thoroughgoing parody of the discursive field suggests the power of that field and the limitations of parody within it. Poe parodies generic features of discovery narrative, such as Crusoesque ejaculatory religious tags, gratuituous philosophical reflection or Latin citations juxtaposed against description of flora, fustian passages italicized for effect, the use of times and dates obviously added on post facto, the outrageously inflated languages presented earnestly, and an insincerity of high-minded motives that seems almost self-parodic. Poe parodies the gesture that financially driven authors make toward providing information for the public welfare, such as Morrell’s (ghostwritten) profession of “duty . . . to my employers, to my country, and to myself” (B. Morrell 1970: 416), and Poe ridicules the pretensions of such narratives to scientific authority.15 At the same time, in my reading, Poe’s pseudo-voyage perversely exacerbates aspects of the ideologies of the texts that he parodies, while juvenilizing the terms of the conversation and preemptively ridiculing any possible rejoinder. Pym exaggerates what it deems already exaggerated, not in the progressive spirit of reforming or redirecting originals, which Poe sees as themselves hopelessly blind, insincere, and caught up in the general juvenile fantasy. His parody has no interest in altering the terms of the nationalistic commercial project, whose crass materialism Poe rejects in the name of more high-minded polar exploration, or in altering notions about Islanders, about whom Poe enjoys remaining ignorant. Rather, Poe ribs the discourse as he finds it, appropriating, parodying, and seeking to capitalize on it.16 Whatever the intent of Pym, a text that has provided a playground for psychoanalytic and deconstructive readings (readings of Pym’s ending as a return to the womb of the white mother are not opposed to the argument this chapter advances), it encouraged nineteenth-century readers, in Dorfman and Mattelart’s terms, to partake of their demons. In response to this quality of Poe’s enabling the vicious imaginings of his audience, Toni Morrison writes of Poe using “allegorical mechanisms in Pym not to

66 Opening accounts in the South Seas confront and explore, as Melville does, but to evade and simultaneously register the cul de sac, the estrangement, the non-sequitur that is entailed in racial difference” (Morrison 1992: 69). If Poe’s allegorical descriptions involving race are at times arguably more devious or ambivalent than this, in Pym (which Poe later called “a very silly book” [Poe 1966: 130]) he seems to remain pickled – more an instance than an effective parody – in the sedimented discourses which he appropriated. In a sense his parody must fail, as so much of the attempted parody of U.S. activity in Oceania does, because the “primary texts” (often based on other texts, which are in turn based on dubious or interested informants) are themselves inadvertent parodies along a chain of citations toward a fantasized, unapproachable “real.” In the case of Pym, parody must fail as well to the degree that Pym shares with the audience that it mocks the core racialized values of the texts whose form and pretenses are the object of parody.

James Fenimore Cooper’s “Tale of the Pacific” and colonial fantasy The subject of slavery was the domain of serious scholars and the occasion for sober national reflection; the subject of conquest was the domain of mass entertainment and the occasion for light-hearted national escapism. An element of regret for ‘what we did to the Indians’ had entered the picture, but the dominant feature of conquest remained ‘adventure.’ Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest

In Pym, Poe parodies a passage on a penguin and albatross rookery from Benjamin Morrell’s Voyages. After describing the “order” and “harmony” of a rookery, Morrell writes that “A moral philosopher could not, perhaps, be more usefully employed, for a few days, than in contemplating the movements and operations of a South Sea rookery” (B. Morrell 1970: 53). Poe parodies the form of Morrell’s description, and plagiarizes details, but he recasts the rookery as a “colony” to which each bird contributes what is of “just sufficient size to accommodate easily all of the birds assembled” – each bird carries its own weight – as a means of “preventing the access of future stragglers who have not participated in the labour of the encampment.” The birds, who have a “striking . . . resemblance” to “human figure[s],” must be perpetually on guard, because of “the thieving propensities prevalent in the rookery,” perhaps because of the “variety of oceanic birds” that live there, “enjoying all the privileges of citizenship, and scattering their nests here and there” while being careful not to interfere with the “stations of the larger species” (Poe 1994: 150-1). Critics debate the meaning of Poe’s parodic topos of a colony. For some, it is part of a pattern of imagery in which Poe inscribes colonial or racial allegories into the natural world (naturalizing hierarchy); for others, the rookery counters Pym’s ethnocentricity, at the same time that the principles on display in it are not extended to humans (Nelson 1993: 100). What should be noted

Opening accounts in the South Seas 67 is that the passage resembles any number of descriptions of port cities by captains and travelers who marveled to see whites and non-whites mingling on apparently equal or equanamious footings (see Jarves 1844: 39). If Poe’s sketch of a “natural” colony remains ambiguous, the same cannot be said of James Fenimore Cooper’s text-length discussion of a colony in the Pacific in Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater, a Tale of the Pacific, in which U.S. policy and ideologies are writ as large as in one of the book’s primary inspirations, Thomas Cole’s series of paintings The Course of Empire (1836), whose cyclical patterns of history Cooper follows closely. What starts out as juvenile Robinsoniad turns into an extended lecture about social organization, with the colony figured as a way to remedy imaginatively what has gone wrong in U.S. society. In Cooper’s work in general – in his own day he was as renowned for his sea novels as the Leatherstocking series17 – Oceania and Oceanians figure marginally, symptomatically, and for the most part as the imaginative opposite of civilized culture. In Afloat and Ashore (1844), for instance, the protagonist has “been in London and on a desert island in the South Seas – the very extremes of human habits” (Cooper 1956: 378), as Captain Ahab “has been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals” (Melville 1988: 79). However, it is significant that Cooper’s mature views on U.S. government come together against an Oceanian backdrop in his one novel set in the region. Although obscure today, The Crater, according to Allan Axelrad, “affords a compact and coherent statement of Cooper’s world view” (Axelrad 1978: 1) and ideas about U.S. society. At the same time, it demonstrates ways in which Oceania cannot simply be a blank slate or backdrop. It cannot be outside of history, despite Cooper’s desire to write didactic allegory, or Poe’s more prankishly metaphysical and parodic allegory, as repeated and specific references to the American Pacific archive in both texts make clear. Oceanians are clearly meant to be relegated to the background in The Crater, but it is inaccurate to argue that there are no Islanders in the book (Sumida 1991: 21). Rather, in Cooper’s extended, earnest, and embittered allegory, “kannakas” are tellingly there to be exploited and assimilated without being socially integrated. Not surprisingly, where Islanders in The Crater are mentioned in U.S. criticism it is generally as thinly disguised versions of Native Americans displaced to a more neutral setting – one in which land does not need to be taken, since the colonized reef is uninhabited; its later fertility is solely the result of its founder’s agricultural ingenuity. He literally manufactures the soil he plants on. However, despite the fact that Cooper occasionally refers to islanders as Indians, he generally uses the term “kannakas” (kanaka, or “person” in Hawaiian), which by the mid-nineteenth century had become the general (and in time derogatory) term for all Oceanians in the maritime. These references and many of the book’s details are too historically specific to conclude, as Wayne Franklin does, that “the native chieftain Waaly is as much an ‘Indian’ as are Melville’s islanders in Typee and Omoo” (Franklin 1982: 217-18). Cooper was clearly well read in Oceanian voyages of discovery, and lards his texts with staples of discovery narratives, such as Islanders worshipping white men as Gods, the tabooing of ships by chiefs, guano islands, beachcombers from whaling ships living among Islanders, sandalwood, whaling, and bêche-de-mer

68 Opening accounts in the South Seas trade, and customs such as name exchange: “He also formed a great intimacy with the chief, exchanging names and rubbing noses with him,” Cooper writes of a character named Betts. “This chief was styled Betto, after the exchange, and Bob was called Ooroony by the natives” (Cooper 1854: 150). Subsequently, the islands receive his name, “Betto’s Group.” Cooper’s readers certainly would have been generically familiar with these references and seen them as locating the novel’s colonial allegory in Oceania. The book’s details, many of which are drawn from Wilkes’s official narrative of the expedition, refer specifically to Hawai‘i, which in 1847 was heavily under U.S. influence (during a time of U.S. colonial aggression in Mexico, which Cooper justifies), after having briefly lost sovereignty in 1843 to Lord Paulet, acting independently of England – a seizure that England repudiated. The Crater begins in 1796, a time when “the Pacific Ocean was by no means as familiar to navigate as it is to-day” and yet “commerce was already flourishing.” The book’s protagonist, Mark Woolston, ships toward “the islands of the Pacific, in quest of a cargo of sandal-wood and beche-le-mar, for the Chinese Market.” Because at the same time the ship’s Quaker owner, Friend Abraham White, is concerned with “civilizing the people of Feejee” through trade, when shipwreck strands Mark and Betts, a simple old salt (who recognizes Mark’s superiority as the natives recognize his), they have with them “tools, seeds, pigs, wheelbarrows, and other matters, honestly intended to better the condition of the natives of Vanua Levu and Vitu Levu,” and are well equipped (armed in anticipation of Fijian conflict) and lardered to “Robinson Crusoe it awhile,” Betts puts it (Cooper 1854: 8, 21, 80, 42), cultivating their island through boyishly imagined Yankee ingenuity. If, in Pym, colonial order is ambiguously natural, The Crater emphasizes colonial projects as human constructs, built thoughtfully upon “just principles,” that will not outlast the pure development of those principles, which require that some members of society occupy a commanding position over others (ibid.: 174). These begin with beliefs that Cooper espoused in Notions of the Americans, his panegyric to the early Republic, in which he argued that “America is to be the first maritime nation of the earth” because free institutions, individuality, and capitalism inevitably lead to commercial expansion. The nation will “become more commercial, and consequently more maritime, precisely as her institutions become more free. The secret of all enterprise and energy exists in the principle of individuality” (Cooper 1991: 50). By the late 1840s, when he was embroiled in libel suits and alienated from the public, Cooper’s views on unchecked individualism were tempered, and he inclined toward more aristocratic domestic positions. In political terms, The Crater reads like a patrician warning and prophecy on the excesses of egalitarianism. Some have considered it an allegory of the rise and fall of the U.S. (“the course of empire”), a reflection on the direction the nation was heading from the early Republic time of the book’s middle sections to the more socio-politically riven U.S. of the pre-Civil War period of its later sections. The collapse of the ideal colony, in Cooper’s terms, comes from, among other factors, the introduction of lawyers and newspapers (Cooper would like an informed hierarchy respecting civil society without free-market legal or media systems), with the subsequently litigious society,

Opening accounts in the South Seas 69 divided in terms of political and economic aims – ultimately, the colony sinks in the wake of an earthquake, with Mark, Betts, and his family alone surviving, along with the Islanders of a neighboring group who have been good trading partners. However, despite his bleak conclusions, Cooper everywhere insists that foundational U.S. policy values – when not taken too far – contrast with those of the colonizing powers: “By the time New Zealand and Tahiti are brought under the yoke,” he intrudes, specifically commenting on the region, “the Californians may be admitted to an equal participation in the rights of American citizens,” although this is largely the result of the expansionist Mexican war (Cooper 1854: 236). For the purposes of my argument about American Pacificism, however, my concerns are with Cooper’s vision of Oceanian islands as places where the U.S. might correctively replay its history, arresting it at the proper moment of the cycle of empire. What Cooper allegorizes in the rise of the colony – all made possible by the South Seas cargo owned by Abraham (the patriarch) White (Anglo-Saxon) – has specific Oceanian connections. The colony flourishes when it builds and deploys ships to bring lucrative cargos of sandalwood and bêche-de-mer to Canton. When the sandalwood reserves of the neighboring islands are depleted, the colony becomes involved in the whale-fishery, employing “kannakas” (through the fishery, the “Kannakas, more or less of whom were employed in each vessel . . . rose greatly in public estimation” [Cooper 1854: 292]). The reference to the economic history of Hawai‘i, and elsewhere in Oceania and Nantucket, could not be clearer. In principle, the colony seeks trade not for its own sake, but for the ways in which it enables the creation of a moral society. In a serenely circular logic, Mark admits settlers on the basis of useful skills and morals – “No one was received but those who bore perfectly good characters” – and private property secures moral behavior and industry (ibid.: 237, 238). In The Crater the model society cannot exist apart from the threat of savages, whose subjection through wars strengthens the colony’s moral fiber and unity. Where there are no more wars to fight, in Cooper, society becomes morally lethargic. The trade that flourishes in the era immediately following stabilization must go through savage lands, and comes to include Islander labor on exploitative terms as part of the process of integrating them into the commercial system that forms the basis of modern civilizations. At first this is done by taking advantage of alternative indigenous systems of value: “Beads and old iron were to be their pay, with fish-hooks, and such other trifles as had a value in their eyes” (Cooper 1854: 268). Cooper’s allegory is specific and unambivalent. Those neighboring Islanders who assent to the colonial authority are treated with paternalistic kindness; those who resist are rolled over militarily. In a version of the good Indian/bad Indian split found throughout the Leatherstocking novels, the Islander Waaly continues to menace the colony, displacing the Ooroony line (a possible nod to Afra Behn’s noble Oroonoko). Waaly grows in power, managing his own fleet of ships, as Oceanian chiefs did in several locations, most notably Hawai‘i (Kamehameha I traded sandalwood for vessels; in 1817 he sent his own cargo to China), until he is conveniently erased from the narrative by pirates. “Foreign relations” subsequently consist of intervening in hereditary tribal conflicts in order to establish a

70 Opening accounts in the South Seas friendly government and trade partner. Much like the U.S. Congress, Cooper’s colonial council (advisors to Mark, the elected governor-for-life) determines that “sound policy required such an exhibition of force on the part of the colony, as should make a lasting impression on their turbulent neighbors” (ibid.: 265–6). After the hostile Islanders have been subdued, “one hundred youths were selected and handed over to the governor, as so many apprentices to the sea. These young Kannakas were so many hostages to the good behaviour of their parents.” This conscription of Islanders into the fishery much resembles the terms of hire advised by firms such as Bryant and Sturgis in Hawai‘i, who instructed a captain, “take as many Stout Islanders as will increase your crew to 21 or 22 . . . when you return from the Coast discharge, and pay them off in such articles of trade as you have left” (Hammatt 1999: xxi). However, when young Ooroony is instated and trade is secured, “it was hoped that the intercourse created . . . and aided by the trade in sandal-wood, might have the effect to bind the natives to the whites by the tie of interest” (Cooper 1854: 265, 268). Much of the discussion of intercultural relations reflects the paternalism of U.S. views about Oceania, even where Cooper sees the islanders as partners joined in interest, rather than the object of outright colonialization. As the colonial governor of the Crater and its “pure Craterinos” (Cooper 1854: 294), white settlers born at the colony, Mark resists the call of some members of the council to make Islanders into slaves. He believes instead that it is “very possible so to treat, and so to train them [the kannakas], as to make them fast friends.” This involves teaching them to read and training them religiously in the views of Abraham White. While the settlers are given parcels of land, Islanders are hired laborers: The “kannakas” are not in any sense regarded as fully enfranchised, property-owning citizens, as a census shows: “An enumeration . . . showed a total of three hundred and seventynine souls, including those absent in the Rancocus, and excluding the Kannakas.” This is in part, the text suggests, because “Kannakas . . . would not labour like civilised men, it is true,” although they are useful for heavy lifting: “the loading and unloading principally done by the Kannakas . . . boat loads of mud and sand were brought by Kannakas (ibid.: 268–70). For Cooper there is simply no contradiction between egalitarian principles and an exploitative racial hierarchy in Oceania, in which Islanders do hard labor, or occupy lower positions in the fishery, in order to increase the wealth of the whites (each of whom owns “lays” in the whaling industry). All well-regulated societies, he argues, observe natural hierarchies; those with God-given talent and good training amass lands and provide leadership. Cooper credits his colonists with wise management of Islanders: The governor had a great faculty in the management of these wild beings. He not only kept them in good humour, but, what was far more difficult, he made them work. They were converted into a sort of Irish for his colony. It is true, one civilised man could do more than three of the Kannakas, but the number of the last was so large that they accomplished a great deal during their stay. (ibid.: 272)

Opening accounts in the South Seas 71 As the colony expands, there are offhand mentions to “kannakas” as “semisavages,” toward whom at times Mark feels a “wise distrust,” now “scattered about among the farmhouses, or working at the different places where shipping lay” (ibid.: 318), something like the metaphorical Oceanian birds who have been allowed to live as citizens among the larger species in Poe’s South Sea rookery. In terms of foreign policy, that is, Cooper sees Oceanians being integrated into the world system to the degree that they adopt Euroamerican trading protocols and form nation-states. Domestically they are to be integrated as labor force to the degree that they develop “a taste for the habits of the settlers” (ibid.: 318), at the same time that they will remain for the foreseeable future unassimilatable to higher culture.

3

Lines of fright Fear, perception, performance, and the “seen” of cannibalism in Charles Wilkes’s Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee

Half the world, it is said, know not how the other half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human bones. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist me, than it is to explore the private sea. H. D. Thoreau, Walden

Fear and perception in nineteenth-century American Pacificism You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. Mark Twain

Neither Edgar Allan Poe nor James Fenimore Cooper ever visited Oceania, but in their symptomatic texts the imaginings of Oceanians, made with superficial reference to particulars of the American Pacific archive, cut through broad parody and allegory to legitimate the lines of ideological debate at work in the formation of the Wilkes expedition, including what Brian Massumi calls a “media scare campaign” or “organized fear trade” (Massumi 1993: 4). It is against the effects of this campaign on perception – this spread of ignorance as it circulates into policy and performance – that Herman Melville wrote several of his harshest indictments of U.S. activities in Oceania.1 Like the members of the Wilkes expedition, whose violence he references early and late, Melville was in Oceania, and like theirs his views are the product of an intercultural experience. However, whereas Charles Wilkes is unambivalent, wholesale in his judgments, and self-righteous, Melville performs senses in which preconceptions destabilize perception and alter behaviour. He does this not because he has effectively distanced his narrative from the epistemologically limiting and distorting modes of seeing that he criticizes, but because he recognizes the difficulty of doing so. Among the most determinate pressures on vision Melville apprehends (playing on the pervasive use of the word “apprehension” during the period) is a fear-saturated, self/other delineating logic,

Lines of fright

73

felt somatically, that sharpens aggression. The differences between Charles Wilkes’s official Narrative of the expedition (1845) and Melville’s performance of fear in Typee (1847) – foregrounded in this chapter – suggest complexities in midnineteenth-century intercultural representation or differences between competing forms of mimesis. The following chapter, on friendships among Islanders and U.S. citizens, assesses a coterminous counter-impulse toward intercultural intimacy and fraternity that runs throughout the American Pacific archive. It seems self-evident that fear – its generation, its repression, its negotiation – would inform all perception, and most extravagantly that involved with early intercultural contact. Fear acts through and upon what Michael Taussig describes as “the nervous system,” a socio-symbolic order made sensate within both individuals and the body politic (Taussig 1992). Fear stimulates, immobilizes, activates aggressive defenses, renders the boundaries of order palpable and permeable, subsides and intensifies in reaction to the perceived threat of the Other it frames and is in turn reconstituted by. In part because of the givenness of these conditions, along with the customized specificity and frightening theoretical abstractness of fear and perception as categories, the relations between fear and perception are rarely analyzed in discussions of crucial episodes in the ongoing formation of the American Pacific archive. These scenes, anchored in “eyewitness” accounts (a “being there” that authorizes texts), reveal not only psychodynamics that feed mutually confirming lexicons or inflationary systems of citation, but senses in which the communication of fear contributes to the making of history. As Greg Dening demonstrates, Oceanian encounters are “compounded histories” made in the transactions among various players, whose actions and reactions, and perceptions and misperceptions of each other’s noetics, are performative and co-creative (Dening 1996: 45). The resultant archive in this reading is something that “produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida 1995: 17). It opens to the “future-to-come” in the banal senses that it is self-replicating and that whatever is added to it in the future will modify precursor documents on the basis of an ongoing dialectic between processes of preconception and recollection. Archive at any arrested moment then is memory as it functions in the present toward an object and an end, including a strain of forgetfulness and denial as part of what Derrida means by “archive fever.” The more fear saturates the scene of contact, the more dramatic, tense, and conflictual become the performative qualities of action, including a range of mimicries, staged deterrences, and willed ignorances of cultural protocols. What Edward Said describes as a “textual attitude” effects the material scene and ricochets into texts and back out into the world. As Said puts it, as the focus of the text centers more narrowly on the subject – no longer lions but their fierceness – we might expect that the ways in which it is recommended that a lion’s fierceness be handled will actually increase its fierceness, force it to be fierce since that is what it is, and that is what in essence we know or can only know about it. (Said 1979: 94)

74 Lines of fright In these senses, fear does not simply inform perception. In fact, neither fear nor perception can be taken as anterior to the other. Rather, a fear environment alters and produces objects for perception, which is itself transactive at the most primary levels, rather than the static recovery of posited objects. As Maurice MerleauPonty observes, The things we see somehow manifest something that transcends both the features disclosed by vision and the consciousness of the one who sees. What there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them – but something to which we could not be closer than by palpitating it with our look, things we could not dream of seeing ‘all naked’ because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 131) In a contact environment, this generates history-making that, Dening argues, “changes the environment in which others will act” because they “will have to respond in some way to the history that has been made” (Dening 1996: 144). History made in a fear environment feeds itself, forming fright-lines that circulate through cultural representations and into a range of intercultural practices. For Gananath Obeyesekere, the process gets pushed further in both directions within Western voyagers, with the prevalence of nursery rhymes and ballads involving cannibalism acting as a primal scene for sailors, so that something uncanny in a fear environment returns them to repressed belief structures. Ultimately, Obeyesekere argues, in a reading which entertains the possibility that British pantomimic inquiries about cannibalism create indigenous fears of European cannibalism (or produce mimicked acts of cannibalism), and subsequently an indigenous discursive counter-attack, “where there is fantasy there could be slippage into reality and from there into human institutions” (Obeyesekere 1992b: 630), a literalization of the moment in Robinson Crusoe when it devolves upon Crusoe to enlighten the supposed-cannibal Friday about the fine art of dressing meat and building a barbecue pit. That every member of the expedition knew the popular song “King of the Cannibal Isles” – members of the crew “by a conceit of the musicians” sang it to the high-chief Tanoa in Fiji (Joyce 2001: 98) – suggests deeply ingrained fantasies of cannibalism. In the sense that the institutions Obeyesekere refers to are jointly made, a semiotics of fear comes into play, deployable and connected to relations of power. For Obeyesekere, relentless Western inquiries “produced a new discourse of cannibalism” and “cannibalistic discourse becomes a weapon employed by all parties.” As the discourse around cannibalism evolved “it begins to affect the practice” (Obeyesekere 1992b: 646, 650). This sense of fear as performed is widespread in accounts of early contact. In a reading of Cabaza de Vaca among Amerindians, for instance, Rolena Adorno argues that “Fear of the other was a weapon employed on both sides, the native American and

Lines of fright 75 the European. Both groups created, managed, and manipulated it, depending on who had the upper hand” (Adorno 1993: 52). A large degree of citation inheres in the concept of fear. For Freud, fear depends “on the state of a person’s knowledge and on his sense of power vis-à-vis the external world” – it is educated into people and this knowledge may in fact be the “expression of a general hysteria which has become a heritage” (Freud 1977: 394, 396). Post-Freudian accounts of fear likewise stress its accumulative nature. For Julia Kristeva, who uses “abjection” to name ejective fear mechanisms, abjection is a revolt within being that sustains the horrors that civilizations and individuals need to “seize on in order to build themselves up and function.” Abjection is “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness” that acts as “safeguard” and “primer” of culture, at the same time that it continues to haunt the subject as “something rejected from which one does not part.” Kristeva emphasizes the ambiguity of the phobic object, citing its “indexing value,” its quality of “pointing to something else, to some non-thing, to something unknowable” (Kristeva 1982: 210, 2, 4, 42).2 Fear, then, haunts the interstices between preconception and experience, drawing force from insinuations of obscure agency, which may be hallucinatory. Conventional distinctions between reasonable caution (or constructive precautions) and a destructive panic-stricken dread (that potentially turns aggressive) rest on whether there is a basis for the fear, which must be determined retroactively. Hence, the necessity and satisfaction of witness. If the not-knowing produces shudders and a kind of spell, then reality or eyewitness dispels fear by making it nameable, in the process transferring authority over the object to the perceiver. Eyewitness, that is, assumes that it can be dissociated from forces that structure perception, a formulation whose ambiguities are suggested in Ishmael’s first witness of Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick: “foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension. Captain Ahab stood upon the deck” (Melville 1988: 45). When Ahab appears, apprehension is overrun by something claiming the status of the “real.” The “seen” overrides fear, which is legitimated by Ahab’s aspect. At the same time, for apprehension to be outrun suggests a space temporarily beyond the real(m) of understanding and raises the question of whether Ishmael’s perception of Ahab is part of a chain of apprehensions. Perception here stills fear only long enough to preserve and perpetuate it. The instance, if held as representative, reinstitutes fear effects. The dynamics sketched above are most tellingly in play in the discourses about cannibalism that form a base-line to U.S. perceptions of Oceanians. In Charles Wilkes’s Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee, as in American Pacific texts in general, cannibalism is the master trope for the pinch point of the nervous system, and for that space in which the perceiver is held by the desire to know or not know in a certain way. The scene of witnessing cannibalism literalizes the trope, converting it into history. However, the styles of representing the “seen” of cannibalism in each text suggest divergent conceptions of mimesis, or representing history, as fundamental to the simultaneous development of American Pacificism and its critique – a critique that itself remains circumscribed.

76 Lines of fright Charles Wilkes’s five-volume Narrative can be taken as representative of state knowledge (and the state of knowledges) about Oceania in the U.S. It is about creating an American Pacific archive, and is self-consciously engaged in an historic and nationalistic mission, begun with anxiety about U.S. reliance on European science. It is intensely concerned about the impressions it aims on making upon both Europeans and Oceanians, with both a sense of national honor at stake and a sense, as Wilkes tells his officers in his General Order, that “the future intercourse of our countrymen with the natives of the islands we may visit, will very much depend on the impression made on their minds by us” (Wilkes 1970: 1.308). (Interestingly, a naval lieutenant observed a set of Wilkes’s Narrative on the desk of Kauikeaouli [Kamehameha III] [Wise 1849: 332].) Like several other U.S. ship captains, Wilkes forbade his officers to go ashore “without appropriate uniform”; he even ordered his men to shave their “mustachios,” an excess ridiculed in the press (Wilkes 1845: 1.416). This sense of representing the country – performing a national duty with the eyes of the world upon him – is emphasized throughout the expedition papers (the public followed the expedition through detailed newspaper accounts, such as regular installments in The Polynesian, published in Honolulu). The title page of the narrative emphasizes that “Nothing has been used in its preparation that is not STRICTLY AMERICAN,” a passage Melville echoes in the prophecy in Moby-Dick that the doomed Pequod’s materials “could only be American.” Typee, Herman Melville’s quasi-autobiographical “peep at Polynesian life,” as suggested in my introduction, is generally taken as inaugurating both a touristic, escapist tradition of literary perceptions of Oceania and a subversive, anti-imperialist tradition; that the two books are in fact one suggests linkages between touristic perception and imperialism. The voyeuristic “peep” at natives represented in a semi-pornographic and carefree “state of nature,” in describing a scene of colonial entanglement that follows fifty years of exchange, cannot be a neutral vehicle. In both of these influential narratives cannibalism figures as a crucial semiotic operator, as sign of the abject quality in the other against which the nervous system revolts and is activated. Throughout the Narrative, Wilkes identifies Islanders as either cannibals or not – or no longer cannibals, in part as a result of missionary, civilizational influence. He literally maps, with the implication of full cartographic empirical authority, the condition of the Natives. Two lines are drawn across Wilkes’s map of the Low Archipelago or Paumotu Group: along the first dotted line is written, “to the East of this line the Missionaries have not extended”; along the second is written, “The Natives East of this line were supposed to be Cannibals” (Wilkes 1970: 1.306). Wilkes and his officers express a Crusoesque abjection about cannibalism, consonant with the outrage at alleged cannibalizations of crews that J. N. Reynolds itemized on the floor of Congress. In the face of putative cannibalism, scientific objectivity breaks down into disgust and didacticism. For Horatio Hale, philologist-ethnologist on the voyage, cannibalism is a racial category and a direct index of “evil qualities” with “roots deep” in Fijian “moral organization” (Hale 1846: 37). For Fred Stuart, a clerk on the expedition,

Lines of fright 77 cannibal stories are believable on phrenological grounds: “We have too strong proof that these people are Cannibals to believe otherwise. Just from what we have seen and heard & secondly from the phrenological developments of their heads – which in itself would condemn them” (Stuart 1838–42). Hale writes, “The Polynesians may, without injustice, be called a race of cannibals” and concludes, tautologically, that cannibalism would not “exist among any but a sanguinary people” (Hale 1846: 37, 15). In Wilkes’s Narrative, the loathing bound up with believing Fijians to have an indiscriminate and “horrible instinct of cannibal appetite” (Wilkes 1970: 3.265) augments a fear and crisis environment in which Fiji – its reefs regarded as the natural equivalent to human dangers – becomes a synonym for danger. “The least degree of confidence reposed in the natives,” Wilkes writes, “was attended with the greatest risk. . . . So treacherous a people were not to be trusted under any circumstances” (ibid.: 3.53). At the same time, Wilkes always argues the vital importance of not showing fear and distrust. In his Autobiography he asserts that “difficulties arising with the Savages may be imputed to the apprehensions of the whites showing signs of mistrust which the savages are quick to perceive and take advantage of. . . . In dealing with the savage all fear should be carefully concealed” (Wilkes 1978: 457). He repeatedly emphasizes visual economies of fear: not showing fear, noting the degree of fear natives display at fireworks and the like, and the “terror” that his reprisals strike in the Fijians. Such an outlook – distrustful and determined not to show it – leads to deterrence, the displacement of fear by creating fear in the Other, and to a resentment of what causes fear and necessitates its concealment. Deterrence forecloses perception and feeds an ontology that originates in and requires revulsion. For Melville cannibalism is a hackneyed theme, blown madly out of proportion, irresponsibly deployed as a justification for preemptive violence, and productive of blockages within perception, while itself becoming an absurd form of literary tourism, as in Melville’s parody of an “old chief” who makes a living out of having consumed Captain Cook’s toe (Melville 1968a: 234).3 However absurd, though, cannibal fantasies structure and delimit what the “I” witnesses, how it processes information, and prevent (or deform) openness to experience that might lead to understanding and more sensuous representation (as fantasies, of course, cannibal fantasies do not shut down imaginative work). In Typee he notes how “a fear of the natives, founded on a recollection of the dreadful fate which many white men have received at their hands, has deterred . . . crews from intermixing with the population sufficiently to gain any insight into their peculiar customs and manners” (ibid.: 6). Fear generated through recollection of prior narratives prevents whites from discovering any cultural basis for their fear. At the same time, Melville feels the attractions, revulsions, and comforts of “cannibalism” as corporeal “fright site,” or nerve cluster for what William Arens calls “cultural boundary construction and maintenance,” including anxieties about race, masculinity, and sexuality (Arens 1979: 145). In the mid-nineteenth century it was widely believed that eating human flesh,

78 Lines of fright even under conditions of famine, resulted in “a conditional racial identity” (Sanborn 1998: 38–46). The stagy “seen” of cannibalism in Typee both mimics and enacts the psychosocial forces of perception involved in scenes of witness such as that in Wilkes. Melville inscribes himself within the discourse he analyzes, experimentally engaging a variety of archival moments recognized as the product of multiple actors whose rhetorical separation can never be as neat as imagined. Among the poetic and useful achievements of Melville’s text is the apprehension, registered intuitively, somatically, and through mimicking citation (marked by repeated references to “prior accounts”), that, from the moment of encounter, a priori discourses about self and other may be productively unsettled. In effect, the whole idea of organic cultures can be maintained only from outside, or from a position that denies the ways in which, as Dening puts it, “to know cultures in contact is to know the misreadings of meanings, the transformations of meanings, the recognitions of meanings” (Dening 1980: 6). The archive is shown as a congeries of theatrical performances that have lost their context – the ambiance and props in which communication takes shape – while purporting wellintentioned positions, including a naive, reportorial mimetic realism. Against such static, imperialism-grounding notions of archive, Typee renders visible a history-making in which Western classifications inform (if they do not create) much of what is handed down as native practice. In showing how “Those whom we denominate ‘savages’ are made to deserve the title” (Melville 1968a: 26), Melville selectively appropriates from and concurs with a source he elsewhere parodies, the missionary Charles Stewart, who wrote that the “vindictive deportment” of the Taipi toward foreigners “is attributable . . . to the ill treatment and wrong suffered by them from previous visitors; and often, is the direct consequence of the imprudent measures and violent usage of the very persons who publish their ferocity to the world” (Stewart 1970: 1.317, emphasis added). Stewart directly referred to Porter, with whom Melville elsewhere concurs in showing how the Taipi have been wrongfully “stigmatized” by the name of “savage.” Yet here he cites Porter with vengeance and irony, since, like Stewart, Melville makes clear that the arrogant Porter is guilty of the most aggressive intrusion by outsiders that the Taipi have endured. In effect, that is, the scenes that shock Westerners may not be ritual aspects of native mythic order, or metonymy for such a mysterious Order, but may be reactivist indigenous theater done as a terroristic or mocking counterdiscourse, for amusement or simply for profit, as with Queequeg’s headpeddling. In the moments where Melville intuits such performative contexts, and through his foredoomed attempt to locate and analyze within the discursive violence surrounding the discourse of “cannibalism” the conditions that hold it in place, Melville begins in Typee to refigure the multiple fears brought about by intercultural encounter – fears about boundaries, or, rather, their porousness – into a space of vital, consciousness-transforming possibility.

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Evidence, performance, and exchange: the “seen” of cannibalism in Wilkes In response to the question of explorers researching cannibalism, the native answers: “Now, there aren’t any more cannibals in our region. Yesterday we ate the last one.” Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do They could, after all, see the Euroamericans collecting them. Greg Dening, Interview

Wilkes’s sailing orders included rigorous requirements for record keeping: It being highly important that no journal of this voyage, either partial or complete, should be published, without the authority and under the supervision of the government, at whose expense this Expedition is undertaken, you will, before you reach the waters of the United States, require from every person under your command, the surrender of all journals, memorandums, remarks, writings, drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as all specimens of every kind, collected or prepared during your absence. (Wilkes 1970: 1.366) In this spirit Wilkes issued a general order that “all the officers of the Exploring Expedition” submit a journal to him every week, a duty to be considered “as paramount to all others.” The journals were to be “as full and complete as possible” in recording “any information in regard to the manners, habits, or customs of natives.” What was to be noted was “public information” and explicitly not “private affairs,” which Wilkes deemed “sacred.” The journals and specimens would form “a mass of evidence for the use of the government on our return” (ibid.: 1.367–8); in fact, they would serve multiple reference uses (commercial, scientific, artistic, religious, academic, military). The official history would be drawn in as circumspect a spirit as possible, as the narrative equivalent of the surveying that was among the expedition’s primary functions, and all the materials that went into constructing it were explicitly government property. Vis-à-vis native peoples, Wilkes was not a discoverer but a surveyor, not an original describer but a certifier of existent knowledges. Every textual position would be ascertained by multiple reckonings and reinforced, if possible, by visual proof, drawings or specimens tied to narrative events. In the process, the sanctity of the private experience of each journal keeper (the respect for which constituted the crew as U.S. citizens) would be protected, at the same time that the errancy of individual subjectivity would be minimized. The author of the final narrative would edit out whatever subjectivity would creep in. One wonders about the kinds of internalized constraints or felt requirements the officer-journalists would feel while writing, given their foreknowledge that their own attitudes ought to be kept

80 Lines of fright out, and that what they witnessed would be compared with other accounts with the same referent. They were not literary men, yet knew at the moment of composition that their signed words, with their reactions explicitly or implicitly registered, would be preserved for posterity as part of a permanent government archive. In fact, contemporary scholars of the expedition favor the individual journals as maximally immediate or unmediated documents. In theory, however, the official Narrative would be at once depersonalized and centralized, as scientifically complete a record as recording procedures of the time allowed; its authority would arise from not being, in a conventional sense, authored. Under these conditions – sanctioned by antebellum institutions – it would be expected that the Narrative would be as unsensational and positivistic a “Pacific” document as U.S. society was capable of producing. That the official five-volume Narrative fails to approach dispassionate ethnohistory is in part attributable to Charles Wilkes, whose overbearing, selfvindicating character is stamped on every page, even where he must be regarded largely as a collator.4 Beyond this, there were perceptual problems inherent in the surveyor’s model of textual production. This model works best where the object is stationary, but it is disastrous for producing intercultural understanding, especially where it records practices around which fears circulate, and where the act of collecting is itself an unrecognized, transformative intervention (especially where Fijians traded for muskets, the balances of local power were being altered). In intercultural contact, as suggested, perception tends to move in alliance with drives that inform preconceptions, which subsequently have the power to alter and be altered by their objects. But the Narrative’s problems illustrate far more than the pathologies of Wilkes or his men, or even of the mechanisms within antebellum institutions that block the processing of Oceanian “knowledges.” The Narrative performs senses in which, in Dening’s words, audience and actors, or readers and writers, “enter into the conspiracy of their own illusions” (Dening 1996: 105). What is ultimately at issue are the consequences of perceiving cultures as discrete and Other and the senses in which not acknowledging fear (or indigenous humor) at play – and the ways that fears are played upon – induce conformity to preconception, which often discharges itself as confusion or outrage. The surveying method denies the dialectic between preconception and perception through its belief in fixable knowledge, after which the real can be cloned into history (a “Mimesis that clones the world,” Dening argues, “changes nothing” [ibid.: 113]). Material exchange invariably took place in Oceania within loosely established and evolving structures. As Nicholas Thomas details, “The American–Fijian encounter entailed both gift exchange and direct barter” (Thomas 1991: 113) that took a variety of forms, and that evolved over decades of sandalwood (1804–14) and bêche-de-mer trading (1820s–30s). Wilkes and his men entered a scene in which Fijians, who had dealt extensively with traders, missionaries, and whalers, were familiar with Euroamerican trading practices and systems of value. The journal writers repeatedly evaluate Fijians in terms of how craftily they bargain. Wilkes had an abundance of advice, coming from the differently motivated accounts

Lines of fright 81 of beachcombers (David Whippy, Daniel O’Connell), traders ( John Eagleston, Benjamin Vanderford), and missionaries ( James Calvert, David Cargill), on how to negotiate with Fijians, and for him it all added up to anxiety and the need for strict control of the conditions of barter. In recalling events leading up to a tragic conflict, he writes, “I felt great anxiety for the safety of our parties in the boats, and issued the foregoing orders very particularly, in order to avoid all misapprehension” (Wilkes 1970: 3.53). Wilkes assembled the Narrative retrospectively, after having faced a public courtmartial that resulted in a public reprimand. It is hard not to see underscoring his scrupulous desire to “avoid all misapprehension” as a means of preparing the reader for what the Narrative calls “the affair at Malolo,” without telling events out of sequence. The Malolo massacre was apparently triggered when several crew members, desperate for supplies, went ashore. Another boat held a native hostage. When the hostage leapt overboard, and a shot was fired over his head, the natives attacked those on shore. In the skirmish, Lieutenant Underwood and Wilkes’s nephew, Midshipman Wilkes Henry, were killed. The loss of two popular officers activated a pent-up hostility toward the Fijians, and the journals record the anger with which the crew prepared to retaliate on the following day. Several journals describe Wilkes as weeping or fainting at the sight of his dead nephew, the only child of his widowed sister, and the deaths deeply effected the whole crew. The death of the two crew members reached and inflamed the U.S. public as well (the account of the “massacre” and subsequent retaliation was front-page news), along with a detailed description of Wilkes’s “severe chastisement for their outrageous conduct.” After killing “the chief and principal actors in the attack upon the officers” (this would have been impossible to ascertain), Wilkes describes how, when the Fijians, their town and crops in ruin, sued for peace, he made them beg for pardon “after the Feejee custom. . . . Soon after, about fifty of their principal men approached us in the most supplicating manner, upon their hands and knees, begging pardon and suing for mercy” (Wilkes 1841: 1). Wilkes would later name a Fijian islet near Malolo “Henry” and a small cluster of islets “Underwood’s group” (Wilkes 1970: 3.472). Before describing the military operation in the official Narrative, which included the massacre of more than one hundred Fijians and the destruction of towns, canoes, breadfruit trees, and yam and hog reserves, Wilkes emphasizes the attempts he made to keep the bodies of his officers from being exhumed and cannibalized.5 Wilkes seizes on this notion that “the grave might not be held sacred from their hellish appetites,” imagining “condor-eyed savages” watching from the highest peaks for signs of the burial site (Wilkes 1970: 3.265). After Wilkes has described the Malolo massacre he again congratulates himself on “the promptitude with which the bodies were saved from ministering to the cannibal appetites of the murderers” who have “been long enough to kill and eat with impunity” (ibid.: 3.285, 286). Several journals stress the care taken to avoid exhumation, so it is likely that this was discussed on deck. The notion of exhumation for cannibal purposes may come from the missionary David Cargill, who reported the practice to Wilkes, who (on this occasion) could not doubt

82 Lines of fright information from “such respectable authority” (ibid.: 3.158).6 What preceded the attack, and perhaps contributed to the whole “affair,” was the eyewitness of cannibalism, which, as Barry Joyce argues, fundamentally changed the relations between Americans and Fijians, which had been largely amiable: For all the attempts to deal with it in an objective and detached manner, the incident of 3 July had a much greater impact on the attitudes and perspectives of the expedition than they chose to admit. . . . The voyagers’ perspectives on and relations with these people were altered, even skewed, once the Fijians were confirmed to be man-eaters. Not surprisingly, relations between the islanders and crew rapidly deteriorated from this point onward. ( Joyce 2001: 104–5). Given the centrality of cannibalism to Wilkes and the crew’s attitude toward Fijians, it is noteworthy that this single episode providing eyewitness gets only one page in the official version of the Narrative. On the one hand, it is as if the sketchy rendition of this structurally crucial scene confesses the instabilities of the evidence, or of narrative as a medium of witness. What has been “seen” seems to speak for itself as it resists narration or a fullness of contextualization in which its details might become legible. On the other hand, the Narrative takes cannibalism so much for granted that it is as if the event can simply be taken as an instance of something never in question, or what Stephen Greenblatt describes as “witnessing understood as a form of significant and representative seeing” in which the “discoverer sees only a fragment and then imagines the rest” (Greenblatt 1991: 122). No one questions why, with cannibalism posited as “rampant,” there is only a single instance of witness in all the months spent in the islands, and that only upon request. The command performance amply fulfills the crew’s perceptual needs, and the evenhandedness with which it is narrated displays a retroactive installation of empiricist consciousness. There is even a strong probability that the “seen” was used in a motivational capacity, because in several journals it is recalled directly before the attack on Malolo: Simeon Stearns, for instance, who was not aboard the Peacock, recounts in his “Journal on Board U.S.S. ‘Vincennes’” (1939–40) the “seen” directly before the description of the attack. Although Wilkes himself did not witness cannibalism, members of the Peacock clearly did see something involving a dismembered Fijian body that dispelled any doubts they had about Fijian cannibalism. The journal accounts either do not agree, or agree with each other so closely that one suspects they are the result of conversation and collaboration as much as joint witness, but a cross-indexing of their confusions does ascertain some material coordinates to the scene. In a passage directly echoing Joseph Banks prior to the witnessing of cannibalism in New Zealand, Pickering prefaces his account by stating that he had previously doubted cannibalism: We had hitherto been so well treated by the Natives, and found them always so obliging, and so ‘timid’; that many of us began to think they had been

Lines of fright 83 maligned. Some even doubted whether they were really Cannibals; and the question had been seriously discussed at the Wardroom table the previous evening. . . . Though we had been nearly two months on these islands, no one could say he had actually witnessed the fact, or name a person of credit who had. (Pickering, 1838–42: entry for July 30, 1840)7 Most of the Wilkes expedition journals, however, refer to cannibalism both before and after the scene of witness as an established fact. Silas Holmes claims that, “in the northern islands, human flesh is a regular article of food and nearly all the officers of the other vessels have seen them cooking and eating it” (Holmes 1838– 42: entry for July 3, 1840), a statement that flatly contradicts Pickering. George Foster Emmons writes that the incident on the Peacock “is one of many instances that has come to our knowledge while among these islds clearly establishing the fact that these people are cannibals, a matter that has been disputed by some & disbelieved by many who have not had a personal opportunity of knowing any better” (Emmons 1838–42: entry for July 3, 1840). Charles Pickering, the generally dispassionate, liberal-minded scientist and author of The Races of Man, concluded, despite the single instance of witness, that Fijian cannibalism is “interwoven into the elements of [Fijian] society; it forms in no small degree a pursuit. . . . Instances are of daily occurrence; and the preparation of human flesh calls into requisition a variety of culinary processes, and is almost a distinct art.” He also goes as far as to hypothesize that “the traces of cannibalism existing among the Polynesians have appeared to me referable to a Feejeean source” (Pickering 1854: 171). Wilkes, necessarily synthesizing the various reports of his officers, narrates the “seen” as follows: On the 2nd of July the Peacock sailed from Muthuata [and] . . . anchored in Naloa Bay. . . . A fleet of canoes came off to the ship the next morning, from which they learned [that] Tui Mbua’s party had killed three of the people of the opposite party. . . . One human body had already been brought over and just feasted upon. Shortly afterwards a canoe came alongside, bringing the skull yet warm from the fire, much scorched, and marked with the teeth of those who had eaten it. The brain had been roasted and taken out, as well as the eyes and teeth. Another canoe came alongside with some roasted flesh in it. While Mr. Spieden and others were agreeing with the natives for the purchase of the skull for a fathom of cloth, a native stood near him holding something in his right hand, which he soon applied to his mouth, and began to eat. To their utter astonishment they discovered it to be the eye of the dead man, which the native had plucked from the skull a few moments before. So revolting and unexpected a sight produced a feeling of sickness in many; this ocular proof of their cannibal propensities fully satisfied them. The native was eating it, and exclaiming at the same time, “Vinaka, vinaka,” (good, good.) Another was seen eating the last of the flesh from the thigh-bone. This was

84 Lines of fright witnessed by several of the officers and men, who all testify to the same facts. Previous to this occurrence, no one in the squadron could say that he had been an eye-witness to cannibalism, though few doubted its practice, but the above transaction placed it beyond all doubt, and we have now the very skull which was bought from those who were picking and eating it, among our collections. (Wilkes 1970: 3.234) The scene may be taken as representative of instabilities in the poetics of “witness.” Something deeply disturbing has been seen, but it is unclear what it has to teach, if anything, about Fijian cannibalism. Rather, the scene suggests that witness may be in multiple senses participatory – what Banks calls a “demonstration” – not simply because fears and preconceptions conditioned by prior accounts are mixed up in recountings, but because what is seen happens within a fear environment and within the context of a “transaction,” or a theater of barter, to which both parties bring “knowledges” and in which both fulfill desires to some degree unintelligible to the other. The cliché that “Western commodities exercised an irresistible magnetism” (Thomas 1991: 94) is clearly reversible here, as Wilkes’s men are eager to possess an artifact that, perhaps unconsciously, acts as a souvenir protecting their collective convictions about Fijians. Much as in Banks’s account, the skull is entirely necessary to the “seen”: as the native Tupia who sailed with Cook puts it, “But where are the sculls? . . . Bring them and we shall be convinced that these are men whose bones we have seen. – We do not eat the heads, answerd the old man . . . but we do the brains and tomorrow I will bring one and shew you” (quoted in Salmond 1991: 245). For Wilkes and his men, the skull (and in some accounts a full body) becomes a crucial prop, valuable for the narrative (or flesh) attached to it. In the sense that the expedition produces a narrative the U.S. wants to tell itself vis-à-vis Oceanian enterprises, the skull, whether exhibited in museums or analyzed by phrenologists, could be held up for that soliloquy. One might begin, in reviewing Wilkes’s account, by noting a gap implicit in the phrase “shortly afterwards.” Wilkes is unclear about whether there was communication between the first fleet of canoes and the canoes that subsequently arrive or whether anyone on board the Peacock responded to the report of the cannibalized body with a request for reliquaries. In Pickering’s journal, it is clear that this took place: “We were anchored off the village on the island visited by us, and someone learning that there was a feast on shore, desired evidences of the fact” (quoted in Poesch 1961: 84). The Fijians, then, do not simply paddle up to the Peacock with a skull, on the chance that it will be of interest, but come for barter, with a sense of what can be gained in return. They know from experience or from the phrasing of the request that the crew are eager to purchase a skull, just as the purser, Mr. Spieden, knows the natives value cloth, if not why they value it. More specifically, the natives know that the skull is valuable in connection with Euroamerican obsession with cannibalism. (Wilkes’s men have, after all, requested a “body” of evidence.) In this sense it seems hardly coincidental that “while” Spieden is negotiating the native begins to nibble on the eye, as if to say, “Feast your eyes on this.”

Lines of fright 85 It is worth noting that the details found in this one “seen” of cannibalism in Wilkes do not accord with anthropological records or theories about Fijian cannibalism, whether of the cosmic Peggy Sanday variety, in which cannibalism relates to “a people’s orientation to their physical and moral worlds,” or in terms of the details circulated by contemporary (largely missionary) sources (Sanday 1986: x). The missionary Thomas Williams noted that it was somewhat remarkable that the only instance of cannibalism in Fiji witnessed by any gentleman of the United States Exploring Expedition, was the eating of a human eye, – a thing which those who have seen many bodies eaten never witnessed, the head, as has been stated already, being always thrown away. (Basil Thompson in The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom repeats this sentence verbatim [Thompson 1968: 108].) Williams offers as explanation the assertion of the “favorite wife of Tuikilakila” that the head is “the portion of the priests of religion” (Williams and Calvert 1859: 167, 166). Similarly, after an assertion – based largely on missionary accounts – that cannibalism is practiced to a frightful degree in Fiji, Sir Edward Belcher reports: “I am told they threw one or more of the heads (which they do not eat) into the missionary’s compound.” Belcher takes this directly from David Cargill, who recounts the episode in The Diaries: The head had been thrown into our garden during the night, with the intention no doubt of annoying us and shocking our feelings. The victims of war were brought from Verata, & were killed by the Bau people. 260 human beings were killed & brought away by victors to be roasted and eaten. (Belcher 1843: 256; Cargill 1977: 159) In other words, contrary to the evidence of the Wilkes narrative, that Fijians do not eat the head of otherwise cannibalized bodies seems to be the one “fact” that all of the “anthropological” sources agree with. And yet The Polynesia (October 3, 1840) concluded, on the basis of ship reports, “Natives treacherous in the extreme, and the worst of cannibals. Came alongside the vessels devouring human flesh. Occasionally eat their own wives and children.” Clearly, this is not scientific anthropology, but storytelling that fills various needs, and as one reads the anthropological record and American Pacific archive it becomes clear that little coherent is available about Fijian “cannibalism,” which may have been, as Obeyesekere argues, more of a response to Western incursion than a set of customary practices, and has in any event been thoroughly mystified in two hundred years of yarning (Obeyesekere 2005: 151–92). One might come up with any number of speculative hypotheses about the “eye” imagery of Wilkes’s decidedly literary description of the “seen” of cannibalism, with its lurid phrases such as “yet warm from the fire” and “picking and eating” seemingly used for effect. (Wilkes draws here on George Foster Emmons – “Some natives . . . came alongside and produced the skull of one out of 3 prisoners which they reported they

86 Lines of fright had lately taken – killed – baked & devoured – this skull was yet warm from the fire, had a little flesh left upon it, & bore the prints of teeth” [Emmons 1838–42: entry for July 3, 1840].) The (un)fortuitously named Mr. Spieden gets “ocular proof” by seeing a Native nibbling on a human eyeball. The reference to Othello, as Geoffrey Sanborn demonstrates, is a “phrase that shows up again and again in early nineteenth-century accounts of cannibalism” – as in Augustus Earle’s “Most white men who have visited the island have been sceptical on this point; I myself was, before I had ‘ocular proof’” (quoted in Sanborn 1998). As Sanborn notes, the reference tellingly backfires, because of course Othello’s “ocular proof,” although it temporarily eases a mind that “misgives” him, is manipulated to literalize erroneously his worst fears and lead him to homicide; Othello fears and desires the proof of what he fears (ibid.: 6). The ritual ingestion of eyeballs (or simulation of such ingestion) by chiefs was a legendary and well-recorded practice elsewhere in Oceania; anthropologists of Tahiti and Hawai‘i conclude that swallowing eyes was an ancient Polynesian custom. This seems not to have been the case in Fiji, based on the accounts of Westerners who profess on the subject. However, in the Wilkes narrative the partial or interrupted ingestion of an eyeball is clearly not symbolic (in a ritualized sense) but demonstrative, and it is certainly not performed by chiefs, if it is authorized at all.8 Like many details in the scene, that is, that of the Fijian punctuating his nibbling in front of strangers with exclamations of delectation seems at once an organized “demonstration” and hard to stage imaginatively, raising as many questions as they answer. (How are prints of teeth to be distinguished from other forms of scraping? Based on Oceanian cooking practices, and traditional insults about having heads “baked in an imu,” would a head be cooked in such a way as to leave the skull charred?) In Wilkes’s collated account little adds up: dramaturgically, the crew cannot first be vague about the “something” held in the native’s hand and then know that it has just been plucked from the skull, especially because, when first mentioned, the skull is already without eyeballs. Emmons writes that “one of the natives was seen chewing an eye which was procured from him & preserved by [?] of our scientific gentlemen” (Emmons 1838–42 entry for July 3, 1840). In Simeon Stearns’s second-hand account, the native has in fact snatched the eyeball out of the skull as a kind of afterthought: “on observing he had left one of the eyes in the head he snatched it back gouged out the eye swallowed it smacked his lips and returned the now completely picked skull. Some of this flesh is now aboard the ship preserved in spirits” (Stearns 1839–40 entry for July 30, 1840). In these accounts, the eyeball moves back and forth across the deck, before winding up – a partially eaten, but evidently not swallowed eyeball – preserved as No. 29 in Titian Ramsay Peale’s catalogue of items for the Smithsonian. (No. 30 was Vendovi’s skull, Vendovi, the center of sensationalized anticipatory newspaper accounts, having died of consumption shortly after the expedition’s return; Vendovi’s death mask remained in the Department of the Navy until 1983, when it was moved to the Smithsonian [Viola 1985: 21].) The label for item No. 29 reads: “Cranium of a Fiji who was killed, with others by a neighboring tribe, and portions of their cooked

Lines of fright 87 bodies taken on board the U.S. Ship Peacock for sale, at Naloa bay, Island of Vanulevu, July 3rd, 1840” (quoted in Poesch 1961: 84). The collections were exhibited with great public interest: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who met with several of the scientists, considered the exhibit “the best sight in Washington” (quoted in Joyce 2001: 146; Stanton 1975: 310). However, there is no hint of ambivalence about any of the details in Wilkes’s account, or consideration of what the “for sale” sign attached to the eyeball might mean in reading the “seen,” and subsequent commentators either simply take Wilkes at face value or distort the scene further, adopting a jokey, postcolonial relativism or making it still more unclear who saw what and from where. For instance, William Stanton’s thorough account of the expedition describes the “seen” as follows: What doubts remained were dispelled one day early in July when a native scrambled onto the Vincennes’ quarterdeck munching on a human head from which he casually plucked an eye “and Eat it, smacking his lips at the same time, with the greatest possible relish.” (Stanton 1975: 203) It is curious that a historian as meticulous as Stanton would get details wrong, quote a particularly lurid journal account, and add his own literary touches (perhaps because of his sustained engagement with the expedition materials, he at times seems to share the tone and views of its officers).9 For instance, in Wilkes’s narrative, it was with crew members of the Peacock that the “transaction” took place. In Barry Joyce’s account the Fijians brought “evidence . . . spread out on a bed of plaintain leaves like a display case at Delmonico’s were the legs, arms, and other parts of a freshly roasted man,” including a skull “covered with teeth marks from those who had earlier partaken of this Fijian repast.” Joyce does not question these details – are we to infer that Fijians passed around the skull, leaving different sets of teethmarks on it, before offering it still warm from the fire for sale? Where has the body displayed on plantain come from anyway? It seems that, where cannibalism is concerned, the transactional nature of witness is liable to be overlooked, and the conversion of witness into history decontextualized. Whatever the officers of the Peacock saw they partly created, and what they communicated was absorbed into the archive, in which Wilkes continues to play a prominent role. The history made that morning – which was taken as decisive by a generation of U.S. and British writers on Fijian cannibalism as a widespread cultural practice ( Joyce 2001: 149–51) – was made of the conjunction of Fijian economies of response to incursion (or at least that of a few enterprising Fijians) and a Western fetish, which needs to “buy” into cannibalism to be satisfied, if only that its mechanisms of response have a basis.

88 Lines of fright

The “cite” of cannibalism in Typee: performing fear in Taipivai Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being reshaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal. J. M. Coetzee, Foe For if the enemy is us, analysis, however necessary, is not enough to found a practice of resistance. Fear, under conditions of complicity, can be neither analyzed nor opposed without at the same time being enacted. Brian Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear

Melville saw the kind of archive created by Wilkes’s Narrative, with its etchings of cannibal pots (Wilkes 1970: 3.105) and second-hand stories of feasts involving hundreds of bodies, credulously recounted as “fact,” as a false survey that validated an imperialist ontology. In Typee, Melville lampoons the relays that contributed to national “knowledge” production: There is a vast deal of unintentional humbuggery in some of the accounts we have from scientific men. . . . These learned tourists generally obtain the greater part of their information from . . . retired old South Sea rovers. . . . when the scientific voyager arrives at home with his collection of wonders, he . . . enters into a very circumstantial and learned narrative of certain unaccountable superstitions. . . . Were the book thus produced to be translated into the tongue of the people of whom it purports to give the history, it would appear quite as wonderful to them as it does to the American public. (Melville 1968a: 170) Like so much of the archive about Oceania filtering through whalers, traders, missionaries, and beachcombers – and absorbed into novels, paintings, exhibitions, newspaper articles, speeches in Congress, and sailing orders – Wilkes’s Narrative, with all its collateral scientific volumes and collections, challenged beachcomber-authors such as Melville (himself a barterer in Oceanian “knowledges”) to convey an alternative account of the meanings and settings of Euroamerican–Oceanian encounter to the “fatal embrace” he saw converting the “instinctive feeling of love” in Polynesian hearts into “the bitterest hate” (ibid.: 26). In a relatively carefree moment in Taipivai, Melville-Tommo asks, “Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals of whom I have heard such frightful tales!” (Melville 1968a: 203). The answer, of course, is yes: the cannibals he posits are directly out of the “frightful tales” circulating from juvenile literature into scientific discovery narratives and back. Melville’s serio-comic “anxious desire” in the preface “to speak the unvarnished truth” is genuinely anxious in the way it

Lines of fright 89 mockingly situates itself within the cliché of asserted verisimilitude (the claim to tell a plain tale). Though Typee insists on the reality of “moderate” cannibalism as a Marquesan practice, Melville never witnessed cannibalism or heard or read a viable account of Taipi cannibalism. As Elizabeth Melville pointed out in 1901, more than fifty years after the fact, “Mr. Melville would not have been willing to call his old Typee entertainers ‘man-devouring,’ as he has stated that whatever might have been his suspicions, he never had evidence that it was the custom of the tribe” (quoted in Leyda 1951: 1.137). This assertion, as suggested in my abbreviated tour of Melville Studies (in the introduction), has been conveniently overlooked by nearly the entire Melville industry. The cannibalism in Typee, then, is imagined, tropic, and tellingly citational; from first to last Melville’s “cannibal talk” is a troubled and troublesome performance, unrelieved by attempts at humor, with the conventional single and delayed scene of witness fulfilling a generic requirement without exactly parodying it. From the moment of approach to Taipivai, where Melville references Crusoe’s panicky discovery of the footprint – “Robinson Crusoe could not have been more startled at the footprint in the sand than we were at this unwelcome discovery” (Melville 1968a: 44) – Melville acknowledges that he is following well-worn textual footsteps, both to confess their imaginative hold and to show where they lead. Crusoe builds elaborate defenses because of his “apprehensions on the account of a man’s foot” and refers to “the life of anxiety, fear, and care which I had lived ever since I had seen the print of a foot in the sand.” In the penultimate “seen” in Typee, Melville again recalls Crusoe, as if to acknowledge that Defoe’s manner of clustering fear words to simulate panic attack (in which fear rebounds with a vengeance) had a powerful impact on the whole phantasmal discourse of cannibalism (Defoe 1972: 170, 200). One could argue (from word clusters, syntax) that Crusoe informs textual “cannibalism,” from the journals of Cook and Wilkes to the fiction known as Robinsoniads or “literary Crusoeism.” Melville’s citations are part of a mimicking mode that attempts to “incite” from within. Geoffrey Sanborn argues in his meticulous tracking of these “cannibal” citations that Melville deploys a pedagogic, ironic sequence that makes him an “electrifyingly postcolonial writer,” and that “the only reason Melville identifies himself with the Orientalist desire of his readers is so that he can bring them to see, in the failure of his voyeuristic desire, the failure of theirs” (Sanborn 1998: 73, 79). In my own reading, Typee is messier. Melville approaches the “postcolonial” in his awareness of his limitations while attempting to inhabit the archive as an autoethnographic subject, who at once asserts and compromises his own authority. This method of embodied deconstruction, at times bordering on recklessness and irresponsibility, discloses how its collations, assessments, and literary surveying of discourses may end up working as collusions. With its inventories of the prior descriptions of cannibalism, Melville suggests the pressures cite places on sight, the ways that citationality confesses a moment of contingency in perception, or the difficulty of maintaining distance from a heritage of fear. Typee is full of minor, nervous, slippery parodies that place all mention of cannibalism in conspicuous scare quotes, but often collapse toward their sources, sometimes unconsciously

90 Lines of fright (given the sometimes random raiding of the archive). If, as Taussig argues, “parody is where mimesis exposes construction” (Taussig 1993: 68), this depends on the audience knowing the distortions of the original (Oceanian cultures) in a prior representation, or of the audience’s being in a position to make differentiations of the parody from its sources (textual and material). As suggested in my reading of Poe, parody of American Pacificist sources generally founders on this point (however directioned) and becomes a place where an author’s care and construction may be exposed as failing in the public sphere. In Melville’s case this may be because structures of belief were deeper than parody could cleanse, and because the difficulties Melville creates for even Melville scholars motivated enough to do the research are so numerous that they potentially function as obfuscation or camouflage. A look at some of the scaffolding Melville uses for the construction of his required “seen” of cannibalism suggests some of the complexities of claiming an orderly parodic method. The most notable of these is David Porter’s Journal, which Tommo says he has not “met with,” although Typee follows Porter’s routes in Taipivai and his (mis)spellings of words and places (Edwards 2003). Like Porter, Tommo professes the difficulty of connecting his preconceived notions about the Taipi as cannibals to the kindness they show him. Porter cannot “reconcile [cannibalism] with the generosity and benevolence which were the leading traits of their character. . . . There must have been some misconception” (Porter 1822: 323). Melville then echoes Porter’s conventional suggestion of information withheld as stepping up the suspicion of cannibalism and the desire both to witness and to “be spared the horror of witnessing” (Melville 1968a: 233). When Porter, “desirous of clearing up . . . a fact so nearly concerned with the character of a whole people,” comes across Taipi attending to slain bodies, the Taipi are “thrown into the utmost confusion; the dead bodies were in an instant snatched from the place where they lay, and hurried to a distance among the bushes.” Porter recalls how his “blood recoiled with horror at the spectacle I was on the point of witnessing” and how he “told them that I was apprehensive that they intended to eat them” (Porter 1822: 335). Charles Stewart likewise describes a scene in which the Taipi seem to be concealing something. His guide, who has been carrying him on his back, as KoryKory will carry Tommo, manifest[s] some uneasiness, and [says], “let us return.” . . . On asking why? the only answer I could get . . . from the guide was, “kakino!” “It is bad!” as he hastened me forward, in evident apprehension till we came in sight of the ship. . . . I have not yet learned the cause of anxiety expressed by my conductor. (Stewart 1970: 1.323–4) What Porter saw was a mortuary rite, in which “skulls are carefully preserved and hung up in their houses” (Porter 1822: 337–8), and this is what Tommo glimpses when he solves the mystery of “taboo” (to him) packages: “Several times I had asked Kory-Kory to show me their contents; but my servitor, who in almost every

Lines of fright 91 other particular had acceded to my wishes, always refused to gratify me in this.” One day when he returns unexpectedly his arrival seems “to throw the inmates of the house into the greatest confusion. . . . The evident alarm the savages betrayed filled me with . . . an uncontrollable desire to penetrate the secret so jealously guarded.”10 Forcing his way into the house, Tommo catches “a glimpse of three human heads,” which are immediately taken as evidence for cannibalism: “Was the same doom reserved for me? . . . to be devoured, and my head to be preserved. . . . My imagination ran riot in these horrid speculations” – a paroxysm echoing Crusoe’s claim that “terrible thoughts racked my imagination.” After a Taipi battle, he is convinced that “the savages were about to celebrate some hideous rite . . . at which they were determined I should not be present.” The next day this anticipation is satisfied: Although the chiefs try to block his view of the remains of their “inhuman feast,” Tommo catches a glimpse: “The slight glimpse sufficed; my eyes fell upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging from them here and there!” (Melville 1968a: 232, 233, 236, 238). The language echoes Crusoe, who saw “great pieces of flesh left here and there, half-eaten, mangled and scorched,” and discovery scenes in Wilkes, Coulter, Cook, and others.11 In building his “witness” around references, Melville suggests how the marketconscious and phobic nineteenth-century discourse of cannibalism absorbs, conflates, and refigures literary, non-fiction, scientific texts into a fearful generic form. In many accounts the “seen” of cannibalism appears obligatory, or staged in response to market demands (Evelev 1992). Melville does not seem to stand at a conventional parodic distance from these forms, and his stance is further complicated by the cruxial split nearly all Melville criticism assumes between two narrators, “the author at the time” (Melville 1968a: 2) or Tommo, held captive in Taipivai, and Melville, who escaped to tell the retrospective tale. “Postcolonial” readings of Typee are often based on the gap between the impressionable, experiencing sailor, imprisoned by preconceptions, and the maturing, subversive writer. Thus, in distancing himself from Tommo’s errors, and through analyzing the sources of Tommo’s false consciousness, Melville is lauded for turning antebellum discourses inside out: “Between the facts in Typee and the narrative of Typee, Melville interposes the distancing process of perception and preconception” (Samson 1990: 24). In my reading, holding rigorously to such a split as ordered and pedagogic pushes apologetics to the limit. Not only is Melville freed of accountability for any errors in representing the implied “real” behind, between, and around his parodies, but he is credited with a consciousness that allows him preemptively to answer any charge against him precisely in the manner that a postcolonial critic would have it answered. All contradictions in his text become pedagogic parodies rather than fissures that catch his ambivalences; Melville can do no wrong. Alternatively, Alex Calder suggests a Melville who at times achieves a distinctive mode of moving within cultural interstices: “Melville has a style of not knowing, and it is a style in which things can be said.” The “said” is not statement, but a placing into relation of cultural metaphors, a poetics of relation that liberates

92 Lines of fright readers from the inadequacies of positing outsider models as rigidly opposed to insider models of culture (Calder 1999: 27). Melville’s critique of the ideologically saturated discursive formation out of which he writes might be located, initially, in such a “beachcomber” style, which undermines the rationale of colonial thinking by worrying the rhetorical separation of cultures without recognizing the difference that genealogy makes. My own sense of the rhythm of Typee is of an alternation between parodic reenactments of fear-driven mimesis (interrupted inhalation, with dramatic catches) and Calder’s “beachcomber” style (an exhalation, part sigh of relief, that opens the imagination to fuller perception). The beachcomber style itself, however, seems multiply split, containing a quality that reaches most readers, unfortunately, in its touristic aspect, in which Fayaway, the landscape, the “state of nature,” provide the “perfect freedom from care and anxiety” (Melville 1968a: 86). The flip side of this is Melville’s apprehension of the destructive national telos. Against this bifurcation, the beachcomber mode finds in flashes of similarity or relation a vision that estranges formalized notions of culture, and that holds within it a sense of awe for the world as Other to the culturally coded and limiting signifying systems through which it must be apprehended. This is a kind of (anti)mimesis that catches what Walter Benjamin would call the “echo” of the translated or observed referent into the seams of sentences (Benjamin 1963: 263). For Michael Taussig the wonder of this type of mimesis “lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume character and that power. In an older language, this is ‘sympathetic magic’” (Taussig 1993: xiii). Of course, the modes of mimesis (or ways of relating [to] the world) sketched above are only provisionally separable, as the first kind of mimesis anchors the second, which is in turn repetitively recalled to the first’s ethnologizing procedures. Thus for all his warmth toward the Taipi and exuberance when his fear abates, for all the carefree moments when, “In [an] altered frame of mind, every object that presented itself to [his] notice in the valley struck [him] in a new light” (Melville 1968a: 126), the interface with manners and inexplicable taboos shocks his nervous system. While maximally appreciative readings of Melville on intercultural engagement concentrate on the moment of sympathetic magic (insight-full), this chapter thus foregrounds the parodic (incite-full), in which Melville identifies blockages within the structure of a fear environment, which generate ignorance effects. My emphasis is based on a sense that, if apprehending traumas to his nervous system caused by Taipian signifying codes includes for Melville a sense of fear as a magical door to places beyond the ironic, interior critique, it is not clear that what he has given readers in Typee is enough for them to follow. In his own time readers chose to follow the touristic vision. In our time it is the critique of Euroamerican colonization that Melvilleans emphasize. Both of these directions evade the text’s enactment of fear and ignorance, and the ethical problematics of such a self-consuming performance as a narrative “method.” When Melville refers to Tommo’s having been “consumed” by “fearful apprehensions,” that is, the edgy puns literalize a link between cannibalism, fear, and the difficulty of Tommo sustaining the direct, sensuous insight into Taipi culture that

Lines of fright 93 his experience intermittently affords him. Tommo’s apprehension (perception, understanding) is shown as coterminous with his apprehension (presentiment, anticipated misfortune) and ability to apprehend (capture in words) the enata (people, the men of the land [I follow Greg Dening in using “enata,” though contemporary Nuku Hivans use “enana”]) of Taipivai. Rather, his own perceptual faculties are apprehended (arrested, immobilized) and are thus “fearful” in that they are temporarily and irrationally stationary in maintaining stereotypes. To be consumed in this sense is to be (pre)occupied within semiotic grids of fear. “Knowledge” and fear are repeatedly spliced together in the term apprehension, and these apprehensions are represented as obsessive and consumptive, the mind eating away at its own resources. Melville strains to contain these fears within puns, but his genial humor – the triumph of time and distance over fear – only pickles the memory of panic, signaling ways in which past apprehensions continue to haunt his imagination: In looking back to this period, and calling to remembrance the numberless proofs of kindness and respect which I received from the natives of the valley, I can scarcely understand how it was that . . . my mind should still have been consumed by the most dismal forebodings, and have remained prey to the profoundest melancholy. It is true that . . . kind and respectful as they were to me, [they] were . . . nothing better than a set of cannibals. (Melville 1968a: 118) These lines admit a gap between Taipi hospitality and Tommo’s experience, asserting that Tommo’s gaze was consumed by conceptions projected into the future and read onto the present. Within his semiotics of fear, Tommo differentiates between feelings he controls tactically (“assuming a tranquil and cheerful demeanor, to allay suspicions”) and those that get the better of him. He “cannot call to mind [aspects of his experience] without shuddering” and recalls “virtually unmanageable terrors” that, three years after his “deliverance,” he scarcely understands (ibid.: 144, 53, 170). As Walter Herbert puts it in his detailed reading of Melville’s “critical ambivalences,” Tommo at times speaks “as a man ravaged by the terrors that his preconceptions inspired” (Herbert 1980: 156, 157). This is to suggest that Melville performs with a nervous retrospective humor that nothing could have allayed his “cannibal” fears; the greater the kindness shown Tommo, the more a side of him would suspect the Taipi. Tommo is “too familiar with the fickle disposition of savages” not to want to escape “that fearful death which, under all these smiling appearances might yet menace” (Melville 1968a: 97). This “guaranteeing the identity of [the cannibal] through all counterfactual situations” is, in Slavoj Žižek’s words, “the retroactive effect of naming itself: It is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of the object” (Žižek 1989: 49). This is so in Taipivai because, as Melville writes of the Taipi, erroneously following Porter (who follows Columbus’s mistranslation of a tribal name into a practice), “the word ‘Typee’ in the Marquesan dialect signifies a lover of human flesh” (Melville 1968a: 24). Thus, echoing Stewart (their “very name seemed to be

94 Lines of fright a watchword of terror” [Stewart 1970: 1.223]), Tommo admits, “the very name of Typee struck a panic into my heart” (Melville 1968a: 51). “You see how dangerous they are?” the discourse claims. “It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind the mask of everyday appearance – and it is exactly this hiding of one’s real nature, this duplicity, that is the basic feature” of the cannibal nature (Žižek 1989: 49). In other words, “the network of illusions that make up an ideology” holds the perceiver when contradictory phenomena confirm it. A cannibal is one who is “stigmatized with the signifier” of a cannibal: “All the phantasmic richness of the traits supposed to characterize [cannibals] is here to conceal the fact that [cannibals] are not like that . . . not the empirical reality” but “a purely structural function” (ibid.: 99). The behavior of posited cannibals matters little: every generous action steps up suspicions. If the cannibal feeds you, he may be fattening you: “For what do you suppose the devils have been feeding us up in this kind of style,” Toby says, “unless it were for something that you are too much frightened to talk about?” (Melville 1968a: 94). Not surprisingly, Tommo wonders why, after a battle in which a Happar has been killed, the Taipi do not “bring away materials for the cannibal entertainment which [he has] heard usually terminated every engagement?” “After all,” Tommo concludes, “I was much inclined to believe that such shocking festivals must occur very rarely among the islanders, if, indeed, they ever take place” (ibid.: 130, my emphasis). Tonally, the passage enacts a perverse mixture of disappointment and relief. Tommo confesses “a sense of regret at having hideous anticipations disappointed.” His “morbid curiosity” (Melville 1968a: 128, 237) battles a wish to “be spared the horror of witnessing,” in the process producing grammatical shudders and slips. He says he “was inclined” to believe cannibalism never took place, and thus should write took, but instead he writes take, intruding the retrospective narrator’s perspective. This narrator should not doubt whether such events take place, since a few pages earlier he has used the future tense to prepare the reader for his eyewitness account: Although the assurances which the Typees had often given me, that they never eat human flesh, had not convinced me that such was the case, having been so long a time in the valley without witnessing anything which indicated the existence of the practice, I began to hope that it was an event of very rare occurrence, and that I should be spared the horror of witnessing it during my stay among them; but, alas! These hopes were soon to be destroyed. (ibid.: 233) In short, Melville has already “seen” yet he withholds the “ocular proof,” inserting a muddled and seemingly self-serving account of the problem of trusting anything but eyewitness. “In all our accounts of cannibal tribes,” Melville writes, we have seldom received the testimony of an eye-witness to the revolting practice. The horrible conclusion has almost always been derived either from the second-hand evidence of Europeans, or else from the admissions of the

Lines of fright 95 savages themselves, after they have in some degree become civilized. The Polynesians are aware of the detestation in which Europeans hold this custom, and therefore invariably deny its existence, and, with the craft peculiar to savages, endeavor to conceal every trace of it. (ibid.: 234) The passage performs the twisted logic of a whole discursive field. Natives who confess cannibalism are not only influenced by European contact but have to some degree renounced prior ways as part of performing that they are now civilized. Unregenerate natives are posited as craftily anxious about offending European taste, an ability to conceal “every trace of it” characterizing their craft. In effect, in the absence of witness by a white man, native statements are assessed on the basis of the auditor’s desires and convictions. (In these senses it is hard to know how to assess the statement “On the Eating of Men” written to his missionary teacher by Ta‘unga, describing the irrepressible “craving for human flesh” [Ta‘unga 1974: 90]). The avoidance of speculation about confessions and denials, or even about the reasons for his own “captivity,” betray a willful ignorance about indigenous agency and colonial resistance. Tommo stresses that the Taipi dwell on the “cannibal propensities” of the Happars in ways that they are “perfectly aware could not fail to alarm” him (Melville 1968a: 138, 102). But Tommo fails to pursue possible complexities of native theatricality – the splendid mimicry of Kory-Kory seizing “the fleshy part” of Tommo’s “arm in his teeth” in describing Happar behavior – or the possibilities of feigned denials and confessions. Maybe accusing others or hiding practices offensive to strangers proves useful in seeking influence with strangers who might later aid in intertribal conflict, as happened with Porter. As Greg Dening notes, “Enata owned beachcombers as they owned their muskets and their clothes. . . . If they thought they might be leaving, they kept them away from ships” (Dening 1980: 137). Perhaps the Taipi hold Tommo as a potential translator and negotiator, or because they hope to barter him to ship captains for muskets, cash, or other desired items, as happens in several places in Typee. (The $5 paid for Tommo seems standard. In the treaties that Wilkes established in Samoa, Fiji, and Tahiti, that is the agreed upon amount for returning beachcombers to their ships, with an additional $3 going to the chief.) Tommo moralizes “upon the disadvantage of having a bad name” (Melville 1968a: 129), but maybe the enata encourage ao (strangers) to read denials as confessions, since at this historical moment, when France was establishing its colonial grip, being considered avid cannibals was decided on as an effective deterrent. Throughout the book, the Taipi will interrogate Tommo for information concerning the movements of the “Franee,” or French, and express disappointment at Tommo’s ignorance about their designs. Tommo–Melville arrived in the Marquesas not to find natives in a “state of nature,” but natives in a death struggle with colonial forces whose designs they well understood and countered innovatively. Within twenty years, their populations decimated, they would be staging massive death dances. Against these processes,

96 Lines of fright Melville may make the Taipi into “noble savages” as a means of attacking ignoble civilized people (White 1978), or he may parody the exoticist views of his audience, but such polemics – authorizing itself through citation – seem problematic at best. Melville might as easily have followed available sources that presented alternative versions of exchange. For instance, Hiram Paulding, from whom Melville appropriates many details, suggests that, just a few years earlier, the conventional accusations of cannibalism against neighboring tribes was a means of securing trade and inter-tribal advantage: “the Typee, and Happah” were “mutually trying to prejudice us against the tribe to which they did not belong, in order to induce us to anchor in their own bay” (Paulding 1831: 34). Paulding’s description of this performance and the representation of Taipi speech closely resembles the initial encounter of Toby and Tommo with the Taipi, but his account of the arrival of the Dolfin on the beach of Taipi contrasts with the versions (re)constructed in Typee, as does Melville’s descriptions of the Taipi desire to avoid exchange with whites. In Paulding, far from driving off all foreigners: “Nothing could equal the apparent joy of the natives when they saw us anchored in front of their village. The whole tribe . . . flocked down to the beach, expressing their satisfaction by dancing and singing” (ibid.: 35–6). Melville’s choice of citations stresses the loss of such joyful exchange to colonialism, while recognizing the dangerous power of the cultural nervous system to stay tantalizingly, in Taussig’s words, “a jump ahead” (Taussig 1992: 2). By alternatively emphasizing a paradise lost and the basis for cultural collision in perceptual failures and fear-driven arrogance, Melville conveys his sense of futility at maintaining any single or clear strategy for indicting the violence of the emerging Euroamerican presence in Oceania of which he was a reluctant participant, swimming against the current but often brought back by the tide. Typee is itself part of colonialism. Its exoticist assertion that in (pre)contact Taipivai the “history of a day is the history of a life” (Melville 1968a: 144) rings with false schematicism in the course of his critique of the colonial process. The placement of the “seen” of cannibalism in Typee cannot help but function, narratively, to justify the book’s subsequent single act of on-stage violence, Tommo’s piercing of MowMow’s throat (or organ of speech) with the boat-hook. As in Wilkes’s Narrative, first comes the “seen” of cannibalism and then comes violence. Whatever the range of parodic intentions of Melville’s description – and part of it was to titillate (while ribbing) his readers – it is Tommo–Melville as much as anyone who has (parodically or not) stuck Marquesans with the “sign of the cannibal.” Typee, in other words, confesses the impossibility of coming clean or being cleansed by irony (Otter 1999: 44) and performs with dubious control Melville’s contribution to the blotting of native speech.

4

A poetics of relation Friendships between Oceanians and U.S. citizens in the literature of encounter

That which you wish, take it. Come away to my house. Don’t be vexed. I will give it to you. What are you pondering in your mind? Tell it me, for I am pleased with your talk. Marquesan lesson as recorded by Willowdean Handy

Friendship as a discourse My friend bid me not to fear, that these people were his particular friends. Edward Robarts, The Marquesan Journal

If a discourse of fear underwrites the construction of founding “seens” in the American Pacific archive, generating lines of fright and exacerbating tensions on the beach, accounts and attestations of friendships between Euroamericans and Oceanians hold out the promise of a powerfully regenerative and countering moment. Where fear inaugurates chains of misperception and distrust, friendship promises opportunities for fresh perception and a widened syntax of being. The discourse of friendship that develops in the archive and takes on a life of its own thus accumulates power to inform affective response, experience, and alter the course of bound-together history. If fear intensifies the visitor’s need to perform “civilized” differences from “primitive” hosts and their practices, or to be compulsively concerned with making an impression and fashioning an image, intercultural friendships in Oceania offer alternatives to what Gayatri Spivak calls an “abject script” (Spivak 1990: 62). What Greg Dening argues of intercultural study, that it is often “the vitality as much as the fatality that needs to be explained and described” (Dening 1992: 4), seems well explored through a consideration of forms U.S. citizens and Oceanians adapted for being together intimately, or seeming to be. Representations of friendships perform – with varying degrees of self-consciousness, or empty rhetoric, or erotically charged and veiled language – a commentary on the vitality, risks, poetics, erotics, politics, and material conditions of relation among Islanders and Euroamericans. No single trope holds the nineteenth-century U.S. imagination as tenaciously as or provides a better index of the split workings of that imagination and its mixed

98 A poetics of relation desires vis-à-vis Oceania, than the pervasive binary by which Islanders are categorized as feared or friendly, whether as individuals or representatives of “Cannibal islands” (New Zealand and the Marquesas, then Fiji, and finally the Solomon Islands), “Savage Island” (Niue) – savage because Niueans would not allow Cook to land – or “Friendly Isles” (Tonga). This bifurcated view has a material base. Along with accounts of “outrageous massacre” are stories of Oceanian kindness toward visitors – of astounding generosity – including the integration of beachcombers or shipwrecked sailors into positions of power within their cultures. Fear and friendship thus comprise poles of the discursive continuum along which Euroamericans anticipate and/or retroactively organize their relations with Oceanians. At a base level within Pacificisms, to the degree that fear ceases, a generalized state of friendship and exchange prevails. Recurrently in the archive, “friends” are those from whom there is nothing to fear. A measure of the excess and idealization of friendship that flares up in early encounter narratives stems from relief of care and anxiety. The problems of representing such island hospitality, however, disclose deeper desires within Pacificisms, including fantasies of purer emotional forms of relation across race, class, and gender boundaries, as suggested in the lines from “The Dream” by Bounty sailor Peter Heywood in 1790 in Tahiti: “Sure friendships there, and gratitude and love / Such as ne’er reigns in European blood” (quoted in Edmond 1997: 68–9). The dream of “sure friendships,” of course, took on the fantasy structure that it did in part because, for a range of purposes, Euroamericans were often extravagantly welcomed by Oceanians. To some degree this resulted from what Randie Fong terms an ideology of ho‘okipa, which can roughly be translated as “hospitality”: indigenous “behaviors and practices which are tied to native perspectives of life and how the world works” (Fong 1994: 96), that included traditional senses of obligation to receive strangers generously. It was felt in ka¯hea (greeting calls), gifts, dances, performances, welcoming songs, and unmistakably alluring gestures of excitement that journals recorded. Oceanians who sailed on foreign ships and resettled around the world carried and circulated (if in modified forms) their own ideologies of relation, especially the notion of bond-friendships and resource-sharing. Samuel Kamakau, arguing that ka¯naka (Hawaiians) on foreign soil best retain and express who they are by practicing ho‘okipa, cites Reverend James Hunewell Kekela on his arrival in Tahiti: “The Hawaiians living here saw us at once and came to welcome us with demonstrations of affection and have helped us in every way” (Kamakau 1992: 244). This followed the Hawaiian proverb “O ke aloha ke kuleana o ka¯hi malihini” (“Love is the host in strange lands” [Pukui 1983: 268]).1 To Euroamericans in a variety of contexts, Oceanian openness or capacity for apparently spontaneous giving, along with institutions of binding and structured friendship, became proverbial, part of the fantasy of South Seas adventure, and an implicit critique of Western affective restraints and inhibitions. “The Polynesians carry their hospitality to an amazing extent,” wrote Herman Melville in Omoo (Melville 1968b: 254) and, in Typee, “the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished

A poetics of relation 99 communities of Europe” (Melville 1968a: 202–3). While subject to a condescending idealization by Euroamerican audiences (who might regard what seem like impulsive affections as childlike forms of attachment), such friendships, whether conceived of and described as mutually beneficial alliances, often developed into professedly intimate relations that stepped up cultural exchange. Whether declarations of friendship “between” Islanders and Euroamericans ultimately reveal a genuine joining or mark a gap constitutes a textual crux. Friendship discourse is always potentially an empty sign of a space “between,” or of exploitative relations. In Hawaiian, one definition of ko¯lea – a term associated in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i with haole who, like the plover, fattened up off the land and then left – is given by Pukui and Elbert as “one who claims friendship or kinship that doesn’t exist.” Hence the image of haole (foreigners) who feign friendship, turn a profit, and then leave Hawai‘i leads to the ‘o¯lelo no‘eau, “‘Ai no ke ko¯lea a momona ho‘i i Kahiki,” which Pukui translates as “The plover eats until fat, then returns to the land from which it came,” and glosses, “Said of a foreigner who comes to Hawai‘i, makes money, and departs to his homeland to enjoy the wealth” (Pukui 1983: 12). Part of what spices and further complicates the discourse of friendship in Oceania is its veiled erotic quality, which recalls the fact that, since the age of exploration, for home readers expansion in Oceania was always imagined, at some level, as a “sexual event.” This might suggest that, among other things, vistas of alternative sexual possibilities as natural in Oceania may be as much occasions for polemical performances as descriptions of friendships. (In Charles Warren Stoddard, for instance, “friend” and “hospitality” are often cover words for homosexual lover, though Stoddard’s gauzy texts are so playfully convoluted that readers who want to do so can miss or redirect their suggestions.) In Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts/Modern Sexualities, Lee Wallace argues that, while South Seas islands were imagined as sites of “heterosexual pleasure,” in narratives of Oceania “it is the male body . . . not the female which provides the sexual vanishing point” (Wallace 2003: 1, 36–7).2 While this may be a revisionist insight in relation to European vision in the Pacific, in U.S. intercultural representation the emphasis on male bodies – and on what Leslie Fiedler problematically termed “innocent homosexuality” (Fiedler 1948) – is difficult to miss. Caleb Crain follows an established critical line in noting that “it is the rule, rather than the exception, that the canonical works of the American Renaissance have as their theme love between men” (Crain 2001: 152). One might add that most are interracial friendships that embody concerns about the possibility of genuinely democratic expression and extension. Amy Kaplan has argued that this eventuates, in moments of overseas expansion, in a double discourse of empire, based on a tension between the disembodiments of empire and the embodied American man (Kaplan 2002: 99; see also Nelson 1998). Representations of friendships in Oceania include this polemical sense of friendships as political in ways that do not necessarily mitigate against intimacy. On the beach friendships seem to have formed initially along rank lines, captains and officers with ali‘i and lesser chiefs, before-the-mast sailors with maka‘a¯inana

100 A poetics of relation (commoners), with each side quick to figure out who was who. Among captains and ali‘i, the relationship literally involves affairs of state, which were enhanced where intimacy developed. In describing the auspicious meeting between Vancouver and Kamehameha, for instance, Abraham Fournander stresses that the exchange of gifts (cattle and sheep, responded to by pigs and feathered cloaks and helmets) was followed by mutual “surprise and pleasure” in the other’s company so that “a sincere friendship sprang up between the two” (Fournander 1969: 336; Kamakau describes Vancouver as the “favorite foreigner of Kamehameha” [Kamakau 1992: 247, see also 164]). Underlying these unions were both the Oceanian and Western senses of friendship and fraternity as central to conceptions of the forms and functions of good government.3 For all his self-reliance, and his belief that friendship was a difficult ideal (“the friend is some floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific Seas”), Henry David Thoreau reflects mid-nineteenth-century Euroamerican theories of friendship in his belief that “a noble friendship . . . is the humanity which sweetens society, and sympathizes with foreign nations; for though its foundations are private, it is, in effect, a public affair and a public advantage, and the friend more than the father of a family, deserves well of the state” (Thoreau 1985: 213, 225). However, while always on some levels homologous with larger political structures, representations of intercultural friendships gesture toward aspects of relation – the personal, emotional stories – that are often absent from history. The forming of friendships among common people with initially different practices of sexuality and identity-construction, that is, and the intimacies that form across cultures, comprise a vital and largely neglected side of Euroamerican–Oceanian encounters that imaginative writers struggled to embody. This struggle involved finding narrative forms that observed the decorums of the market. There is much that cannot be told here that is registered in what Rod Edmond, speaking of relationships among missionaries and their native protectors, terms “the trope of preterition – the figure by which attention is drawn to something while professing to omit it” (Edmond 1997: 158). If the successful friendships recorded in U.S. journals and recoded in stories and novels compress – fleetingly and tenuously – the moment of radically different cultures filiating in creative, cooperative ways, they do so with all the complications of anything intimate, and from within, against, and around U.S. codes of relating masculinity. Imbricated as visitors are in the contexts in and from which they take cultural forms, friendships among Islanders and U.S. citizens – insofar as they can be classed “friendships” in both Islander and U.S. senses – suspend the anxious ethnocentricity, coded in binaristic and fetishistic discourses, that the nineteenthcentury U.S. archive seemed so invested in maintaining. At the same time, they extend U.S. ideas of friendship as binding men “without curtailing their liberty,” a process that Caleb Crain discusses as a pervasive antebellum investment in “sympathy” (Crain 2001: 5). That individuals can and do filiate across cultural boundaries throws a special light on the beach where they meet. The space reappears, in resonant topoi, as charged, charmed, richly performative, and permeated by apprehension, attraction, need, and endless problems in cultural translation.

A poetics of relation 101 As in all aspects of cross-cultural relations, translation is where colonial discourses most strongly reveal their fault lines, disposed as they are to translate indigenous categories into their own, seen as universalisms or “practical reason.” When untranslated, Euroamericans often describe gestures, practices, forms, dances, chants, and rituals in ways that valuably register indigenous culture, but without even attempting a deeper sense of seeing or understanding their meanings. In appreciating Islander–Euroamerican friendships, one assumes that they have multiple, potentially discrepant meanings. The very use of the word “friendship” threatens to flatten distinctions among a range of institutionalized and less formal Islander understandings of interpersonal, family, and clan relations. Some cultures do not have a word for “friendship” that would be distinct from a kinship relation. A dozen or so Hawaiian terms denoting quite distinct relations, ranging from general acquaintance to formal bond, are generally translated “friend.” These mistranslations are telling in that the condensation of forms into the single, pervasive form “friend” suggests a concentration on autos, or on an individual self that filiates or merges with an “other” (Aristotle’s two souls in one body) as the irreducible Western foundation for conceptualizing friendship. This recasting of relations as outside of social networks is often the strategy that U.S. storytellers use to recode U.S.–Oceanian relations. In the “classic” U.S. tradition intimate relations among men are ostensibly situated outside of delimiting socio-political norms, often in fugitive contexts. In contrast, as Handy and Pukui put it in The Family System in Ka‘u, “an individual alone is unthinkable, in the context of Hawaiian relationship” (Handy and Pukui 1998: 75). It is difficult to imagine an Oceanian work like the U.S. bestseller How to Become Your Own Best Friend. Rather, at least in the early period of encounter, “friendship” in Oceania takes specific forms not just because it establishes specific relations between a pair of selves – who are bound to respect and protect who the other is culturally – but because it inscribes the malihini into a network of relations.

Give and take: island forms and the narrative performance of friendships On the arrival of strangers, every man endeavored to obtain one as a friend and carry him off to his own habitation, where he is treated with the greatest kindness by the inhabitants of the district. William Ellis, Polynesian Researches

In his description of a 1791 stay in Palau, Captain Amasa Delano writes of a chief, Abba Thulle, who proposes that we should each choose a friend. We answered, that we intended to be friends to them all, and hoped that they would all be our friends. This did not meet his sentiments. He spoke to us of the pleasure, the peace, and the mutual safety

102 A poetics of relation which would arise from the kind of confidence required by their particular laws of friendship. (Delano 1994: 44) Readers of Melville’s Benito Cereno know that Delano is not reputed for “quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception,” but (or so) there is something representative in the ways that he inherits and inhabits a discourse within which natives are classed as hostile and feared or friendly and hospitable, and attempts to maintain Western terms of friendship, with their reserve and suspicion of hasty or orchestrated intimacy. Working through translators, Delano attempts to recode terms of intercultural friendships into categories he and his readers will recognize. However, Abba Thulle prevails, and in his terms of friendship pleasure is politically stabilizing and confidence an effect of laws of sociality. That a friendship is acknowledged as social, pragmatic, and political performance does not necessarily make it less intimate. Instrumentality is openly part of what constitutes friendship. To Delano, the proposal sounds overformalized, thus less than genuinely intimate. He seems bemused at facing not a child of nature, but a Native whose intimacy is calculated in multiple registers. Accounts such as Delano’s of particular friendships in Oceania as flexible acquiescence to native laws unsettle Western boundaries of friendship, and illustrate the complexity of reading Islander–Anglo friendships in terms of a conjunction of differing conceptions of philia, which too easily slip into overdetermined models of rigid Native custom vs. flexible Euroamerican practical reason (this is the core of the debate between Obeyesekere and Sahlins [see Li 2001]). However unreflectively, Delano exposes for reconsideration assumptions of classical friendship theory, which, in comparative contexts, appears as a severely restricted framework. These assumptions include the notions that friends in multiple senses speak the same language; that friendships necessarily develop over time within a shared cultural matrix among agents who share assumptions about the narrative structures friendships take; or that in friendship the autos is the basic element that, through uncoerced, unceremonious public expressions, is moved mysteriously to affiliate with another, who remains free to withdraw, unobligated; or that “a friendship is a kind of private shelter from the demands of the public” (Sharp 1986: 40). As Ronald Sharp argues, there is in U.S. “notions of friendship a puritanical suspicion of ritual,” “aversion to ceremony,” and a “romantic ideology of authenticity” that tries to “circumvent or explode forms in personal relationships.” For Sharp, the cost of formlessness in the general privatization of friendship is “a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the expectations and duties of friendship” (ibid.: 9, 13). In contrast, traditional Islander friendships, at least involving chiefs, included highly structured rituals and formal displays of reciprocity. Institutions such as e inoa (Marquesas) or the taio relation (Tahiti) often function like marriages in that they involved bond-ceremony, an exchange of names, and the establishment of extended kin and resource-exchange relations. Among the first two Islander terms Europeans recognized as central, Dening argues, was “tayo” (the other was “tapu”).

A poetics of relation 103 Spousal imagery often attends descriptions of Islander–Islander tayo and adoptive ceremonies in Euroamerican narratives. Espousals of friendship, that is, can be literally forms of marriage. (Like conjugal unions we can assume they varied in affectional content.) E inoa (name-exchange) filiates one not just to an other, whose understanding mirrors and completes the self, but through that other the one is incorporated within a network of relations. E inoa connects one, through the assumed name of the friend, to all aspects of the friend’s socially dispersed identity, including the tapu status on his head. Names were crucial, and to exchange them, as beachcomber Edward Robarts recognized in the Marquesas, was “the grand point of respect and protection towards a stranger” (Robarts 1974: 65), and was in his case an entry into a tapu class. Robarts’s editor, Greg Dening, writes: “Names were real symbols of the persons named, and to exchange a name, especially with chiefs, was to enter into a relationship whereby rights and obligations were exchanged with the name” (Robarts 1974: 22n.). The exchange involved ceremony, sometimes, as with the Missionary Crook, of considerable pomp, but it was not simply “ceremony or compliment”; rather, “In it they [enata] exchanged some part of their lives with its obligations and rules, with its status, authority, and relations. They would confidently call on others to see in them their new person” (Dening 1980: 104, 50). Robarts visited neighboring islands and tribes as an extension of his friend, in his friend’s name, and shared all aspects of his friend’s household. It was expected that he share conjugal rights, but in a decorous aside Robarts claims to have passed up his friend’s invitation.4 But while Robarts’s relation with Teinae was mutually useful, he repeatedly emphasizes his love, respect, and gratitude at being received in the name of his friend “more like a parent, a brother, or some near kinsman than an entire stranger. . . . these poor benighted people shews that hospitality not to be met with among a people who call themselves Christian.” The contrast between their “unequaled” hospitality and the violence Robarts like all Euroamericans observed in Marquesan culture, as if the two were parallel exorbitancies, is a theme of the journal: “I have often been amazed with these people, to experience their hospitality and see their Kindness one among another, and yet in their wars they have no mercy” (Robarts 1974: 55, 249, 258–9). Wilkes was conventional in his description of Islanders as “extremely changeable in their disposition. . . . [they] will at one moment appear to give themselves up to merriment, from which they in an instant pass to demon-like anger” (Wilkes 1970: 3.76). Clearly, Oceanian ways of expressing emotions, like the boundaries around sex and personhood, were drawn differently. Though he often modifies tapu, Robarts was integrated into Marquesan society, imbricated in a complex web of adoptive and name-exchange relations. In times of war, multiple affiliations left him positioned awkwardly between his namesakes’ families. “I told him I could never fight against a people that was my friends,” Robarts writes. “I respected each party too much to lift my hand against either” (Robarts 1974: 95). Partly for these reasons, he takes “leave of [his] dearest adopted relations with the greatest weight of sorrow. My heart, which some time before was like that of a lion, was now melted with the most tender feelings” (ibid.: 159).

104 A poetics of relation In contrast, what happens in accounts such as Delano’s is more openly improvised out of traditional Island categories, which include a desire for friendship and strategic alliance with those with the mana or technical means to be militarily useful or to contribute to prestige. Delano’s military support, it turns out, did aid Abba Thulle in defeating a neighboring tribe, as Kamehameha’s friendship with Vancouver facilited his efforts to unite the Islands. But if Delano’s description of his crew’s experience in Palau seems like a mass, arranged Moonie wedding, the point his text insists upon is that it works. Delano describes the friendships formed with Palauans as beneficial and sincere – as if the Palauans and his crew members had no preconceptions about the fabled tayo – denying that such “terms of friendships must have rendered it mercenary,” and remarking on the Islanders’ “remarkable fidelity in the engagements of friendships” (Delano 1994: 45). The Pacific archive contains numerous descriptions of great friendships springing up almost immediately upon the arrival of ships. Captain Bligh notes how, after a few days on shore in Tahiti, “an intimacy between the natives, and our poeple, was already so general, that there was scarce a man in the ship who had not his tyo or friend” (Bligh 1792: 67). Ships often stayed in the islands for extended periods, sailors regularly jumped ship, and ships recruited Islanders on a massive scale. The individual liaisons, whether or not initially formed en masse, often became powerful, with numerous records of Oceanians going to sea to be with their friends or making friends to gain a berth, and sailors integrating into island society, becoming pakeha maori or kama‘a¯ina haole. Among the difficulties in assessing “great friendships” is the scarcity of sustained narration of Islander–Euroamerican friendships, or of Islander narrators. With the exception of the oral sources, one is left primarily with journals, revised after the fact for publication, and thus drawn toward the voyeuristic conventions of travel narrative, with its tendency to romanticize/eroticize or demonize sensationally. Such “non-fiction” journals, in most cases written or prepared for publication after the return home, inform the structure of nearly every novel relating to Oceania. Whether in journals or imaginative fiction – and there is inevitably a two-way slippage between them that novels foreground – the brevity and modes of narrating Islander–U.S. friendships texts is so striking given the assertions of the intensity of the felt intimacy that they speak structured repressions. The dominant topoi are scenes of meeting and parting. Journals are full of accounts of the beginnings of friendships in spontaneous expressiveness (“he came to me and clasped [me] in his arms with so much unaffected joy” [Robarts 1974: 51]) and formal ceremony (presenting of gifts, symbolic green boughs or pigs) or awkward (to Euroamericans) rituals (honi [“rubbing noses”], embracing thighs, formalized chantings), and of Islanders’ seemingly excessive grief at parting. There is conspicuously little of the day-to-day personal interactions in between. There is in the retreat into ethnographic concentration on the extravagance of these retrospective scenes a sense of emotional confusion and awkwardness, suggesting that the eyes record to stay the heart’s reaction. There are aspects of what is felt that simply could not be narrated at the same moment that detail functions to validate

A poetics of relation 105 the narrative’s authenticity. (Validating ethnographic knowledge about Islanders, as Vanessa Smith argues, was always one possible Euroamerican motive for attesting to friendship with Islanders.) The liberation and license felt on the distant beach is blocked by anxieties about self-presentation (or textual self-fashioning) before an audience informed by antebellum race politics and decorums around narrating male friendship. In the context of nineteenth-century U.S. mores, it must be stressed, all relations with Islanders are before everything interracial relationships that comment on Anglo relations with Native or African Americans. Alternatively, texts bristle with racy hints, puns, and repeated references to Greek mythological figures (in particular Apollo and Adonis), and a nostaligic idealization that enables eros to be at once hidden and flaunted. Narratives guard against exploring or expressing feeling in emphasizing the Islanders’ combinations of unregulated emotion and formality, in the process transferring emotionality to the ethnographic act recorded. The texts project a choked desire to reciprocate in some culturally appropriate manner, expressible only from a distance, through a delayed reaction. They portray Oceanian societies as mysteriously ordered yet chaotic and wildly emotional, hierarchical but communal, and disruptive of Western binaries separating public and private spheres, friendship and sex. The scene of separation carries with it as well the force of a separation from the possibility of a certain life. The kind of life lived with the island friend will not be possible in the home society. So it is too easy for the narration of early encounter friendships to wind up dismissed in postcolonial criticism (with its predisposal toward reversals) as colonial stereotypes – natives forming spontaneous, devoted friendships or distraught at parting from whites. Often lacking a cultural context, postcolonial unmaskers of discursive violence have no frame beyond a retroactive reading back from the nostalgic, exaggerated colonial sidekick fictions of the imperial period, so the Islander’s acceptance of what seems a subservient position may be misread as an assertion of white superiority. Thus reading Fayaway’s and Kory-Kory’s tears at Tommo’s departure through reference to The Marriage of Loti – prototype for the colonial theme of “desertion” (Sumida 1991: 76) – seems limiting and condescending (however liberally meant), as does assuming that Fayaway’s whiteness must be Eurocentric fantasy (Robarts describes a Marquesan woman whose “skin [was] extreamly white and clear” [Robarts 1974: 73]). Kory-Kory and Fayaway may weep disconsolately on the beach, not because they worshipped whites, but because Oceanians did not feel any need to conceal their feelings at parting from those with whom they had formed emotive bonds. Rather, to express their grief was to publicly reaffirm a relation. If Oceanians sometimes knocked out their teeth, or tore their hair, or scraped their foreheads with shells, or joined in prolonged wailing at the departure of white visitors it was because they experienced that parting as a death. The ongoing cultural gap with Westerners on this point is emphasized by archeologist Robert Suggs, who describes contemporary Marquesan displays of feeling at parting for a long voyage as “not removed from that of a funeral” (Suggs 1962: 22–3).

106 A poetics of relation

Fatal embrace: the sickness of Dana’s hope I found poor Tom the Owyee man in a dying state. I stopt with him part of two days. He made several attempts to strangle himself, but I prevented him. When I left him he was all but dead. I could be of no good to him. Robarts, The Marquesan Journal When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the “big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters toward their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal Embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys. Herman Melville, Typee

The fatality of the beach for so many Oceanians, however, throws a pall over vital moments of exchange in the American Pacific archive. The general sadness or chill that brackets U.S. assertions of emotional closeness apprehensively registers the onset of colonial relations, and acknowledges that, real as friendships may be at the individual level, they are nested within relations disastrous to Islanders, within an economy of mourning entangled among discourses of inevitable indigenous decline (fatal impact) related to island generosity itself. In narrative after narrative of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “anti-conquest,” the very openness and hospitality of the Islanders is taken as a contributing factor to their undoing. The embrace with Euroamericans makes Oceanians sick. In classical friendship theory one mourns the loss of the friend in advance, anticipating it as the time when the friend can be differentiated from the self and friendship assessed. A number of classic Western meditations on friendship (Cicero, Montaigne, Derrida) are eulogies that acknowledge this dynamic. Parting scenes in Oceanian contexts in a sense redouble this structure. When the Euroamerican malihini leaves, generally without expectation of return, and the Island friend remains, textually speaking, weeping on the beach as an idealized memory, it is a kind of multiply registered death. It is as though the narrators are saying farewell to a mode of their own being, a way of relating to non-whites, and the seemingly unavoidable rupture and decline of indigenous lifeways to which their presence has contributed. Given the decorums that both keep discussions of friendship at a general, idealized level and invoke friendships for a range of tactical reasons – from investing the journal writer with ethnographic authority to asserting a personal basis for attacking colonialism or industrial civilization – the expression of what seems genuine intimacy is relatively rare, always retrospective, and more often found in jumbled forms in works of imaginative literature, where it might be considered, as Thoreau said of friendship, “the fact in the fiction.” The intimacy apparent in texts such as Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1841) clearly illustrates this general linkage of feeling and mourning. Dana lived with a group of Hawaiians in a hide-curing colony in San Diego and worked at learning Hawaiian language and customs, and his sporadic but effusive

A poetics of relation 107 references to a group of Hawaiian co-workers, and in particular one of them named Hope (allegedly after a ship he sailed on), resonate with a sense of mourning. As Caleb Crain describes it, this is in keeping with Freud’s sense of “a struggle between reality’s demand that love be withdrawn from an object that no longer exists and love’s resistance to giving up its object.” The separation, both actual and textual, requires a “bit-by-bit” parsing that involves a “line-by-line revision by an editor who forces you to cross out your favorite passages in a sentimental fiction that you wrote only for your own pleasure” (Crain 2001: 134, 135). As in so many of the classic texts on friendship, the time of loss, of mourning, is the time of intensity and assessment, encoding as it does the memory of what must now be absent. It memorializes a hope that offered itself before it was mediated by conventions of expression, that the author replays at the moment of writing. In Oceanian contexts, such moments are often connected to the epidemics that threaten native survival and the colonialism which all parties recognized as commodifying Island lifeways. As in so many fictionalized journals, the censored passages potentially play around questions of erotics and intimacy. For instance, Two Years omits references to sexual relations with Native Americans, which led to an ironic letter from a shipmate, Benjamin G. Stimson (Ben in the novel), who reminded Dana of “the beautiful Indian lasses, who so often frequented your humble abode in the hide house” (Dana 1968: 1.28 n. 45).5 Of his kanaka co-workers Dana recalls, they were the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted set of people that I ever fell in with. I felt a positive attachment for almost all of them; and many of them I have, to this time, a feeling for, which would lead me to go a great way for the mere pleasure of seeing them. (Dana 1964: 149) He admires in particular the Hawaiians’ “manner of treating each other,” which he describes as “a reproach to our own people. Whatever one has, they all have.” As an old Hawaiian, Mr. Bingham (whose teeth were knocked out by his parents as a sign of grief at the death of Kamehameha, and who was evidently named after the missionary Hiram Bingham) chastizes a Yankee trader, “We no all ‘e same ‘a you! – suppose one got money, all got money. You; – suppose one got money – lock him up in chest. – No good!” Within the warm sense of communal fellowship, organized around an abandoned oven popularly referred to as the O‘ahu Coffee House or Kanaka Hotel, Dana describes how Every Kanaka has one particular friend, whom he considers himself bound to do everything for, and with whom he has a sort of contract – an alliance offensive and defensive – and for whom he will often make the greatest sacrifices. This friend they call aikane; and for such, did Hope adopt me. I do not believe I could have wanted anything he had, that he would not have given me. In return for this, I was always his friend among the Americans. (Dana 1964: 151–2)

108 A poetics of relation (Melville echoes this in describing the brotherhood of sailors as “a league of offense and defense, a copartnership of chests and toilets, a bond of love and good feeling” [Melville 1970: 15].) At one point aika¯ne seems to have included the sense of homosexual – ai (coitus) joined to kane (man) – and referred to a class, otherwise heterosexual, that attended the ali‘i (chiefs). There are numerous recordings of this use of the word aika¯ne from Cook’s journals up through the 1820s, when Hiram Paulding (in the oddest recorded spelling) refers to Billy Pitt as the “high carnie, or great friend of Tamahamaha” (Paulding 1831: 199). Whether the relation was always sexual or not – and Handy and Pukui insist that, properly speaking, it never was – the ali‘i could choose multiple aika¯ne from maka‘a¯inana (commoners), for whom this might be a means of advancement (Handy and Pukui 1998: 73). In The Family System in Ka‘u, an aika¯ne relationship is described as a non-sexual but intimate same-sex friendship, stronger and more specific than hoa or hoaloha. However, Lilikala¯ Kame‘eleihiwa’s Native Land and Foreign Desires describes aika¯ne as the “male lover of an Ali‘i Nui” or “intimate sleeping companion” (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 47, 116–17). Clearly, in this instance, friendship forms partake of the socio-political situations in which they are defined, and it seems that, in Nietzsche’s terms, “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to vice” (Nietzsche 1964: 99).6 Whether in post-Christian contexts resonances of the old institutional sense in which Cook’s men documented the aika¯ne relationship remained, and whether or not Dana is aware of them, the model for Hope may use the word purposively, in ways that Dana’s text registers better than its author, not simply in regard to their relative rank within the racially coded world of nascent colonialism, but because, from an indigenous viewpoint, for a maka‘a¯inana to respect an “educated” haole such as Dana as someone with power to provide protection was culturally meaningful. His request that Dana remember to be kind to ka¯naka should he become an officer suggests both Hope’s acknowledgement of the wider context of colonial racism, in which haole will be officers without hope of such advancement for Oceanians, and his belief in the clarifying and emotionally based utility of Hawaiian friendship forms. It is noteworthy that it is Hope who “adopts” Dana – aika¯ne is an “a” class word, indicating that the speaker has a choice about the referent – in what is perhaps a metaphorical ho‘okama (adoption through affection) within their relatively isolated ‘ohana (family) on the California beach, and that Dana returns the feeling and commitment. While Hope cannot get the textual space that the emotional connection Dana asserts seems to warrant, that he gets as much as he does is uncharacteristic for the vocational novel genre, which presents a portrayal of an industry and industrial conditions, referencing rather than novelistically developing personal relations.7 Thus it may not be too much to suggest that Hope’s name allegorizes a sense of “hope” for the survival of modes of friendships and intercultural relations in the face of accelerating international commerce. Dana seems to give Hope an iconic status within the deeply personal one when he finds his friend wasting away with what is possibly a venereal disease: “It has been said, that the greatest curse to each of the South Seas islands, was the first man who discovered it; and every one who knows anything of the history of our

A poetics of relation 109 commerce in these parts, knows how much truth there is in this. . . . They seem to be a doomed people.” After a stint at sea Dana returns to the O‘ahu Coffee House to find sick ka¯naka lying around hopelessly without medicine, including he who “was my friend, and Aikane – Hope: . . . When I came in . . . he looked at me, held out his hand, and said in a low voice, ‘Aloha, Aikane! Aloha nui!’ I comforted him as well as I could” (Dana 1964: 242). (Perhaps Hope is saying “aikane aloha nui, or “dearly beloved friend,” as Martha Beckwith translates the phrase in Hale‘ole’s La‘ieikawai [Hale‘ole 1919: 30].) Dana is haunted by “his horrible suffering, and his apparently inevitable, horrible end” (as Ishmael will sit by the side of his “waning savage” when his “fast bosom-friend, Queequeg, [is] seized with a fever” [Melville 1988: 476], or Stoddard will hear in his bosom-friend Kana-Ana’s dirge “the death song of his tribe” [Stoddard 1905a: 69]). On each of his brief returns to the California encampment, Dana importunes ship captains (one openly racist toward “d--ng Kanaka”) for medicine for Hope, and before his final departure, having found a sympathetic captain who remembers Hope, he is able to bring ample medicine, after which Hope begins to recover. In recalling his last nights in California, Dana describes how his only regrets in leaving are separating from his “Kanaka friends,” since he has felt “an interest and affection for these men such as I had never felt before but for a near relation.” This resonates with an earlier paragraph when Dana describes how, “During the four months that I lived on the beach we were continually together. I really felt a strong affection to him, and preferred him to any of my countrymen.”8 When Dana finally leaves California he hears two old Hawaiians chanting “one of their deep monotonous songs, the burden of which I gathered to be about us and our voyage” (Dana 1964: 262, 242, 267), an example of indigenous oratorical forms (of mimicry and/or grief) in foreign settings.

Commerce, failed relation, and bosom friendship: Melville’s cruising of the American Pacific archive The Hawaiian people welcome the stranger freely; rich and poor, high and low give what they can. The strangers call this love ignorance and think it good for nothing. The love upon which they depend is a love based on bargaining. S. M. Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawai‘i

In any tradition, friendships are supposed to be useful to both parties, nonexploitative, and based on intimacy. That this seems more openly the case in some forms of Oceanian friendships appears to have been what stirred and stayed deepest with Euroamericans in their often idealized accounts. In addressing Dana in a letter written while writing Moby-Dick as a sea brother to whom he felt “tied and welded . . . by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy,” Melville responded to a hopeful vision, gleaned between Dana’s lines (Melville 1993: 153). The image resurfaces in the chapter “The Monkey-rope” in Moby-Dick, where Ishmael and

110 A poetics of relation Queequeg are “wedded . . . an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my inseparable twin brother” (Melville 1988: 320). As Robert Martin has argued, Melville sees Oceania as an exemplary place in which “male friendship is recognized and institutionalized” (Martin 1986: 38). In fact, it is openness to male friendship that signals and affords an openness to cultural difference, as well as proposing alternatives to aggressive masculinist codes. This quality of Melville’s would be appreciated and extended by Charles Warren Stoddard, whose texts often rewrite Melvillean moments into fey, homoerotic scenes. In my reading, from the start Melville’s Oceanian fiction faces that image of friendship against the emerging colonial archive and its bifurcating discourses of savagery and friendship. The protracted “escape” scene that begins Typee, with “The Important Question, Typee or Happar?,” might be read as a parody of the knowledges generated by the American Pacific archive: “the natives of Happar were not only at peace with Nukuheva, but cultivated with its inhabitants the most friendly relations, and enjoyed beside a reputation for gentleness. . . . On the other hand, the very name of Typee struck a panic into my heart.” The extremes are drawn out and exaggerated to parodic effect: “A frightful death at the hands of the fiercest of cannibals or a kindly reception from a gentle race of savages” (Melville 1968a: 50–1, 66). As the novel progresses, what at first seems like a reversal (the Taipi are actually friendly) is actually an invalidation of the inherited framework. The question of whether a tribe will prove friendly or hostile is not only not knowable in advance or an inherent characteristic of a tribe. Rather, it is a multiply constructed history, involving both the state of intertribal affairs prior to or as they are effected by incursion, and the interaction of Oceanians and Europeans, to which both groups bring preconceptions that develop dialogically. In context, that is, many phrases that critics have found remarkably “Melvillean,” such as bosom-friend, are not innovative or metaphorical so much as purposefully drawn from Oceanian institutions that are in the process of being refigured and consolidated within the archive. As suggested, Melville’s strategy is not to straighten out these distortions, or to attempt to reveal the “real” of native practices, but to appropriate and parody details for a variety of philosophical or polemical ends. However, in places Melville references specific Oceanian friendship forms that rebound back into a new ideal of white–white relationships throughout his fiction. One might in this sense posit that his flaming lines to the cooler Hawthorne – claiming an “infinite fraternity of feeling” – were an attempt to evoke the form of an “Oceanian Friendship.”9 When Tommo and Toby abruptly form their alliance it is described in terms of a fusion of Western handshaking and Marquesan name-exchange, with conjugal overtones: “we then ratified our engagement with an affectionate wedding of palms.” That Melville means the reader to see this is clear through the echoes when Tommo and Toby exchange names with Marheyo, “An exchange of names is equivalent to a ratification of good will” – and to the description of the nameexchange through which the “tabooed kanaka” Marnoo can enter Taipivai – “there are some instances where a person having ratified friendly relations with some individual belonging to the valley” may “venture with impunity into the

A poetics of relation 111 country of his friend” (Melville 1968a: 33, 72, 139–40). It should be noted, though, that during Tommo and Toby’s “name-exchange” ceremony “the greatest merriment prevailed,” which Tommo suspects is because “some of [the Taipi] at least were innocently diverting the company at our expense, by bestowing upon themselves a string of absurd titles, of the humor of which we were of course entirely ignorant” (ibid.: 72). In Omoo, Melville most explicitly discusses Polynesian friendship practices that have become debased and cynical as a result of colonialism, with Tahiti a precursor to the modern tourist cultures by which proverbial island hospitality is exploited. The fabled tayo institution has degenerated into a tour-guide arrangement, with Tahitians exploiting Euroamerican fantasies to con sailors out of their travel chests. As Charles Anderson shows, one Melville source for these reflections, John Turnbull’s Narrative, was at least thirty years old. A more contemporary precursor, Frances Olmstead, in Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (1841), humorlessly records both the perpetuation of bond-friendships (not necessarily same-sex, as, most visibly, between ship captains and female arii [chief] in Tahiti) and the corruption of the institution: There is a singular relationship subsisting among the Tahitians, called “Friends” which implies that individuals, whether of the same or opposite sex, conceiving a fancy for one another, unite in a covenant of inviolable friendship, which requires either party to assist the other in all emergencies, and to be faithful to his interests. This obligation also involves the necessity of frequent presents, a source of great annoyance to the foreign residents, happening to have a ‘friend,’ who has no hesitation in signifying his desire to possess any article belonging to the other that he may fancy, an appeal which must be complied with. (Olmstead 1969: 294)10 Melville more tactically emphasizes the degeneration of the institution as crudely connected to colonial relations. Through a series of cruisy scenes, Tahitians are presented as using tayo-like port-hustlers (or guides) peddling mock-friendships. For Robert Martin, “the corruption of friendship by money stands synecdochically for the experience of colonial encounter. The establishment of intense male friendships manifested in a vanished Eden is Melville’s gesture toward an anticolonialism that is always already lost” (Martin 1998: 190–1). After making assessments of a sailor’s wealth, Islanders compete with each other to befriend him: since the narrator finds Kooloo “a comely youth, quite a buck in his way,” the narrator “accepted his overtures,” after which the other candidates for his affections leave him alone, since, “though little inclined to jealousy in love matters, the Tahitian will hear of no rivals in his friendship.” After “sponging” the narrator and his friends, however, the “tayos” begin to “cool off quite sensibly,” and Kooloo falls “in love at first sight” with a sailor “flush from a lucky whaling-cruise” (Melville 1968b: 157–8). However, against the jumbled, parodic scenes of colonial Omoo, Melville retains a sense of what friendships could mean:

112 A poetics of relation The really curious way in which all the Polynesians are in the habit of making bosom friends at the shortest possible notice, is deserving of remark. Although, among a people like the Tahitians, vitiated as they are by sophisticating influences, this custom has in most cases degenerated into a merely mercenary relation, it had its origin in a fine, in some instances, heroic sentiment, formerly entertained by their fathers. In the annals of the island are examples of extravagant friendships . . . entertained at first sight for some stranger from another island. Filled with love and admiration for the first whites who came among them, the Polynesians could not testify the warmth of their emotions more strongly, than by instantaneously making their abrupt proffer of friendships. Hence, in the old voyages we read of chiefs coming off from the shore in their canoes, and going through with strange antics, expressive of this desire. In the same way, their inferiors accosted the seamen; and thus the practice has continued in some islands down to the present day. (Melville 1968b: 152) The passage suggests Melville’s lifelong fascination with the rare phenomenon, which he associates with the classical era and its more fluid sense of eros, of abrupt relationship based on mutual recognition, his emphasis on beginning with the archive, here island “annals” and narratives of the “old voyages,” and his lighthanded parodic method of undermining the Western self-aggrandizing and gullible simplification of Polynesian “love and admiration.” The passage implies, however, not simple nostalgia for the days of the “old voyages” (less than seventy years past vis-à-vis Oceania, but feeling to Melville remote in relation to the altered present around him), but a sense that the continuities between past and present indicate that there was always a canny tacticality about friendships with Euroamericans, and that intercultural friendships remain emblematic, for better or worse, of the state of intercultural relations. In Typee, friendship was an attractive counter-category to fear, but was not itself free of fear, including a fear that desires may be met. Through the Queequeg– Ishmael marriage in Moby-Dick, however, Melville embraces the site of his previously dramatized fears. He rejects the parodic idioms of Typee, confronting an audience who celebrate him as “the man who lived among cannibals” with the literal image of a “good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church” in a “hearts’ honeymoon . . . a cozy, loving pair” with an Oceanian cannibal (Melville 1988: 52). In this context, the Queequeg–Ishmael relationship reads as a filling in and drawing out of the archive’s implications and radical but abused possibilities. Melville says what writers such as Delano and Dana and his own earlier works could not or would not, that the “stiff prejudices” of his culture may become “elastic” when “love comes to bend them.” If Queequeg’s selling of “embalmed heads” literally references the Maori trade in skulls and the colonial economies behind them, his sharing of the proceeds with Ishmael suggests an economy based on feeling and fraternity (mercantilism takes a back seat to friendship). Queequeg’s first act after accepting Ishmael’s “overtures” is to give his new friend the remaining “embalmed head,” along with half of the

A poetics of relation 113 proceeds from selling the others. Ishmael reciprocates by using Christian principles (echoing Native-American preacher William Apess) against Christian practice to rationalize joining Queequeg at worshipping his phallic pagan idol, Yojo (O Joy in reverse, as Leslie Fiedler notes). Melville’s dramatization of Queequeg and Ishmael’s marriage, that is, shapes specific aspects of Oceanian friendships into topoi of intercultural relations, the opposite of the self-destructive, narcissistic stasis represented by the isolato, Ishmael’s desperately alienated outlook at the outset of the novel. Ishmael describes Queequeg’s motives in going to sea as a desire to learn about the West in order to “gain the power of enlightening countrymen. For at bottom . . . he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were” (Melville 1988: 18, 19, 56), a motive adopted by young chiefs who sailed to European capitals, and, like the chiefly Queequeg, were treated as common sailors and too rarely returned to be tribal leaders (as did the famous Maori chief Hongi). Ishmael’s theatrical panic before the “cannibal” parodies preconceptions about Islanders, and is finally dispelled by the embarrassed recognition that Queequeg “treated [him] with so much civility and consideration, while [he] was guilty of great rudeness.” “Ignorance” has been “the parent of [his] fear,” and when he really looks at Queequeg he begins to be “sensible of strange feelings” and a “melting” within him (ibid.: 27, 21). The abrupt movement between an attraction and friendship that openly includes both eros, a division of goods, and instrumentality – with its repeated homoerotic valences – violates with concise and precise force the decorums of Melville’s society, exposing the constructions of its institutionalized exclusions and relating them to the nation’s expansionist principles. This requires ignoring the people in Nantucket streets who are shaken not by the familiar sight of Queequeg, but by the implications of him and Ishmael appearing “upon such confidential terms.” In contrast, implying some regularity of such matings, fellow whalers are “amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up” between them. In that sharing relationship, Melville stresses, utility compliments the underlying emotional connection. Ishmael “joyously assent[s]” to Queequeg’s suggestion that they “mess” together and “share every hap,” admitting that, “besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg,” as an “experienced harpooner” the Oceanian will help him get a berth and advise him about whaling (Melville 1988: 58, 57). However, what seems most real in the Ishmael–Queequeg relation is its foundation in felt intimacy, a literalization of the best qualities of friendship degenerating on the beaches of Omoo. As Ishmael narrates, He seemed to take to me as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much mistrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply. (Melville 1988: 58)

114 A poetics of relation Questions of rules and their suspension, when it comes to friendship, recall the constructedness of laws and the ways in which governmental systems and policies are founded on principles emblematized by interpersonal relations. For Melville, the question has turned, in the presentation of cross-cultural friendship, to models of international relations. In Polynesian models of friendship, Melville posited both a model of social cooperation and a model of transnational relations that would not cost indigenous people their sovereignty. (The fusion between eros and instrumentality that he sees in Oceanian bonds seems closer in spirit to Aristotle and Montaigne than to U.S. essays on friendship such as Emerson’s and Thoreau’s.) In Typee, the pervasiveness of friendships and extended networks of relations makes the Taipi seem like “one household, whose members were bound together by strong ties of affection” that go “beyond blood kinship,” allowing the Taipi to work “unitedly, and actuated by . . . an instinct of friendliness” (Melville 1968a: 204). The establishment of such a model among nations, as Delano’s perhaps fantasized Abba Thulle instructed (a kind of ultima thule of democratic liberalism under conditions of benevolent hierarchy), constitute within the American Pacific archive a range of Islandspecific relations, nested within principles of hospitality, that are radically opposed to the exploitative and destructive logics of colonialism.

The enduring spirit of cultural forms: name-exchange in Henry Adams, Jack London, and Willowdeen Handy Don’t mention to anyone that I have a Taitian name. At home it is a joke, but in Polynesia it is serious. Henry Adams, Letters For the traveler who will move outside of the towns of the South Pacific . . . and will take the trouble to stop for longer than a week, the miracle of Polynesian hospitality can still be invoked. Eugene Burdick, Introduction to The Forgotten One

Colonialism and neo-colonialism erode and transform Oceanian lifeways, but indigenous notions of hospitality and friendship have never been eradicated. As Nicholas Thomas puts it in In Oceania, “though Maori, Fijians, and others have been influenced in many ways by intrusive discourses and institutions, their socialities remain intractably different from those colonizers sought to impose” (Thomas 1997: 13). For a range of authors during the period of high imperialism and its aftermath (1890s–1920s), when the effects of colonial incursion were devastatingly visible, the encounter with Oceanian hospitality and friendship, and the resistances or attractions to what remain extravagantly expressive conduct on the part of Islanders by U.S. standards, reveal nostalgia for Oceania as a space where emotional walls might be breached, and a recognition that the Oceanian forms for such communions exceed those available in U.S. contexts. With the

A poetics of relation 115 evidence of the colonial abuse of hospitality all around them, authors respond, or find themselves inadequately able to respond, to formalized reception. Such reception suggests that a cultural sovereignty of the deeper substances of Oceanians’ bonding forms has never been ceded, or set at odds with “modernity.” For several U.S. authors, indigenous hospitality most assuages and adds pathos to the disappointment and loss they feel toward the decimation they find in Oceania. In these situations, the offering of name-exchange is recognized – or fantasized – as meaningful. Whether or not they can regard Oceanians as equals, or bring themselves to “commit,” the authors register that they have been moved. The generally sardonic Henry Adams, for instance, toured Oceania from August 1890 through July 1891 with the painter John La Farge (and their Japanese servant, Awoki, whom Adams describes as “My man Friday . . . a little Jap” [Adams 1982: 380]) in search of “old gold” and ex-cannibals (Adams’s “cannibal tour” will be discussed in chapter 5), but he warmed to Oceania when he allowed himself to feel the enduring spirit of its affectional forms. Originally, in the series of letters he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron, which he described to Cameron, who was to keep them, as “a sort of diary [that] should run together” (Adams 1982: 285), Adams expressed cynicism about what seemed to him a romantic and archaic institution (name-exchange).11 The form had been popularized as still current by Robert Louis Stevenson in his dedication to “The Song of Rahero” (1888), in which Stevenson wrote, Ori, my brother in the island mode, In every tongue and meaning much my friend, This story of your country and your clan, In your loved house, your too much honoured guest, I made in English. Take it, being done; and let me sign it with the name you gave. – Teritera. Stevenson’s relationship with Ori was a bond-friendship the two entered through a ceremony involving name exchange. Stevenson took the name “Teritera,” one of Ori’s names, while Ori took “Runi,” a Tahitian rendition of Louis (Finney 1964: 431). After Adams has been introduced through letters from Stevenson to Tahitian royality (the chiefly family of the Teva clan) and spent several months in Tahiti, he comes to appreciate the ongoing importance to Tahitians of bond-friendship, particular among the arii, for whom, Adams writes, a name-exchange is “like giving a title of nobility in Europe, only more so, because a real name, or title, is here a fixed thing, and goes with certain lands” (Adams 1982: 407). When Adams and La Farge are first offered such an exchange by, of all people, Stevenson’s Ori, Adams feels that it comes too easily, and treats it as “rather a joke,” and hypothesizes that maybe the name-exchange amounts to little more than an exchange of nicknames. Taken literally, he would be, by extension, Stevenson’s brother, which he feels the au serieux Stevenson would not appreciate. Adams was self-conscious as well about being perceived as imitating Stevenson. Later, Adams suspects that the

116 A poetics of relation exchange was initiated by Ori’s wife Haapi-vaine, whose “archaic devotion” in weeping over and stroking him affectionately leaves him “conscience-stricken” and even appreciative of the gesture of the name-exchange, as for its “tenderness which has really some meaning here, and puts us on a different footing” (ibid.: 450). Adams’s greatest concern in accepting the exchange with Ori is that his real hosts (Tati Salmon and Ariitaimai) have not given “express approval.” (When a less sympathetic tourist to Tahiti met Salmon and asked him to what race the Tahitians belonged he got the mocking reply: “We belong to no race; man was created here; this is the lost Garden of Eden” [Senn 1905: 46].) When Adams asks Ariitaimai she does not express approval, as she did not approve of Ori’s nameexchange with Stevenson. However, when Ariitaimai herself offers him “the proper, traditional and formal act of investiture,” recited and performed in front of the adopting family, that confers “the hereditary family name of Taura-atua, with the lands rights and privileges attached to it,” Adams has what, in the context of the entire tour, might be considered an emotional breakthrough: The compliment from such a source was so great as to be awkward. To be sure, the lands attached to the name of Taura-atua are only about a hundred feet square, a few miles from here; but the name is a very real thing, and was borne by Tati’s ancestors, and is actually borne now by his second son. To give it to one was a sort of adoption. (Adams 1982: 452) As Fred Sawyer writes of this scene, “For once, Adams could describe such a ritual of high society without his usual ironic detachment: he was genuinely moved” (Adams 1968: iii). During the last months of his stay, with Ariitaimai’s daughter Marua translating, Adams began working on his namesake’s memoirs. The volume was originally published as Memoirs of Marua Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti (1893), but was subsequently titled Memoirs of the Ariitaimai. As John La Farge recalls with some pride, King Kala¯kaua had tried to get the old arii to let him record Tahitian traditions and arii genealogies “so that they would not be lost, but she refused” (La Farge 1912: 345). While at work on this project, and despite the amusement Adams and La Farge are afforded by writing about being Taura-atua and Territua, the letters register an uncharacteristically (for Adams) emotional relation to the old arii: “The other evening I was taken in to see her, and found her sitting on her mat on an inner verandah. When I sat down beside her, she drew me to her and kissed me so affectionately that the tears stood in my eyes” (Adams 1982: 477). In the end, when it comes time to leave Tahiti, he is struck by how his relationship to Ariitaimai, “the Old Chiefess who gave us names,” and her family has grown “to be more than fraternal. . . . I love the old lady with all my heart.” When Ariitaimai gives a speech at parting it is with such “dignity and feeling” that, although Adams cannot understand Tahitian, he admits, “I quite broke down” (ibid.: 494, 485). For the hypermasculine Jack London, amid his generally deformed view of Oceania as “a place of Darwinist identity struggle” (Wilson 2000a: 40), the fantasy

A poetics of relation 117 of name-exchange seems to have been associated with what Justin Edwards describes as a homosocial “search for a chum.” London described this desire as the desire for a “Great Man Comrade,” able to grapple with “the fiercest life.” As with his sometime friend Charles Warren Stoddard, to whom he could write rapturously, but from whose homosexuality he ultimately recoiled, London in places sees Oceania (or, rather, Polynesia) as a place where a longed-for male– male attachment can be made.12 London, that is, dreams of an ideal male–male kinship that cannot be achieved within a “civilized” setting, where heterosexual conventions hold apart virile masculine strength from more tender displays. The agonistic triangles of desire in The Sea Lions shows the tension of setting aside these conventions (Auerbach 1996: 178). Perhaps only in an interracial Oceanian relationship could devotion be expressed between manly men, in part because the Islander is not made effeminate at the same time that he insists on subordinating himself to his white partner (calling him “master,” the narrator’s objections aside). The distinction between London’s and Stoddard’s (or Dana’s and Melville’s) work on this dream of finding ideal male companionship in Oceania might be approached through Eve Sedgewick’s distinction between homosocial and homosexual relations, in which the homosocial starts out as analogous to homosexuality, suggesting the “unbrokenness of the continuum” between them, before cultural pressure “radically disrupts” male–male desire (Sedgewick 1990: 1–2). If in London’s writing, as Edwards suggests, natural elements break in as metaphorical disruptions of the homosocial–homosexual continuum, in Stoddard the opposite happens: his entire world breathes homosexual desire through a gauzy veil that reveals more than it hides. Stoddard, whom Mark Twain called “a nice girl,” draws erotic qualities of friendship discourse “out” to the point where it is homosociality that is disrupted. In scene after scene involving bosom-friendship at first sight Stoddard reworks the archive as a giant cruise, or what he described as an “orange spree” (Stoddard 1905b: 33). Stoddard’s stories are full of lines such as, “He placed his two hands on my two knees, and declared, I was his best friend, as he was mine; I must come at once to his house” (1905a: 21). The “friendships” flare up and then Stoddard realises, “I had sucked my orange dry and was sick of the pulp; I needed a new orange” (1905b: 317). That, as Roger Austen notes, nineteenth-century reviewers did not remark on South-Sea Idyls in either 1873 or 1892 (when the book was reprinted) as containing “anything untoward” suggests the degree of license on issues of male sexuality afforded to South Seas narrative.13 London’s “The Heathen” (1909) is a homosocial story that borders on homoeroticism, despite gestures (“disruptions”?) throughout that insist on normative heterosexuality. Among London’s stories set in Oceania it is extraordinary in the longing it conveys for partnership in the fullest senses with an Oceanian, and for the degree to which it holds an Islander up as an ideal of masculinity and loving friendship. In London’s macho sentimentalist terms, these involve the combination of a native described as a brute “manhandler” who looks at the narrator with “eyes luminous and soft with joy” (London 1967: 170, 172). Island men seem to represent, temporarily, alternative ways of expressing masculinity. (As the demonstratively heterosexual Robert Dean Frisbie told James Michener, “In America I

118 A poetics of relation suppose you hear a lot of nonsense about the alluring women. Actually the men are more to be wondered at. They have the courage of heroes, but they can weep like children” [quoted in Michener 1951: 13].)14 At the same time, as in nearly every place where London’s Oceanian fiction treats Polynesians sympathetically, it is the Islander who insists on a certain superiority in the white characters despite, in this rare instance, the narrator’s expressed desire for a more equal sharing. Where London admires qualities in Islanders, that is, it is through remaking them in his own image, and attributing to them his own values and interpretations of historical causality. In this sense he performs what Frantz Fanon considers the end point of settler-colonialism, which only ends its “work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values” (Fanon 1963: 43). London’s language in contexts sympathetic to Islanders exceeds its own denials. He gives agency to natives to the degree that they use it to affirm the basis of white leadership, moral or not. Thus, while “The Heathen” shares the peculiar texture of London’s Oceanian fiction, in which anti-imperialism and Darwinian-based white supremacy find awkward confirmation in a dispensation in which whites are shown assuming power through brute will-power over a diseased Oceania, the desire lodged in the story pulls it somewhat out of London’s general orbit. “The Heathen” begins on board a ship that, like Oceania itself for London, has become a laboratory for survival. It is “freighted with millions and millions of germs” which kill a number of the kanaka crew, and then it is demolished by a hurricane and a “hell-pit of sea-water gone mad” in which the ship is “literally blown apart” (London 1967: 165). Charley, the narrator, manages to float away from the wreck on a hatch-cover/life-preserver, and drifts across Otoo, a native of Bora-Bora whom London describes from the first in uncharacteristically erotic terms: “He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator” (ibid.: 168). (Otoo was apparently based on a Tahitian crew member, Tehei [Reesman 1999: 131], though the name probably references the Otoo who was the chief of Matavai at the time of Cook’s arrival and later befriended Captain Bligh [Bligh 1792: 62].) The two float together for two days before, having saved each other’s lives, they are beached (the sole survivors) on an atoll where they live among the Islanders for a week before a French cruiser picks them up. “In the meantime, however,” Charley writes, “we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds the men closer together than blood-brothership. The initiative had been mine; and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it” (London 1967: 172). This extraordinary bond holds for seventeen years, until death does them part. Their union assumes priority over all others in the story. Otoo marries, but his wife dies almost as soon as she is mentioned, as if she were a narrative inconvenience. When Charley later marries, his wife and children embrace Otoo as an extension of Charley’s affection (wife and children are established in a sentence and then dropped). For the most part, Otoo functions as “brother and father and mother” to Charley, who feels he has to live up to the “love and worship” of Otoo, or the

A poetics of relation 119 “exalted place” he holds in the native’s eyes. This sense of Otoo’s watchfulness makes him “a straighter and a better man” (London 1967: 174), although among the activities they engage in together is blackbirding, described in the story as “persuading the wooly-headed cannibals to come and labor on the Queensland plantations” (ibid.: 180), which was often little more than kidnapping and slavery. The “wholly unselfish” Otoo repeatedly protects Charley’s interests and in fact guides the investments that make him a wealthy man. Their ventures include land deals, pearling, and cocoa plantations, which Otoo overseas without leaving Charley any way of “repaying him except with love” (ibid.: 187). In fact, the relentlessly anti-materialist Otoo lets his share of their ventures accumulate in a bank account of which Charley is the beneficiary. Finally, not surprisingly, Otoo sacrifices his life to save Charley, calling out “Good-by, Otoo” and positioning himself so that Charley can “see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice” before being dragged under by sharks (ibid.: 196). “And so passed Otto,” Charley concludes, “who saved me and made me a man . . . [with] . . . years of comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and other white” (ibid.). The emotional moment pulls against the grain of the political tide, in which the Islander willingly dies so that the colonist lives and expands, as Stoddard’s Hua Manu repeatedly saves the narrator through homoerotic acts in “Pearl Hunting in the Paumotus,” and Ishmael survives on Queequeg’s coffin. When Stoddard’s Hua Manu dies, “the soul went out of him, perfectly satisfied.” Like London, Willowdean Handy experienced Oceania as disease-ravaged but, unlike London, her experience of the power of Marquesan socialities did not require fantastic projections. In comparison with London, with his sensationalized presentation of interracial friendship as an anomalous fantasy of masculine affection, in which the white man appropriates indigenous friendship forms (extraordinarily, he initiates the name-exchange) whose meaning the Islander subsequently teaches him, Willowdean Handy’s response to the Marquesans she studies are measured and thoughtful. Handy first visited the Marquesas on the Bayard Dominick expedition (1920–1) as the wife of the Bishop Museum anthropologist E. S. C. Handy, and as part of a team that had “come to salvage some of the achievements” of a culture believed to be dying: “the race was dying, we had been told.” It was frankly salvage anthropology, a saving into textuality of what is disintegrating (Clifford 1986: 112). The expedition employed the methods of its time, including an emphasis on “somatology” or human measurements, and a perspective that approached its objects as doomed “repositories of information” believed to be “so much closer to raw nature” than civilized people (Handy 1965: 4, 5, 71). A National Geographic article from 1919, on “The Tragic Fate of the Marquesan Cannibals,” at once emphasizes the fierce, cruel beauty of Marquesans, and concludes that “all the French colonial administration can do [is] let the natives die off as speedily as possible” (Church 1919: 306). In marked contrast, Willowdean Handy conveys in several of her works a deep attraction to and respect for Marquesans. In one of the earliest, “Kaoha! Marquesan Sketches,” published in the Yale Review and offered as a return gift “to

120 A poetics of relation them of appreciation of their sterling qualities” (Handy 1925: 8), Handy describes how, despite her attempts to maintain distance from her hosts, she “could not escape. My mind was crowded with these disturbing Marquesans.” When she would sit alone their words would follow her, “‘Friend, kaoha! You know us.’ There was nothing to do but know them” (ibid.: 3). Handy notes how, despite so much of the tree of Marquesan culture having been “cut down” by foreigners, the acts of Marquesan daily life “spring from . . . ancient sources” (ibid.: 4–5). For instance, she notes that “names are still exchanged between persons of the same sex as the sign of closest friendship, the possession of one become the possessions of the other. An individual . . . who takes advantage of this custom to become a parasite is, goodnaturedly, but pointedly, ridiculed” (ibid.: 7).15 It is such exchange patterns in particular that make Handy most aware of cultural differences. In her memoir of the Bayard Dominick expedition, published in the year of her death, Handy emphasizes both her appreciation of Marquesan hospitality and her problems with entering into its economies or of knowing how to reciprocate generosity. Dedicated “To the memory of my Marquesan friends who taught me many things,” Forever the Land of Men (1965) – the title translates the Marquesan description of the islands as “Te Fenua Enata” – has a frank and fresh honesty about a young woman’s vivid impressions and confusions that few U.S. texts on Oceania approach. In addition to providing an appreciative and informed account of the complexity of Marquesan arts, a vivid portrait of a multicultural community of settlers who have increasingly intermarried with Marquesans, and in addition to demystifying accounts of Marquesan life, Handy takes the occasion in her retrospective narrative to comment on comparative socialities, without the tropologies and often misleading ambiguities of a Melville. From the point of view of a person who genuinely projects a sense of warmth toward Marquesans, and an openness to their lifeways, she faces the fact that “there was always a point at which I turned away from Marquesan culture with dismay if not disgust” (Handy 1965: 220). Early in the memoir Handy witnesses Marquesan gift-exchange practices that go along with the formal exchange of names. “I had read about this close and expansive relationship,” Handy recalls, without realizing what it would mean to surrender your name and everything that belonged to it to someone else. I looked with awe upon these two women, for I could see no trace of withholding by the one, nor of a sense of indebtedness by the other. I had never seen people so obliviously lacking a sense of “mine” and “thine.” This was generosity in giving and unselfconsciousness in accepting that left me breathless. It didn’t seem human. (Handy 1965: 28–9) This passage begins a pattern of reflections on forms of exchange in which she at times feels herself “drowning in strange customs, some not so repellent but very confusing and embarrassing.” What provokes the most anxiety is a sense of not understanding how to reciprocate “apparently otherworldly generosity” through material exchanges that are forms of emotional reciprocity. She recognizes herself

A poetics of relation 121 as more comfortable “in the strait jacket of the economic concepts of [her] race,” in which money is paid “without any overtones of personal considerations” (ibid.: 35, 36, 46). Unlike so many authors who embrace the archival figure of nameexchange because it allows them and their readers vicariously to experience, like an affair, a relationship unachievable in the U.S. context, for Handy the institution is real, wonderful, and frightening: it would emotionally overcommit her. Handy did in fact devote herself considerably to preserving and spreading appreciation for Marquesan culture for the remainder of her life. At her death she left among her papers what might be called an ethnohistorical novel, Thunder from the Sea, that was published eight years later in Australia. In its preface she wrote: “Neither I nor my Marquesan friends would want anything to appear on their behalf that was not well done” (Handy 1973: xvi).16 However, in Forever the Land of Men, after years of publishing and lecturing on Marquesan culture, she emphasizes the limitations of the relationship she was willing to claim. Handy works closely with a group of Marquesan women, who guide her back into largely depopulated valleys to copy tattoos off of older Marquesans (tattooing having been outlawed by the French colonial government for a number of years). Because she is there to do research, and her research is the people themselves, Handy feels that she should not become personally involved, but relationships form. She confesses to having been “thrown into a panic of embarrassment” at the prospect of being asked to exchange names: “Marquesans did not consider that the offer of a name could be refused. I was devoted to Te-hono, and I would not bear to hurt her. How could I forestall such a proposal?” She need not have worried, though, because “the old lady had a fine sense of the fitness of things. She said to Uta, ‘Both friends must want it’” (Handy 1965: 204–5).

5

From man-eaters to spam-eaters Cannibal tours, lotus-eaters, and the (anti)development of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century imaginings of Oceania

We are done with our South Seas at last, clean cooked and eaten. Henry Adams to John Hay (1891)

From a literature of encounter to literary tourism I long for a palm thatch cover, Where chattering parrots hover; I hate these dreary fields and folk, And sigh for a South Sea lover Charles Warren Stoddard, “South Sea Bubbles”

Charles Warren Stoddard, nicely described by Roger Austen as a “genteel pagan,” was known in his day as “the Poet of the South Seas.” His South-Sea Idyls (1874) was the most popular work of literary travel about Oceania after Melville’s Typee and Omoo, and many “South Seas” writers credited Stoddard with infusing them with the spirit of the islands.1 For highbrow readers, that spirit was bright and hazy. William Dean Howells, who published Stoddard in Atlantic Monthly, wrote in an “Introductory Letter” to a reprint of the Idyls (1892) of Stoddard’s fiction as “the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that ever were written about the life of that summer ocean,” lauded their “mustang humor,” and concluded that “no one need ever write of the South Seas again” (in Stoddard 1905a: v–vi). Stoddard’s extra-literary writings about Oceania suggest a complex relation to the islands that is generally occluded within his summery fiction. He traveled to Hawai‘i in 1864 (his parents ran a general store on Maui and his sister married a planter), returned in 1868 to write “Hawaiian Island Notes” for the San Francisco Evening-Bulletin, toured Tahiti in 1870 and Hawai‘i in 1872, and set up bachelor’s quarters in a Hawaiian “bungalow” from 1881 to 1884. He admired many aspects of Hawaiian culture, but participated in crass tourist promotion of the islands. Though never a “political animal” (Austen 1991: 94), he was paid to write editorials on Hawaiian politics.2 If at the time of the U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i his sympathies were royalist, as expressed in a series of letters to Lili‘uokalani, they were mixed with exoticist reminiscences about the halcyon Hawai‘i of his youth.3

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 123 Throughout his fiction Stoddard refers to “sooty,” “dusky,” and “mahogany” natives, which is to say that Stoddard plays with the racist vocabularies of his time. He could comfortably write a line such as “Lahaina is a little slice of civilization, beached on the shore of barbarism” (Stoddard 1987: 100), and he habitually infantilizes the cultures that animate but eventually bore his narrators. However, Stoddard’s stories do express appreciation for Oceanians, a sense of “privilege [at] sitting in the midst of [Islander] men and women who [are] willing to accept [him] as a friend” (Stoddard 1905a: 335). Such feelings about Island cultures, like most of Stoddard’s themes, are blurred in obfuscatory purple prose. Emotional detail and nuance is obviously not what readers sought in accounts of Oceania. Rather, it is the Idyls’ sense of possibility and unhurriedness among simple, loving peoples that touched readers, and that figure a turn in late nineteenth-century writing about Oceania toward the spirit of tourism. Like so much literature set in Oceania, it is not the specifics of Island cultures or material history that concerns readers, but an auratic impression. That Stoddard’s appreciation for the sensuous “natural” life and apostrophes to Oceanian hospitality were covers for homosexuality and the sexual availability of Islanders (men, though audiences could read in gender preferences) seems not to have struck his readers as much as the dripping eroticism. (The English edition of Stoddard’s Idyls, called Cruising in the South Seas, distracted from the book’s homoerotic themes by featuring drawings of Oceanian women [Austen 1991: 68].) It is Stoddard’s escapist qualities that prefigure the transformation of the apprehensive desires of the nineteenth-century literature of encounter into the literary tourism of the twentieth century. In this literary tourism, threatening aspects of Polynesia in particular are refigured to meet a new set of needs in the U.S. cultural unconscious. (Melanesians remain largely abject and Micronesians are generally absent or collapsed into Polynesia or Melanesia.) What is remarkable is the degree to which, in the process of such refiguring, imaginings of Oceania remain in a stabilizing continuum with nineteenth-century sources in the U.S. public sphere. What develops into the nostalgic imagining of Oceania as antidote to modernity and transformations in U.S. socio-politics structurally requires continuity with the earlier imaginings. To sustain an image of island cultures as pastoral alternatives at the same time that the U.S. was extending its colonial, economic, and military investments in the region requires massive double-think. The fact that, by the twentieth century, many of the imaginatively sanctified sites were afflicted with disease, alcoholism, depopulation, plantation economies, pollution, and cultural loss needed to be contained by reaffirmations that “paradise” and the old lifeways remained to be discovered. This involved both an underlying conservative rationalizing that the negative effects of development in Oceania were inevitable, necessary evils (pangs of Islander delivery into modernity) and a conservationist stance toward aspects of Oceania most attractive to tourists (hospitality, erotic freedom, cultural performance, sun and surf). Nowhere are the ideological grounds for these processes of accommodating dispiriting material relations to national needs more evident and worried into

124 From man-eaters to spam-eaters stabilizing forms than in twentieth-century literary tourism. Like tourism writ large this is built on foundational contradictions. The development that makes leisure tourism possible is at once required and imaginatively arrested. The U.S. attempt to escape from politics in Oceania itself acts out a political relation in ignorant, inhospitable ways. It elides the ways that Oceanians resist colonization or respond to it as individuals or communities in opportunistic ways. The liberal tourist is not much different, from a structural viewpoint, from the ugly, bumbling tourist constructed as his foil. Rather, the posited distance from crass tourists legitimates literary tourism as a mode of oppositional cultural dialogue. What literary tourists almost invariably critique (and proliferate) is a sense of imperialist nostalgia in the face of an Oceania in the process of being contaminated. This “decline” is most visibly embodied in racial mixes. Jack London in Taipivai notes that “There are more races than there are persons, but it is a wreckage of races at best” (London 1911a: 157). Likewise, Henry Adams deplored a “pervasive half-castitude” (Adams 1982: 417). For London, racial mixing is figured as both the means of survival (the survival of mixed-race Islanders suggests that white genes protect them) and evidence of the contamination process itself. However, literary tourists perform a glossing over and containment of their disappointment, unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, who concluded that escape to the South Seas was a trap, the islands being “only for those who want to paint them or sail them” (Fitzgerald 1956: 52–3). Adams rues that Tahiti, as a result of disease, has become a poorer place for ethnic tourism and the experience of what he terms “archaic” culture. Nonetheless, in the end the islands retain their charm and novelty: No man can have a ghost of a dream how fantastic this world is till he lives in the different moralities of the South Seas. Every fresh island has been to me a fresh field of innocent joy in extending my museum of moral curiosities. . . . Truly I care not to eat my neighbor; but – (Adams 1982: 513) Such literary tourism, functioning as a defensive accommodation of disappointment in the tristes Tropiques, is not only not opposed to colonialism, but epitomizes the evasiveness and ethical apathy, vis-à-vis Oceania, at the base of U.S. empirebuilding. The “tourism” of literary tourism involves a temporary relation to amplified aspects of cultural difference and the modes and economies of seeing that sustain gazing at others as a leisure and/or adventure activity. The partiality of tourist perception at once confesses a weakness and asserts a strength. If it claims to be only an impression, it believes itself to be a fresh and unmotivated one, in contrast to promotional work or thesis-driven scholarship. However, the touristic gaze, as John Urry describes it, is “always socially organized by its difference from nontouristical forms of social experience” (Urry 1991: 2). In semiotically reductive forms, it is packaged escape into zones of difference that reify the gazer’s worldview in ways that tend toward cultural and economic imperialism. The works of literary tourism discussed in this chapter are touristic in proceeding through snapshots,

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 125 as is evident in their heavy reliance on anecdotes, ethnographic illustration/ photography, and decontextualized historical tidbits. They are at the same time “literary” through interaction with prior literary texts and conventions for artful representation. Vis-à-vis Oceania, these conventions require a measure of amateur and commercial anthropology, presented as unbiased non-fiction. This sort of “non-fiction,” tourism covered over by the status afforded literature, has been central to the dispossession of native peoples, since to assert that “what one is presenting is ‘essentially descriptive’ is to assert a level of facticity which conceals its own ideology, and to prepare a ground from which judgments of classification, generalization and value can be made” (Ahmad 1993: 99). A telling quality of literary tourism in Oceania is its allusiveness, its pilgrimages to “remote” sites (Urry 1991: 10) described by a handful of artists. Literary tourists in Oceania, from Adams through Paul Theroux, travel book-heavy. The library of London’s Snark had over 500 books. Frisbie on remote Puka-Puka claimed to have a thousand volumes. This enables a dialogue with literary representions of Oceania that authorizes the earlier writers as tour guides. In a telling moment Larry McMurtry reminds himself that “it may be better to look first and read later” (McMurtry 2001: 111). Travel to already described markers becomes a means of gauging development. What Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan (1998) term “tourists with typewriters” present themselves, generation after generation, as performing literary salvage of a vanishing Oceania. “With their passing,” writes Frederick O’Brien in the Marquesas, “vanishes the living link with our own prehistoric past. And I was to see it, before it disappears forever” (O’Brien 1921a: 8). The dynamic is marked by the anxiety that exoticist writers experienced as a result of feeling “belated,” of “coming after what had come before” (Behdad 1994: 13), which steps up the desire of literary tourists to write themselves into the nostalgic narrative, affirming the sanctity of a handful of sites and modes of perceiving them. By this mutually validating and delimiting process a sequence of non-indigenous authors – drawing upon salty beachcomber informants – gain public authority as documenters of development in Oceania. While only a fraction of the U.S. public reads literary tourism, its assumptions remain continuous with (and a base for) popular images. In this respect, to attempt a thicker description of the means by which U.S. artists continued to imagine Oceanians in the twentieth-century, through an analysis of material and popular culture (tourist posters, films in Oceania from Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic romances to Elvis movies, National Geographic photographic essays, postcards, Reader’s Digest or American Heritage articles, surf-culture, beach-boy/hapa-haole music, romantic ethnography, Travel Channel documentaries), while productive in identifying and critiquing politically neutralizing articulations at various moments, would not yield a substantially different ideological narrative.4 One might speak here, in other words, of a pseudo-dialectic of the “literary” and popular-scholarly with tourist kitsch, “pseudo” because the institutionally validated seriousness of the former masks the fact that literary and popular-scholarly production are themselves powerful underwriters if not outright forms of tourism. This is not because there are not complexities in the works of literary tourists, along

126 From man-eaters to spam-eaters with a persistent between-the-lines indigenous response. It could be shown that figures such as London, Stoddard, and Adams – all of whom, for instance, dined with Hawaiian royalty – had an access to and complex experience of Hawaiian culture unavailable to their contemporary critics. Frederick O’Brien, Robert Dean Frisbie, Charles Nordhoff, and James Norman Hall certainly have more complex relations to Oceanian cultures (into which the later three married) than can be explored in this context. Rather, the simplifications of Oceanian histories and cultures (re)produced in the U.S. public sphere result from the ways that “letters” or “notes” or fictionalizings from the field are packaged, critically re-represented by non-specialists for a range of socio-political uses, and discussed or discussable within the public sphere. Paul Briand’s biography of Nordhoff and Hall, for instance, attributes to Hall what seems like his own cultural-shared fantasy: “Here were the true successors of Adam and Eve in innocence,” Briand writes of Polynesians, “for here was Eden before the Fall, before man sought wisdom and found despair . . . Like children who had never matured, they were gentle, generous, and trustworthy” (Briand 1987: 222). The gentle James Norman Hall noted that, because metropolitan audiences were so disillusioned in general, they romanticized every book about Oceania: “I have read all of [Stevenson’s] South Sea books,” Hall writes, “and I cannot find that he painted life in the islands in such rosy colors” (Hall 1928: 90).5 The response of audiences to such books about Oceania, in other words, suggests the difficulty of decathecting, from a thoroughly exoticized archival body, in which notions of Islands as “paradise” function as sponges or semiotic compresses for absorbing Western ailments. Thus clichés about the South Seas may be activated in spite of an author’s intentions. Tellingly, readers such as Stoddard, Adams, London, O’Brien, Theroux, or McMurtry do not allude to Melville’s anticolonial dimensions. Rather, for these author-readers, “Typee” remains a place where Melville “lived in captivity and happiness” (O’Brien 1922a: 471). In my analysis, then, attention remains on the touristic reduction in the public sphere of popular literary works into the blocks out of which a twentieth-century South Seas image is recurrently (re)constructed. Central to perpetuating this image is the neutralization of indigenous perspectives. Literary tourism insulates itself and its readers from the fact that much of what it recounts depends on Islander informants who certainly have their own agendas, including the love of practical jokes. Unlike in the literature of encounter, in which Islanders hardly speak coherently and translation issues are bracketed, in literary tourism, Natives can and do speak, though how their words are understood, framed, or represented gets drawn toward generic forms. Repeatedly, literary tourists quote traditional stories (this confers credentials on the literary tourist, whether the stories are hoaxes or not), recount tragic mixed-race love stories (this reifies prejudices and touristic fear of boundary-erosion), and provide comic instances of idiosyncratic (or syncretic) Islander adoptions of Western mores (this makes Islander Christianity, for instance, look ridiculous, whether or not it has become a long-standing feature of the culture). In all such instances, it is well to remember when reading the resulting cultural dialogue that what is a novel

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 127 experience for white writers is generally a routine one for the Oceanians with whom they interact, who are used to strangers coming and asking strange questions and making unusual requests, who tend to play upon what visitors want and expect to hear and tell parts of history and not others for reasons quite their own, and who of course are at all times “analyzing subjects who critically interrogate” would-be ethnographers (Rosaldo 1989: 21; see Smith 1998 on Islanders as readers). In part because they are conscious of being out of place, of potentially being laughed at or manipulated by Islander stories while needing to seem reliable filters, literary tourists from Mark Twain to Paul Theroux tend to adopt a jokey, belittling line toward everyone, while saving themselves the last laugh. (The rude Theroux, himself the object of much indigenous ridicule, argues that “What is clear in them [Malinowski’s Kurtzian journals] is that what he hated most – what all travelers hate – was not being taken seriously” [Theroux 1992: 111].) That fellow tourists, from whom literary tourists routinely attempt to differentiate themselves, are belittled along with Islanders minimizes the discursive violence of misrepresenting or decontextualizing Oceanian speech. There are fundamental differences between joking about one’s own culture and joking about cultures whose norms and histories one may not understand. Joking about one’s own culture may be a healthy mechanism of self-inspection and change, while joking about foreign cultures without providing contexts for understanding mocked behaviors tends to reify one’s own values and political actions. (In this sense, a writer such as Evelyn Waugh scores palpable hits when he jokes about England, but feeds his countrymen’s prejudices when he jokes about Africans preparing to boil Englishmen.) The sarcasm and callousness of much U.S. writing in Oceania – the ugly comments followed by stabs at recuperative humor – strike a pose before armchair tourists presumed to share the belief that Oceanian practices, untenable in the modern world, had to be given up. References to practices considered to be recently outgrown remind readers that natives would, for instance, have remained cannibals (or might revert) without the processes that stabilize tourism. Adams seriocomically writes that Fijians are “still savage, and would be back at their old practices in six months with their incantations and war and cannibal feasts if the foreign government were taken away. All of the older men about us have been glorious cannibals” (Adams 1982: 499). In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud argues that joke-work differs from dream-work in being inherently social or shared: the joke depends upon a relation between joker and listener that excludes the perspective of the butt of the joke. Provided that the listener has no sentiments “that could provoke feelings opposed to [its] purpose,” the joke may “bribe . . . powers of criticism and confuse them,” turning the “co-hearer into a co-despiser” (Freud 1960: 145, 132, 133). The visions of islands and islanders that underlie jokes about Oceanians disclose such a phantasmal, fetishistic quality that they index a collective cultural unconscious. Such dreaming-of-others, like stereotypical images as Ralph Ellison defines them, involves the prejudiced individuals’ “reading into situations involving [‘Others’] those stock meanings which justify his emotional and

128 From man-eaters to spam-eaters economic needs” (Ellison 1964: 28). The emotional needs cannot be disentwined from the economic ones, as becomes clear in a writer such as Theroux, whose “cannibal”-humor is an unwitting discourse about tourism itself, about the misunderstandings and preoccupations that inform the tourist gaze, and about how tourism consumes the differences it requires. Cannibal joke-work in particular functions as an aporetic moment and sign for the predatory culture-work performed by literary tourism or commercial anthropology, which, from the early observers to the present, blocks from self-knowledge the desires at its source. The extent of double-think in relation to Oceania is exemplified by the apparent eagerness of skeptical writers to accept the reality of accounts of cannibalism without what in other contexts would pass for evidence. What is most striking is that this racialist/psychosexual confusion seems continuous among writers of divergent sensibilities, trainings, and commitments. It does not seem to matter whether one reads critics of imperialism such as Melville or London, romantic anthropologists such as Thor Heyerdahl, or a literary Don Rickles such as Theroux who roasts everyone. If in the nineteenth century nearly every work of encounter required a “cannibal,” in the twentieth century literary tourism seems to need a recent-”ex-cannibal” and to be willing to be gulled at any length to find traces of one.6

Desperately seeking Herman: cannibal tours from Charles Warren Stoddard to Frederick O’Brien But, tell, shall he, the tourist, find Our isles the same in violet-glow Herman Melville, “To Ned” We were not in time . . . the devastating civilizing years have preceded the Snark venture. Charmian London, The Log of the Snark “You had other mens, and you eat ‘em!” Samoan girl to Joshua Slocum, in Sailing Alone Around the World

For Henry Adams, John La Farge, Charles Warren Stoddard, Jack London, and Frederick O’Brien (as for Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin, and James Norman Hall), all of whom claim they were motivated in part to go to Oceania because of childhood readings of Herman Melville’s Typee, to “desperately seek Herman” reflects a desire to go on what might be termed a cannibal tour.7 Pilgrimages to the Marquesas, whether undertaken or imagined, exemplify cannibal tourism’s desires, along with the impossibility of fulfilling them. Adams writes during the course of his tour of Oceania that “nothing but dreams of Typee sustains us.” He describes the Marquesas as “hopelessly barbaric and cannibalistic”

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 129 and thus expresses certainty that if he and La Farge manage to get to Nuku Hiva they will “have old Polynesia crude” (Adams 1982: 277, 465, 444). For Adams and La Farge, the latter of whom writes with a characteristic stab at humor of “Typee, where the eating of man was apparently something like a duty or necessity, not a mere gourmet liking for a certain richness of taste” (La Farge 1912: 339), cannibalism indexes Marquesan “crude” and an antipodal relation to U.S. society. Without it, there can be none of what La Farge and Adams, after their friend Clarence King, call “old-gold naiads in Nukuheva.” Throughout their tour of Oceania they measure their perceptions (usually coming up short) against Typee. From Samoa Adams writes, “No Fayaway has come near us,” and after being lost in reeds he writes, “Melville’s account of going through them at Nukuheva has an amount of accuracy that I can now swear to” (Adams 1982: 256, 425, 508). In an important sense, Adams never gets out of Melville’s Nukuhevan “reads.” For London the whole of the Marquesas is unalterably Typee. He knows the valley’s name is spelled “taipi” on “the charts,” but claims he will “always spell it ‘Typee’” because when he was “a little boy” he “read a book spelled in that manner” and determined that when he “had gained strength and years” he too “would voyage to Typee. . . . The years passed, but Typee was not forgotten.” The Snark’s cruise to the Marquesas is openly a “pilgrimage to Typee . . . I was bent on finding another Fayaway and another Kory-Kory” (London 1911a: 156), and Typee is associated with cannibal prowess. (London repeats Melville’s citation of Porter’s erroneous suggestion that the name “Taipi” means “man-eater,” and revels in the thought that “in all the islands of the Marquesas the Typeans were named with dread” [ibid.: 169].) When London receives a traditional chant that accompanies a feast held in his honor, he hears “deep guttural cries” and recalls that long-pig is the Polynesian euphemism for human flesh; and these descendents of man-eaters . . . brought in the pigs to table as of old their grandfathers had brought in their slain enemies. . . . So Melville, two generations ago, witnessed the bodies of slain Happar warriors, wrapped in palm-leaves, carried to banquet at Ti. (London 1917: 159) Although Melville–Tommo witnessed no such thing – slain bodies being carried to banquet does not occur in Typee, or in any reliable anthropological record of the Marquesas – London desires that it should have been the case, and jokes that he “shall not have the chance in these degenerate days to see any long-pig eaten, but at least I am already the possessor of a duly certified Marquesan calabash.” Where cannibalism was, London finds tourist souvenirs, here a souvenir of cannibal ancestry. For London, like Joseph Conrad with his abject sense of “remote kinship” to Africans, it is only the “ultracivilized” who deny relation to cannibals, or refuse to acknowledge that “their own savage forebears have somewhere in the past been addicted to similar practices” (ibid.: 161, 159). A cannibal tour, then, is a tour to places where the Islanders are supposed to have until yesterday, by native admission (or practical joking), practiced a

130 From man-eaters to spam-eaters fantasmal “cannibalism” (generally in the next village over). Structurally, of course, it must fail to satisfy the expectations brought to it. Literary tourists cannot find a fantasy, only its setting. The “Typee” Melville wrote about cannot be rediscovered because it never existed, and tourists cannot really escape civilization because such escape is made possible by the imposition of that civilization upon the area to be escaped into, which remains (in ever-diminished forms) worth visiting because its comparative underdevelopment offers a form of getting out. The desire to be Crusoe, in this scenario, is doomed from the start, since the footprint one discovers will increasingly be another tourist’s. However, if a cannibal tour cannot literally be fulfilled (no one really wants it to be), it retains unrelinquishable hopes. The special irony of this is that cannibal tours are undertaken at times when “civilization becomes an intolerable bore” (Adams 1982: 235), or to get out of what Stoddard describes as the state of being “world weary, full of disgust” (Stoddard 1901: 16). A cannibal tour, in other words, acts out of the generally splenetic stance toward society that characterizes much of society itself, which believes that the “impulses in man . . . are stifled” and that the civilized man’s nerves are frayed by “the artificially-lighted cage of a thousand slaves to money-getting” (O’Brien 1921a: 169, 123). The critique of the gap between national democratic principles and material conditions is a constitutive feature of nineteenth-century canonical literature. At the same time, that cannibal tours, despite resenting the destruction of natural inclinations at home and the contamination of Natives abroad, never seriously support indigenous rights, suggests an underlying commitment to the forces they seek to escape. (On the crucial question of “for whom” and “for what” the writing, this differentiates Stevenson’s Note on Samoan History or Adams’s Memoirs of the Ariitaimai from their accounts of cannibal tours.) The cannibal tourist, in contrast, requires a novelty or difference to which is affixed the name “primitivity,” which the aura or name “cannibalism” guarantees. In its jaded pose toward the “ultracivilized” it only plays at identification with a cannibal’s “naturalness” to which is attributed a savage aggression that is linked to unrestrained hospitality: Frederick O’Brien, who describes Melville as having been “fed, amused, and even lionized by savages who were accustomed to lick their lips over the roasted thighs of their enemies” (O’Brien 1922c: 18), emphasizes that “the Polynesian, of all races, loves his fellow” (O’Brien 1921b: 13–14). The hypermasculine London’s declarations aside, feigned identification with cannibals marks its opposite. Literary tourism discloses a latent revulsion toward the “cannibal’s” guilt-free enjoyment of behavior that civilization had to repress. It resents ex-cannibals for embodying its twisted moral: freedom from neuroses and hypocrisy are accompanied in the natural state by unacceptable practices (nature is unnatural). Against such “knowledge” cannibal humor directs circular mastery (indigenous lifeways were ruptured for the good of Islanders) and self-mastery, an affirmation of the superiority of civilized values that the desire to “get out” may question only to a point. Something uncanny, that is, haunts the Euroamerican obsession with cannibalism. Leaving the Marquesas, where he has been “quickened by . . . cannibal surroundings,” Stevenson describes an “incurable cannibal grandee”:

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 131 His favourite morsel was the human hand, of which he speaks today with an ill-favoured lustfullness. And when he said good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in the falsetto of Marquesan high society, he wrote upon her mind a sentimental impression. (Stevenson 1971: 91, 139) Describing the Islander through mismatched categories, Stevenson both appreciates the emotional farewell and mocks cannibal drooling. While Stevenson credits ex-cannibal guile (“I know one old chief Koo-amua, a great cannibal in his day [who is] a perfect gentleman and exceedingly amiable . . . no fool, though” [quoted in Menikoff 1992: 145]), he confesses that before a cannibal his “attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the natives.” Yet he seems relentless about finding evidence for the element that “unmortars society.” “All Melanesia appears tainted,” he writes. “In Micronesia, in the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is not more than that of a tourist, I could find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert zone I long looked and asked in vain” (Stevenson 1971: 102, 90, 93).8 For all of this confusion, cannibal tours continue to promise freedom from hypocrisy in islands whose lushness supports a comparatively carefree existence. For Stoddard, if his cannibal hosts “at times . . . almost exceed excess, the more’s the pity for when they have returned to civilization they shall put on hypocrisy as a garment and pose as a living lie” (Stoddard 1905a: 32). For Stoddard, who claims to write to “afford interest or pleasure to the careful student of the Unnatural History of Civilization” (Stoddard 1905b: 276), a cannibal tour is in multiple senses about getting “out.” His creamy stories push the homoerotic qualities of Melville’s cannibal discourse to their limits. He tramps around Oceania with a hardy submissiveness, making bosom-friendships right and left, sleeping with every “cannibal” who claims his heart. His aim is often openly to “heav[e] a stone at civilization, business, worry” by sporting with a cannibal “camerado” (Stoddard 1894: 7, 22). Of his “bosom-friend” Kana-Ana, with whom he is “as natural as possible,” he supposes that “perhaps, instead of having converted the little cannibal, he may have converted me. I am sure, at least, that if we two should begin a missionary work upon one another, I should be the first to experience the great change” (Stoddard 1905a: 47). He is immediately excited by “one gigantic youth, big enough to eat half our ship’s crew . . . he began making vows of eternal friendship . . . and proposed touching noses at once” (ibid.: 137). Approaching a meal with Islanders, he writes that A cannibal feast might begin in this wise: I had never been present at one; yet I feared not. They had the gift and the voice and eyes of love and better is a dinner of white meat where love is than the stalled American Consul and the price of his office therewith. (Ibid.: 31)

132 From man-eaters to spam-eaters This “cannibalism,” like that of Ishmael who would rather sleep with a “sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” (Melville 1988: 24), has become wholly tropic. Stoddard’s own “cannibal” humor aside, he responded defensively to the impresario Charles Mathews’s “amusing” statement that he had played before “a whole pit full of Kanakas, black, brown, and whitey-brown, till lately cannibals” as follows: “cannibalism is unknown in the annals of the Hawaiian kingdom; if there has been any human roasting done in this domain, it has been since the arrival of the American missionaries” (Stoddard 1894: 198). Henry Adams knew Stoddard and admired Idyls (in the Letters Stoddard is always “Charley”), and like Stoddard, though for different reasons, he desperately needed to get “out.” (During the 1880s, Adams’s mother died, his wife committed suicide, and he exhausted himself completing the History of the United States, all of which gave him a sense of being severed from his “old life” [Adams 1982: 248].) During the years prior to his tour of Oceania, when he fantasized in letters about the islands, it was almost always the prospect of visiting Melville’s “Typee” or living among the “cannibals” of Fiji that most excited his imagination. Cannibal references become a rhetorical stance against society, as when he complains that “I know not a solitary cannibal at Newport” or replies to a friend, “Yet you wonder that I long for the Cannibal Islands” (ibid.: 120, 143). Fiji always comes up comically in connection with cannibals, toward which, like Mark Twain in his comments about demonstrating baby-eating in his early lectures, Adams takes a jocular attitude that at once accepts and ridicules putative practices tout court. The mode of antic hauteur toward “cannibals” may rhetorically root for savages over ugly tourists, but the misanthropic posture at bottom conveys an aristocratic worldview. While democratically sarcastic toward all and theoretically unsympathetic to colonialism in Oceania on moral grounds (ibid.: 483), Adams’s letters certainly have what John Carlos Rowe described as an aristocratic and snobbish quality (Rowe 2000a: 166), and those written to influential policy-makers (such as his close friend John Hay) on Island politics ultimately defend Island sovereignty only to the degree that the Islands appear to be poor economic investments.9 Adams never reached the Marquesas, because, given the desultory reports of the “melancholy desertion” of Taipivai that he read about in Stevenson and “other travelers whose stories” he asked after, it did not seem worth the seasickness he chronically suffered. These reports brought news that the “dances are all gone” and “Melville’s valley deserted, at least by the tribe he knew.” Adams thus wrote Elizabeth Cameron, “I shall not visit Nukuheva where I hoped to sketch for you the scenes of Melville’s book” (Adams 1982: 467, 474). However, believing as he did that, while “cannibalism is supposed to exist still in the Marquesas” it is “not wholly forgotten in Fiji,” he stepped up his old desire to tour the latter: “We are are trying to charter a steamer to take us to Fiji,” he wrote. “I want to see one black island before closing the chapter. Fiji had great influence on Polynesia, chiefly in cannibalising my poor friends, who never took as much pleasure in eating their enemies as I should do in eating mine if I had any” (ibid.: 468). During his stay in Fiji, Adams and his entourage went inland to be in “wild country where no

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 133 Europeans live, and among savage tribes who were howling cannibals fifteen years ago, and are still fairly savage, at least in thought and superstition.” His and La Farge’s attendants at meals included “three gigantic Fijians in barbaric want of costume, and cannibalistic masses of hair, who smile kindly at us since they are deprived of their natural right of eating us.” Because of this Adams feels at last in a country where “the simple savage is truly simple, and would gladly eat you if such were the Christian commandment,” and he inhospitably quips, “We were guests of these mountain tribes for weeks, and I shook hands with more old cannibals and murderers than I could reckon” (ibid.: 468, 500, 488, 513). At one point in the best selling White Shadows in the South Seas (1919), Frederick O’Brien offers his hand to Kahuiti but is reminded by the “cannibal” that in the old days Marquesans did not greet by shaking hands.10 It is the sort of scene that typifies O’Brien’s work, which at once epitomizes a cannibal tour and disrupts its form. When O’Brien asks “what was the toughest portion,” the old man replies, “the back of the neck of a woman,” and then he “opened his mouth in a broad smile, showing all his teeth, sound and white. His smile was kindly, disarming, of real sweetness, so that, foolishly perhaps, I would have trusted him if he had suggested a stroll in the jungle.” To his question “Is it good that the eating of men is stopped?” O’Brien receives the non-response that at once allows him to write and be stuck in his own answer: “He was of the old order, and the new had left him unchanged. He did not reply to my question, but sipped his bowl of kava” (O’Brien 1921a: 13, 227). It is far from clear whether the disarming broad smile that goes with the account of the toughness of the back of women’s necks is simply laughing at O’Brien, the good-humored (potentially tongue-in-cheek) Irish-American storyteller/tramp-gentleman, who often performs his insisted-upon divide from Islanders by posing alongside shirtless chiefs in a white shirt and tie with his journalist hat turned up. The ideological frame of O’Brien’s books presents him, for all his twenty-five years of touring and living in Oceania, as a well-meaning, adventurous journalist ambivalently caught within what he himself describes as a cultural script that limits his perception. As he puts it in Atolls of the Sun, “We demand the toxins of our machine bringing-up and racial ideas, as the addict his drug” (O’Brien 1922a: 444). If O’Brien sees himself performing salvage, it is with some awareness of his own faulty vision: the last words of White Shadows fear that “They shall have passed as did the old Greeks, but they will have left no written record save the feeble and misunderstanding observations of a few alien visitors” (O’Brien 1921a: 450). In his discussion of modernist ethnography in Oceania between the end of World War I and the depression, Jeffrey Geiger writes of O’Brien that he “strives to avoid absorption in creating and reinforcing myths about the exotic worlds of the South Pacific, while simultaneously revealing the deeply problematic nature of describing and observing what is construed as cultural otherness” (Geiger 1997: 140). This effect comes in part from the amount of voice given to local and indigenous narrators, in response to which O’Brien does not require (like Theroux) the ego-affirming rejoinder. These narratives, along with indigenous songs and

134 From man-eaters to spam-eaters accounts of practices – such as O’Brien’s vivid descriptions of tattooing in Atolls – irrupt against toxic framing scripts. Thus, while imbricated in imperial views whose effects he is ashamed of, O’Brien does not come across wholly as an imperial “eye/I.” Rather, he conveys a sense that he has made connections with his hosts that his text cannot display. His admiration for Marquesan culture comes across as felt, as does the sense that, when his hosts compose a departure chant (the whole village chants him off), or when a Marquesan writes him a letter in Marquesan, O’Brien can hear, read, and understand much of what is being said to him. At the same time, O’Brien’s affection for Polynesians as “the most lovable and handsomest untutored men and women” is clearly paternalistic (O’Brien 1922c: 8). He describes his one-year stay in the Marquesas as a move “backwards across centuries of time” to “islands isolated from the world for eons” made in order to see a “living fragment of the childhood of our Caucasian race” (O’Brien theorizes that Polynesians are sun-browned Aryans). Despite some of the most hard-hitting passages of anti-conquest in literary tourism – the “white shadows” of his title are the blotting force of Euroamericans on Oceania as well as a “black spot on the white race” – O’Brien claims to be writing in order to share with “those who stay at home” his “record of one happy year spent among the simple, friendly cannibals of Atuona valley” (the valley where Gauguin had lived). The friendliness and joyous communalism of cannibals prior to or apart from Western incursion is the refrain of O’Brien’s works. Despite the ongoing decline of their population, to live among them is to experience “a dream-like, care-free life, lived by people sweet to know, handsome and generous and loving . . . then as now the most perfect harmony prevailed among them”: “They were essentially a happy people, full of dramatic feeling, emotion, and with a keen sense of the ridiculous” (O’Brien 1921a: 7, 26, v, 75, 164). O’Brien amplifies and naturalizes stories of cannibalism (enata kaikai/maneating) as frequently as possible, and suggests that it is the index of a hardwired difference that is in the process of being destroyed by Euroamericans. That O’Brien believes, conventionally, that all humans were once cannibals makes Marquesan life the pre-history of civilized life. He even suggests that cannibalism is connected to Marquesan health and cultural richness (depending on the rhetorical situation he describes cannibalism as “damnable appetite” [O’Brien 1921a: 221] or relativizes it as moral within Marquesan morality). Without the old, cannibalistic ways, Marquesans cannot be strong and vigorous as a people: “We are not the men we were,” a Marquesan tells O’Brien, “We do not eat the ‘Long Pig’ any more, but have not the courage, the skill, or the strength.” For Marquesans to give up cannibalism is to give up spiritual knowledge and the power of the ancient tapu system. In other words, for O’Brien indigenous Oceanian cultures are not malleable and cannot negotiate forms of modernity without giving up the essence of who they are; Polynesian culture is either pure or degenerate. Whatever their posited common Aryan roots, for O’Brien Anglos and Polynesians have become essentially different (without the process being reversible): Now “they may ape our manners, wear our ornaments, and seek our company, but their souls

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 135 remain indifferent. They laugh when we are stolid. They weep when we are unmoved. . . . From our side, too, the abyss is impassable” (ibid.: 342, 68). Thus the lengthy story O’Brien tells in Atolls of a hapa (mixed-race) woman who is sent to a nunnery to keep her licencious Marquesan side in check must end in tragedy. For O’Brien the white man is not a Polynesian, and cannot become one: “the white who would become a savage succeeds only in becoming a beast” (ibid.: 68–9). For Robert Dean Frisbie, in a passage lauded by Hall, “going native” is both impossible and inadvisable because, in his view, the natives want to be proud of their white man (Frisbie 1944: 86). Oceanians are joyful in proportion to their maintained distance. In “Happy Days in Safune, Samoa,” for instance, O’Brien writes, in actuality Safune is as distant from America as the mountains of the moon. The hearts and souls of the people of Safune are as different from ours as were the red Indians’ when Pocahontas loved John Rolfe. No white man not born to their ways and reared in their habits can pierce that strange, soft, elusive envelope of their outward beings and understand their thoughts, their musings and especially the reasons for their often puzzling conduct. (O’Brien 1925: 37–8) In O’Brien’s emphasis on an ineffaceable difference between Islanders and whites – an emphasis most visible in his articles and reviews, in which the critique of Western destructiveness drops out – O’Brien reveals his connection to the worldview, fundamental to twentieth-century tourism, which feeds on difference, and is underwritten by the current science of the period which argued that that the savage mind was prelogical or analogical. Where literary tourism moves away from the “cannibal tour,” as in the more sensuous accounts of what has been called the “lotus-eater” school, it preserves the need for mental, cultural, and physical difference toward the more sensuous storytelling modes of “lotus-eater” whitesettler writing in Oceania. This mode expresses the pervasive escapist and fetishistic spirit of the nascent U.S. tourist industry, whether in the purple, soporific poetry published in Atlantic Monthly or the various forms of popular edutainment. A photograph in White Shadows with the caption “Marquesan cannibals, wearing dress of human hair” (O’Brien 1921a: 212) appears also in a National Geographic (1919) feature where, because the “cannibal” is surrounded by three naked Marquesan girls, the caption reads, “What Joseph Banks Missed.” The National Geographic article, which insists that “Marquesans today are as fond of ‘long pig’ as in the years past,” includes as well a photo with the caption “Scene posed by the Marquesan natives showing the killing of a victim to be used for sacrifice and ‘long pig’ (Church 1919: 306, 293). In the photo one of the Marquesan actors mugs for the camera.

136 From man-eaters to spam-eaters

The lotus-eater school: James Norman Hall, Charles Nordhoff, Robert Dean Frisbie, Margaret Mead and the reconstruction of the South Seas image Wearied with the clash of arms, cast down by the results of harnessing himself to machines, fearful of his political and religious guides, in uncertainty, but with avidity, man is looking everywhere for spiritual comfort. . . . And as delightful evidence of his craving for the irresponsibility of infancy, the warmth and feeling of the cradle, he especially finds his “spa” for soul sickness in the South Seas. Frederick O’Brien, “Some Famous Vagabonds” Would Margaret Mead have taken seriously an anthropological study of America written by a 23-year-old Samoan who had done only nine months of field world, couldn’t speak English, and was ignorant of American history and the literature about America? Albert Wendt, “Three Faces of Samoa”

The “cannibal tour” and the “lotus-eater tour” are sides of the same imaginative coin, an extension of the old split between feared/hostile and friendly natives that would later be acted out yet again in the highly publicized Margaret Mead–Derek Freeman controversy, in which Freeman, in arguing that Mead romanticized Samoan culture, stressed in contrast Samoan violence. Both cannibal and lotus tours are motivated by desires to “get out,” and to assuage (or evade and deny) colonial shame by embracing Oceanians, who are now considered as unthreatening. “Tahiti is not an abode of savages,” a 1920 article claimed. “It still has primitive life, but of barbarism it has none. There life and property are safe” (Gooding 1920: 301). If the cannibal tour is a version of the literature of encounter refigured as safe, lotus-eater narrative softens and eroticizes Oceania, whose iconic figure becomes the available vahine (Tahitian women), in ways that reassure metropolitan readers that the healing spirit of the Islands remains accessible. If cannibal tours perform a structural disappointment, lotus-eating tours promote fantasies of revitalization from soul-sickness and avoid discussions of history, colonialism, and politics. As James Norman Hall puts it in “Why I live in Tahiti,” Oceania appeals as a place where government appears (to a white settler) to have been “reduced to the vanishing point” (Hall 1928: 350).11 Lotus-eater writing, such as Charles Nordhoff and Hall’s Faery Lands of the South Seas (1921) – which O’Brien called a “beautiful and true portrayal of life in the atolls of the Pacific” (quoted in Roulston 1978: 39) – or Robert Dean Frisbie’s description in The Book of Puka-Puka of life in the “farthermost seas” (Frisbie 1929: 3), re-romanticize the image of the South Seas, cleansing it of ambivalences from the colonized, diseased, ruined Eden motif of London and others. This is not to suggest that cannibal tourists ultimately accept that paradise has been lost. In articles written for the tourist industry that are still quoted, for instance, London continued to describe Polynesia as paradise.

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 137 In contrast to Melville at the advent of French colonialism, or Adams half a century later describing Tahiti as a “very beautiful graveyard” (Adams 1982: 455), Hall sees Tahiti as remarkably unspoiled. Arriving on the docks in Pape‘ete he writes of his relief that it is “nothing like so disappointing as I had feared it would be. Outwardly, two hundred years of progress have wrought no great amount of havoc” (Nordhoff and Hall 1921: 6). In his Autobiography, written decades later, the self-described “yea-sayer” would re-emphasize that “Tahiti surpassed my most hopeful expectations . . . only the tips of the octopus tentacles of Western civilization . . . had reached that far into the Pacific, and the effect of them was scarcely felt” (Hall 1952: 248). This idealized presentation of Oceania, an extension of the lotus-eater school’s appreciative feeling for the islands, expresses both what Hall calls a dislike of “the whole of our Industrial Civilization” and a sense that Oceania offers an antidote or spiritual alternative (Hall 1952: 236–7). The combination of affection and paternalism is clear from some of Hall’s first lines about Tahiti, in a poem that would be published in Atlantic Monthly two decades later. “Tour de l’ile” begins, “This small island, is for me, / Everything a home should be,” and concludes, “children in such lands as these / Lost in the farthest, loneliest seas” (ibid. 254). Between the world wars, lotus-eaters would publish stories, poems, and essays in Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Mentor, and other highbrow journals that “hymned Polynesia” (Roulston 1978: 41) and that resonated with the general longing for “everything that wasn’t war, everything that was peace and warmth and security,” as a character in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra puts it. Later in the play another character will speak of the Islands, recalling Typee, as making her “forget death . . . There was only this world – the warm earth in the moonlight – the trade wind in the coco palms – the surf on the reef – the natives dancing naked and innocent – without knowledge of sin!” (O’Neill 1931: 132, 212). Writing in a genial style, authors such as Nordhoff, Hall, and Frisbie bonded with audiences though literary allusions, and by admitting that living in the tropics cost them some of what their audience had, while light-heartedly reminding urban jungle-dwellers that civilization was a state in which “the fundamental beauties of life were lost ages ago” (Frisbie 1930: 193). The sense of trade-off is made clear in Hall’s poem “Evening on a Coral Island,” published in Atlantic Monthly (1931): Granted that news of highest consequence I miss, and feast of wit, and flow of soul. I do not care. Mid-ocean solitudes Offer, as of old, a recompense, A gift that every lesser gift includes: Silence, in a brimming silver bowl. The market for works transporting readers along with Nordhoff and Hall to such mid-ocean solitudes – presented as uncluttered by colonial history and postwar geopolitics – was such that, when the friends decided (after demobilization in 1919) to go to Oceania, it was with a generous contract from Harper’s to write travel

138 From man-eaters to spam-eaters articles that would subsequently be published as a collection. All that the editor required was an insurance policy with Harper’s as beneficiary “in case [they] should be drowned at sea or killed by the ‘savages’ of the South Pacific” (Hall 1952: 240). The result was Faery Lands, which, as its title suggests, offers the reader pictures of “the charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is different from our own; of living with a simplicity foreign to anything in one’s own experience, amid surroundings of beauty unreal in both actuality and retrospect” (Nordhoff and Hall 1921: preface). Within a few years, editors of several journals would tell Nordhoff “they could use any sketch he wrote” (Briand 1987: 298). As with the experiences of cannibal tourists, the material relation of lotus-eaters (settler-writers in Oceania) to their hosts is far more complex than can be foregrounded in their texts, given that lotus-eater texts celebrate the simplified life, and this requires lacunae into which readers are encouraged to project fantasies. Robert Dean Frisbie, who fashions himself before his readers as an “epicurean beachcomber” (Frisbie 1944: 6) on an atoll at the end of the earth – but who struggled with poverty, depression, alcoholism, personal disaster, tension with Puka-Pukan relatives, and his considerable writerly ambitions – becomes in this sense, in large part through the offices of James Norman Hall and James Michener, the exemplary figure of this mode of literary tourism, or what Michener called “the ultimate beachcomber” (Michener 1992a: 62). Hall’s profile of “Frisbie of Danger Island” in The Forgotten One and Other True Tales of the South Seas, in which he describes his friend as an internally divided “white kanaka” (“Robert Dean Frisbie, mortal enemy of Ropati-Tane”) who shuttles between the Stone Age and what Frisbie derides as the “Film Age,” is itself romantic lotus-eater fiction (Hall 1963: 161, 240, 191). Frisbie believed that most literature about the Islands was rubbish, prudish, and written by people who knew nothing about Oceanian cultures. In an essay on “Americans in the South Seas” (1931) that performs its thesis, Frisbie argues that, of those who address Oceania, “half write the regular South Sea bunk, and the other half devote their pens to exposing the first half . . . the glamourists do the greater harm. They bring more Americans to write books” (Frisbie 1931: 157, 8). In a later essay on “South Seas Authors” (1948) Frisbie prioritizes catching the “spirit” of the place over accuracy. However, despite their between-the-lines subtleties in suggesting ways in which Oceanians on “remote” atolls integrate modernity into their system through indigenous categories, Frisbie’s works stimulate fantasies in what were clearly market-conscious ways.12 The Book of Puka-Puka, made up in part of articles that had previously appeared in Atlantic Monthly, is the idyllic, engaging description of “Ropati” (Robert) as a man who would rather partake of Puka-Pukan life than take notes about it, but manages (unlike the anthropologists he ridicules) to do both without contradiction. “If there is any place on earth where men and women live naturally,” Ropati claims, “surely it is on Puka-Puka.” If Puka-Pukans are now syncretically Christian, they continue to follow their old inclinations outside of church. Frisbie assures his reader that the Edenic life is possible: “Many a beachcomber has eaten of the lotus, forgotten the world, loved native women, lived without malice, labor, or pain, and died in the hope that Paradise will be like the isle he is leaving behind” (Frisbie 1929: 82, 231).

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 139 The natural order on Puka-Puka involves, among other things, fishing the lagoons and feasting on moonlit nights beside teenage girls on green-frond plaited mats, an invitation to dream to those working forty-hour office jobs in crowded cities (or, during the 1930s, suffering the visible failure of the U.S. economic system). Through The Island of Desire (1944), with its idyllic early accounts of courting his wife Desire (based on his wife Ngatokorue a Mataa) on moonlit beaches to a brief, muted account of her death from tuberculosis (after which, in reality, he “nearly went insane” [Frisbie 1959: 68]), Frisbie would write variations of his life story, of marrying and having four children (“cowboys,” he called them), and living out a Puka-Pukan Family Robinson “in a primitive South Seas that is yearly narrowing as the tourist steamers encroach” (Frisbie 1935: 541). The eldest “cowboy,” Florence “Johnny,” would write one of the first works of Oceanian literature in English, and continues to write today as Johnny Frisbie Hebenstreit. Her sister Elaine married Don Over, a millionaire publisher, and Nga married Adam West, star of Batman (Michener 1992a: 64). What is most striking in Frisbie and lotus-eater writing, in relation to the prudish and relentlessly masculinist American Pacificist textual archive, is his celebration of sex with Oceanian girls.13 (Frisbie writes that eighteen is “past the prime for Polynesian women” [Frisbie 1929: 54].) My own sense is that, despite the myth of the Venus-“vahine” popularized in voyager literature and Gauguin’s nudes, the U.S. literature of encounter (and its extension, the cannibal tour) is comparatively puritanical in relation to Oceanian women. All Pacificisms assume the availability and hypersensuality of Islanders – women and men – and encounter in Oceania is always at some level potentially a sexual event. In lotus-eater fiction this is exemplified in the topos of naked Island women swimming out and then thronging about ships with sailors, though the reasons they did so remain mystified or detached from Islander desires and economies. (Motives for Island women swimming out to Euroamerican ships are reconstructed by Sahlins [1981] and Chappell [1992].) Certainly, Oceania has long provided an imaginative “space of adventure and liberated sexuality for women as well as men” (Sturma 2002: 2), though a white woman fulfilling sexual feelings toward an Oceanian man is often a recipe for disaster, as in Nordhoff’s The Hurricane, and later film adaptations, such as that directed by John Ford, which met with protests of cultural insensitivity in Samoa. However, as suggested throughout my argument (in keeping with an understanding of canonical U.S. literature as what Leslie Fiedler called a literature for boys that avoids adult heterosexual relations), the gaze in the U.S. literature of encounter rarely lingers as long on women as on men (recurrently apostrophized through references to Greek and Roman gods), and when it does it often seems an obligatory, structural reassurance of healthy heteronormativity in texts with a homoerotic strain. If Fayaway is the prototype for the obliging, light-skinned Polynesian woman, dressed “in the garb of Eden,” against whose “free and pliant figure” (Melville 1968a: 86, 85) tourists have been measuring Island beauty for a century and a half (the covers of Waiki¯ki¯ tourist brochures invariably feature young, light-skinned, hapa women), it is not so much because of what Melville said (Fayaway is given only

140 From man-eaters to spam-eaters a few paragraphs in Typee) as for the spaces her image opens for male fantasy to rush into in a text where much of the erotic descriptions are of Marquesan “Apollos.” (As suggested, Melville’s emphasis is generally on male bodies, as in the lines from Clarel, “In mid Pacific where life’s thrill / Is primal-pagan; and fauns deck / Green theatres for that tattooed Greek / The Polynesian.”) The U.S. literature of encounter and of cannibal tours, that is, does not portray Oceanian women with anything like the eagerness with which the literature is re-represented as doing, particularly in the postwar years. In this sense the breast-fetishizing lithographs, photographs, and movies of bare-chested Oceanian women, which in U.S. culture require justification on the grounds of ethnographic accuracy, form a visual (soft pornographic) counter-text to the more restrained literary forms of American Pacificism that they accompany. (In cannibal tours, juxtapositions of verbal descriptions of cultural devastation with idealizing photographs often neutralize critique.) For all the references to shipboard orgies and beachcombers with native wives, there is nothing like the sensuality of the Bounty story in U.S. literature, until Nordhoff and Hall recognized its potential “bounty” in their threevolume trilogy (1932) and turned it into the twentieth-century blockbuster that is more sensualized and ethnographic with each cinematic retelling. The Clark Gable–Charles Laughton Bounty – the highest grossing film of 1935 – is continuous in its modes of idyllizing Oceania with Marnau and Flaherty and, though the infatuated women are tastefully clad in halters, the film activates all the tropes of Pacificism: the ship is greeted in the harbor by high chief Hitihiti who says, “Me Hitihiti, you my tayo, friend.” Once ashore Gable meets Hitihiti’s daughter, who “speaks English; one word,” which is “yes.” Against choirs of angels’ music, one crew member tells another, “it’s a dream, this island isn’t real.”14 In twentieth-century lotus-eater fiction, in contrast to the more reserved nineteenth-century literature of encounter, the sensuality of island girls is highlighted. If there is “spiritual comfort” offered here, to refer to O’Brien’s garish formulation above (see epigraph), it has a carnal promise. Lotus-eater writing, that is, does not explore indigenous spirituality (religious practices) as viable alternatives to Christianity, though it frequently presents titillating anecdotal hints that such alternative practices furtively exist in forms inaccessible to Christianized Islanders and whites. Rather, it holds out and presents as natural to the Islands (and thus permissible while in the Islands) a sense of alternative sexual decorums involving young Oceanian women. Given the U.S.’s residual puritanism, images of unselfconscious half-nudity could only be recuperated by attributing a “naturalness” and “childishness” to Islanders. In attaching the idea of “spiritual comfort” to a desire for the “irresponsibility of infancy” and the nurturing “cradle”/ rejuvenating “Spa” of Oceania, O’Brien thinly disguises that he means something closer to the irresponsibility of second adolescence as achievable by older men in Oceania, along with the journey to Islands as a return to the prepubescent play of boys.15 A highlight for readers of O’Brien’s White Shadows must have been the passages, echoing Melville’s water-sporting with Fayaway or Twain’s descriptions of naked

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 141 bathers being ogled through spy-glasses (Twain 1872: 483), that suggest that in the Marquesas he could bathe as often as he liked with “the naked girls laughing in the torrents of transparent water, the wet crimson blooms washing from her drowned hair” (O’Brien 1921a: 67). (Images of bathing pervade lotus-eater literature, as when Nordhoff’s and Hall’s Byam in Mutiny on the Bounty first sees Tehani and then swims with her.) The brown girl, structural opposite of “chaste and hard-faced waitresses” (Frisbie 1944: 39), is figured here not as nourishing mother, but as an echo of innocent first love. Frisbie exceeds the customary textual voyeurism in his lusty descriptions of desiring “the breasts of an atoll Calypso hungry for love” (ibid.: 49) and of lovefests with enthusiastic Puka-Pukan teenagers: “I consented to join them only for scientific reasons,” Frisbie writes, characteristically scoffing at anthropologists, “so that I might study more intimately ancient Puka-Pukan customs . . . I will not record my erudite conclusions, for these memoirs are in too light a vein to admit of anthropological conclusions reached through frequenting Puka-Pukan saturnalias” (Frisbie 1929: 89). Frisbie married Nga when she was sixteen; Hall married sixteen-year-old part-Tahitian Sarah Winchester when he was pushing forty; Gauguin’s mistress, Teha‘amana, was thirteen. Without installing ideas of normative sexual behavior, one might argue that this age gap is fetishized by U.S. audiences and to some degree mythologized, as when Nordhoff’s and Hall’s publisher wrote in his memoirs that Nordhoff, living in the “timedefying” islands, “fell in love with a very beautiful Polynesian, the daughter of a chief” (Weeks 1959: 68). Though Frisbie disparages touristic-writers and anthropologists – and lived out a complicated relation to Oceania – the primitivist, South Seas myth-rehabilitating aspects of his work are continuous with writers such as the Norwegian anthropologist Bengt Danielson, who in Love in the South Seas, declared that what attracted Westerners textually and physically to Oceania was the idea of “free and merry love” (Danielson 1986: 10), or Thor Heyerdahl, in Fatu-Hiva, who played at a return to nature in the Marquesas like the “nature men” who formed a colony on Bora-Bora.16 That several of the scenes and much of the prose in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) might have appeared in The Book of Puka-Puka, first published the same year, suggests that they have more in common than an appreciation of teenage Oceanian sexuality. Central to this is the old Crusoesque dream of possession and mastery alluded to by lotus-eater writers. His ridicule of anthropologists aside, Frisbie’s ambitions had a strong anthropological component: he wanted to “live with the natives” and “know them so well that I can write about their culture and their real way of thinking” (quoted in Frisbie 1959: 19). Mead’s bestseller must have been as familiar as it was reassuring to readers of lotus-eater fiction or viewers of romantic, ethnographic films such as Robert Flaherty’s Moana of the South Seas (1926) and W. S. Van Dyke’s cinematic interpretation of O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) (which featured Latina Raquel Torres and drew character names [Fayaway, Mehevi] from Typee) or F. W. Marnau and Flaherty’s Tabu (1931). The poster for Tabu advertised “A Hundred Pulsating Thrills” and included a bare-breasted hula girl (Reyes 1995: 199–200).

142 From man-eaters to spam-eaters In these contexts, Mead’s text renders visible some of the ideological commitments of lotus-eater fiction. The panoramic opening sequences of Coming of Age – “as the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes” (Mead 2001: 12) – moved in imaginative alliance with literary and visual tourism. Young women in this iconography are recurrently swaying trees, as in Frisbie’s “her slim body was as graceful as the stem of a young coconut-palm” (Frisbie 1929: 38), and “brownness” is a requirement, as is clear in National Geographic’s display of a bare-breasted Polynesian women “whose skin tones had been darkened in the production process” (Lutz and Collins 1993: 116). Mead’s book inclines toward the literary throughout: Samoan women are never “pregnant,” but “great with child,” and male lovers are “young lothario[s]” or “successful Don Juan[s]” (Mead 2001: 13, 69–70). If metropolitan audiences wondered whether Islanders could have remained unspoiled by modernity and history as lotus-eater writers presented them, Coming of Age assuaged such doubts. However, though expressed in language aimed at the lay reader, it was categorically a work of “science,” introduced by Franz Boas. Of course, the eagerness with which Americans accepted Mead’s outrageous inferences – including her claim that she could generalize about the most intimate aspects of Samoan sexuality because “in an uncomplex, uniform culture like Samoa,” she felt “justified in generalising” (Mead 2001: 10) – suggests that they went to Mead as much for titillating confirmation as for cultural insight. It does not matter that elements of Mead’s lyric account of Samoan culture might in some literal sense be “accurate” (much has been simply disproved): what makes her unreadable as anything beyond an extension of the lotus-eater school of literary tourism is, in part, the commanding, nostalgic, and patronizing style, disguised from itself and its own libidinal interests as reportage, that embodies the ideological, imperial fantasy of Samoa as infinitely obliging and fully, unambiguously available for Mead’s comparative purposes. This 23-year-old, sleeping in a never-mentioned naval compound that allegedly coexists with the “most primitive” Samoan culture (elsewhere Mead praised the U.S. naval administration of American Samoa), believed that “a trained student” could “master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months.” She chose “a South Sea island . . . inhabited by brown Polynesian people” (Mead 2001: 8) because it offered the strongest polemical contrast to U.S. society, but also because, despite her professions of scientific method, and her clearly progressive agenda in terms of U.S. gender politics, she knew in advance how Samoa would answer her research questions. She was, in other words, writing what James Clifford calls “ethnographic allegory” with “moral, practical lessons for American society” (Clifford 1986: 102–3). This was possible because studies of Polynesia told one story to U.S. readers between the wars: because of their too-complex society, their lives were too neurotic, hurried, and sexually inhibited. However, not surprisingly, as has been shown, much of Mead amounts to fiction, based on the hoaxing of young Samoan informants. One interviewee, Fa‘apua‘a Fa‘amu, later claimed: “We just fibbed

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 143 and fibbed to her” (quoted in Omicinski 1998: B2). One must admire here the power of a Samoan hoax when it moves in alliance with U.S. credulity. These girls turn out to have been major influences on the free-love movement of the 1960s, for which Coming of Age was a seminal text, and which in some quarters was even held responsible for weakening U.S. families (Ross 1994: 36–7). Among many disturbing aspects of Mead’s touristic presentation of Samoan girls “coming of age” is her essentializing ethnic present, set outside of colonial history, a mode that “tends to degenerate into colonial apologia” by minimizing the effects of Euroamerican incursion (Duratalo 1992: 208). The suggestion that Samoan life has been altered, mainly in scattered references to a superficial adoption of Christianity, is made in the salvage ethnography mode by one who in public statements about Oceania and other regions invariably equated progress with Westernization (Foerstal and Gilliam 1992: 144), and who believed that the adoption of Western goods made indigenous people less indigenous. In her “preface” to a 1973 edition of the book, Mead celebrates the fact that fa‘a Samoa (the Samoan way) has proved “extraordinarily persistent” when she had expected that it “was surely going to vanish,” but answers requests that she revise her book by choosing to remain “true to what I saw in Samoa and what I was able to convey of what I saw” (Mead 2001: xxiv), as if that seeing had not been invested and culturally conditioned and even collectively willed. Though they rarely enter each other’s frames, that Frederick O’Brien romanticized Safune, on the island of Savai‘i, the same village where the Flahertys lived for eighteen months while filming the exotic Moana, which the Hollywood studies wanted to call “The Love Life of a South Seas Maiden,” and that Margaret Mead set up in a nearby village with photographic stills of Moana on the walls of her field house ( Jolly 1997a: 146; and see Geiger 1997), is anything but coincidental, as is the fact that literature, film, anthropology, journalism, and tourist posters seemed to do the same ideological work. The power of that work – thoroughly imbricated in the selfexculpating logics of tourism and with strong linkages to state power – continues to this day, in which Mead figures as an unapologetic, myopic embodiment of anthropological arrogance. What is most remarkable and telling about this pervasive ignorance is that it is shared by the audiences who believed her. Mead had links to the State Department that Coming of Age conceals, as does much of the anthropological work underwritten by the U.S. government during and after World War II. In the postwar period – as exemplified in the efforts of James Michener and Cold War imaginative writers, historians, and anthropologists – constructions of Oceania articulate more openly with U.S. geopolitical needs in the region. As linkages among cultural brokers, and the drive toward statehood in Hawai‘i in particular, will be discussed in the following chapter, they will be leapfrogged here. However, it is worth concluding this chapter with some suggestions of how tenaciously, despite major movements that have substantially altered the U.S. conversation about “race” and U.S. imperialism, late twentiethcentury U.S. travel writing in Oceania has remained connected to earlier representational practices.

144 From man-eaters to spam-eaters CODA

From man-eaters to spam-eaters: Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania and the tenacity of American Pacificism in the late twentieth century The more anthropologists write about the United States, the less we believe what they say about Samoa. Bernard De Voto on Margaret Mead I had found circumstantial evidence for cannibalism – the liking in Vanauatu . . . for Spam. It was a theory of mine that former cannibals of Oceania now feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. “Long pig” as they called a cooked human being in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the peopleeaters of the Pacific had evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania

Writers need not leave the continental U.S. to see Oceanian peoples, nor have they needed to since the early nineteenth century, given the extent of islander voyaging, displacement, and settlement. In the age of intensified global capitalism, which in much of Oceania is driven by tourism, the old processes of diaspora have accelerated: As Simione Duratalo notes, “While people in the West dream of a Pacific Island vacation, the idea foremost in the minds of many islanders . . . is how to get away from these same islands” (Duratalo 1992: 205). There are nearly as many Hawaiians, Samoans, Tongans, and Chamorros in the U.S., for instance, as there are in the Islands themselves, and Islanders have been engaged in synthesizing traditional and metropolitan artistic forms for several centuries (Henderson 1999). Despite changes in material conditions, nearly every literary tourist in Oceania clings to notions of a paradise that, like a trick birthday candle, never goes out. Attached to this, and symptomatic of larger cultural attitudes, is the desire to see native representatives in their places acting out expected roles. The desire to keep Oceania as imaginative reserve (for lotus eater or cannibal tours, or for meditations on modernity) pervades writing about the Islands, as in works by Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, and Paul Theroux, to choose three acclaimed authors. A reading of Annie Dillard’s appalling “Sirens of the South Seas” (1985) shows how when it comes to Oceania a “serious” writer can remain entranced enough to reproduce the essentialist, reassuring perceptual structures of the crudest lotuseater writing.17 Dillard begins her mental holiday in Tahiti with the Mead-like assertion that “The Tahitians are a beautiful, languorous people devoted to pleasure. That is how they were when the missionaries found them, and that is how they are again today.” With chatty and unconsciously condescending envy, Dillard draws on the Pacific archive to confirm her fantasy of erotic Oceanian indolence: Tahiti retains

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 145 a sweet ease, a voluptuous luxury, a sense of the compliance of nature and the abundance of time. Nothing more fully embodies this sense of sweet ease than the vahine, the island women. Every visitor has remarked these women – their faces, bodies, presences, motions, perfume – with good reason. They are admirable as objects, like flowers – and that is how they present themselves. Like flowers, they specialize in bright beauty, passivity, and sexuality. (Dillard 1986: 3) In keeping with this description, Dillard’s Tahitians were never “artistic or intellectual people” but instead devoted their creative energy to “dancing, and, especially, making love” (ibid.). In contrast to narratives of decline, Dillard celebrates a resurgence of “neotraditional” arts. This renativization, despite worker’s riots in Pape‘ete, anti-nuclear protests, and a growing sovereignty movement at the time of her visit, is not for Dillard political, as is the New Caledonian “independence conflict,” involving “black-skinned, short, and blunt featured” Islanders. Tahitians, Dillard assures her readers, are “by contrast, pale, rich, self-satisfied, and virtually self-governing. The French keep their islands in luxury, like girls in a harem.” For Dillard, apparently, being “pale” is preferable, living in a harem a luxury, being “virtually self-governing” in one’s own land a satisfying political status, and being rich a matter of being wealthier than those exploited in a harsher colonial regime. That the leading anthologizer of Anglo literature in Oceania (A. Grove Day) could admire this piece and that a Hawai‘i-based press would publish it suggest the ongoing hold of exoticist language toward “Tahiti,” which, Day writes, is “one of the most romantic words in the language, tolling the unwary to dreams of an exotic Eden” where “humdrum cares are forgotten and men and women live only for today and each other” (Day 1986: i). Paul Theroux’s postmodern cannibal tour in The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992) – with its negative-vignette-driven “show” of Oceania – follows the antic footsteps of Henry Adams and other cannibal tourists, using the same set of literary guidebooks against which to measure his impressions (on Theroux’s recycling of tropes see Edmond 1997: 265–7). How much different would these impressions be, one might ask, were Theroux to paddle around Papua New Guinea reading Russell Soaba, Vincent Eri, John Kasaipwalova, or Nora Vagi Brash instead of Malinowski’s The Sexual Lives of Savages? What if in Samoa he carried along Albert Wendt’s essays, novels, poems, and stories instead of Margaret Mead? Is it simply that this might cost Theroux authority and a shared frame of reference with readers positioned as continuous with the old readers of Atlantic Monthly literary tourism? Or is it, as Theroux suggests in his discussion of Hawai‘i, that he believes an indigenous author to be a contradiction in terms (Lyons 1994: 265)? For all his performances of being an iconoclastic thinker, that is, and for all his liberal critique of exploited natives and nuclear waste-dumping in the Islands, Theroux’s perceptual patterns never detach from the imaginative question that binds him to his audience: how much of the Oceania of childhood reading can be rediscovered? How much of Island aura remains available in the modern world? For Theroux,

146 From man-eaters to spam-eaters that reading is, in a sense, the real Oceania, and travel writing does more than describe: it defines and shapes the itinery of those who will follow. Thus, Stevenson put Samoa on the map . . . A place that is finely described . . . is given a power of bewitchment that it never really loses. . . . Not only Samoa, but . . . the whole of the South Pacific is a clear example of this sort of transformation because it has been used so effectively as a setting. (Theroux 1992: 322) Likewise, “Maugham was another writer who had sanctified a place by using it as a setting; he had done the islands a great favor – made them seem exotic and interesting” (ibid.: 350). Filled with credulous recountings, Theroux’s text exemplifies the power of previous texts to inform the gazer’s perceptions. But his notion that such writings confer “enchantment” upon the places they exoticize, or do no cultural damage, is typically self-serving. Even in acknowledging the falseness of writing about Oceania, Theroux trivializes the stakes of representation for Islanders: “I should say that the very fact that so much written about the Pacific is inaccurate – indeed, most of it is utter crap – intensifies the pleasure of traveling there and gives it so much unexpectedness” (ibid.: 226). For Theroux, however, unexpectedness generally leads to disappointment, which he tries to escape along with the sense that, as Tom Farber puts it, whites in response to anticolonial movements in Oceania feel that “their legitimacy is now waning. Has waned. That their very presence evokes, implies a history of sustained physical or administrative violence; requires explanation, defense” (Farber 1994: 114). The defiantly unapologetic Theroux keeps after Crusoesque isolation and possession: “On the plus side,” he writes of a camping site, “the island was mine” (Theroux 1992: 304). But even in these moments he seems to be living out the consumer fantasy (unrestrained by the group-tourist’s packaged itinery) of the tourist who spends thousands of dollars to get to places where he can escape the “depredations of western-induced dependency” (Pratt 1992: 218) and “rough it,” kayaking with his Walkman and setting up high-tech camping gear on subsistence farmers’ lands without permission. Caught in its own deflations, Theroux embodies both the bitterness of having to give up Pacificist fantasies and an unwillingness to do so. This emerges clearly in the serio-comic discourse of cannibalism that pervades The Happy Isles. Theroux cannot resist any opportunity to suggest the former cannibalism of Oceanians. His generally jokey language in these contexts, typified in the passage above (see epigraph), suggests an acknowledgment that, to some degree, the cannibalism he recalls is and has always been a laughable illusion. However self-parodying, however unconsciously, the sound-joke connecting spam-eating to man-eating suggests a continuity in the discourse of cannibalism and the ideologies behind it. In an important sense, the continuity or tenacity of the discourse in and through Theroux’s text marks transformations in the nature of the cultural-economic work driven by the old whitened ideologies. As an acclaimed literary guide and postmodern “adventurer” who profits by joking about Oceanians, Theroux is both a consolidator of national fantasies and hang-

From man-eaters to spam-eaters 147 ups and himself an embodiment of tourism/capital, “some kind of breathing parable of atomistic capitalism, the solitary self with credit card” (Farber 1994: 169). Where Theroux goes he traces the pervasiveness of capitalism and enacts its delusive notions of reciprocity – repeatedly, as in some re-enactment of early barter, he hands out fish-hooks and small gifts, recalling voyager gift exchange, or the withholding of anticipated payment or gifts from Islanders who laugh at him. Theroux’s equation of spam-eating with man-eating is offered as a joke that contains a truth. “As with other former cannibal islanders,” he writes, “they loved Spam and corned beef.” But despite its gestures toward seeming open-minded to the point of apathy, the joke passes wholesale judgment on Oceanians, whose natures he repeatedly essentializes and denigrates. A leader such as the king of Tonga remains for him “the king of cannibals and coconuts” (Theroux 1992: 231, 286). Completely dehistoricized, as if there were no class or historical basis for spam-eating, his spam jokes are part of a pattern of sour witticisms that express disappointment that Islanders are not as he wants to imagine them, while emphasizing a continuity between their earlier ‘cannibal’ and later post-cannibal selves. From page to page one reads of “wild cannibal-looking youths” on “what had once been cannibal islands” causing “a fear of cannibals, mostly, and amply justified” (Theroux 1992: 345, 268, 241). The Happy Isles relishes in pseudoethnographic reporting. Wherever he goes, Theroux has his pad out, using Islanders’ responses to ridicule their pains, pleasures, and bodies before an audience positioned as sharing his tastes (opera, oui; rap, non). If “Are you cannibals?” doesn’t get the desired answer then maybe “Are they cannibals?” or “Were those people cannibals at one time” will. The questions are relentless: “How many wives are you allowed to have?” “Do you people eat dogs?” “What does dog meat taste like?” “Do you eat horses?” “How do you prepare them?” “Do you stew them?” In Oceania, Theroux concludes, “you ate every living thing that fitted into your mouth.” “They looked like cannibals,” he writes. “Indeed, they had been.” Theroux fixates on the bodies of ex-primitives – on “jutting cannibal teeth,” “brown tits,” “thick kinky hair,” “webbed” or “splayed” feet, “filthy muddy legs,” “chunky,” “clumsy obesity” and “chaffing thighs,” “dusky” skin and “slopping foreheads” – in ways that turn physical differences from him into signs of evolutionary distance: thus he offers “a gloomy little glimpse of the Neolithic Age, complete with muddy buttocks” (Theroux 1992: 197, 95, 196, 259, 192). The socio-symbolic desires behind and working their way through Theroux’s fetishizing jokes about Islanders as recent cannibals seem to index a need to remain ignorant about Oceania at sites of curiosity and commodification, to go on considering Oceania, despite the poverty he discovers, a vast playground. Regarding the reception of his books in the major U.S. popular institutions, one is struck by how deeply the racist fantasies about Oceania seem embedded in the U.S. popular consciousness. It seems that U.S. writers and audiences still need “cannibal” traces to guarantee a sense of continuity with primitive life. This “dark” fantasy feeds off the notion that Islanders still possess qualities that civilized people had to repress in order to rise above their common genesis in cannibal savagery. For Jean Baudrillard, such a need for “a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin” is necessary to “reassure us to our ends” (Baudrillard 1983: 20). It is

148 From man-eaters to spam-eaters these “cannibal” drives operating within literary tourism that seek to preserve zones of difference less as a healing decolonization of prior constructions than as a means of suppressing self-knowledge about their own imperialist nostalgia. While Larry McMurtry shares with Theroux an ironic stance toward fellow tourists, and while his book recycles staples of lotus-eater and cannibal tours, Paradise (2001) seems more representative of the limitations of even thoughtful, liberal American Pacificism in its meditation on the Islands as fragile paradises perennially threatened by “development.” Among these limitations is the unwillingness to do Island-centered research. McMurtry’s library, which includes Theroux, is made up largely of the old Pacificist sources, the exception being Scott Malcomson’s Tuturani, a hard-hitting, deromanticizing political analysis of the Islands by a young reporter looking for “other ways of being” and registering his disappointments (Malcomson 1990: 20). The cover of Paradise, Gauguin’s “Words of the Devil,” establishes the book’s return to the theme of Oceania as ruined Eden. (The owner of Theroux’s “Hotel Honolulu” renames his bar “Paradise Lost”.) Of Gauguin’s pastel, McMurtry writes: “Teha‘amana, a startled young girl, realizes she has lost something. Too late, she covers herself. The sun sets quickly in the tropics; no less quickly, innocence goes.” In other words, McMurtry comes to Oceania both with answers to the questions he poses and with a template for thinking about regional history. He wonders whether paradise still exists, and ponders what role the “faithful presence of the sea plays in the ordering of human affairs.” Such a question presumes that he will find a post-lapsarian version of paradise. With his mother on her death-bed, he imagines the “kingdom of Oceania,” structural opposite of landlocked Texas, as an auratic, charmed vantage point from which to meditate on his parents’ relationship. The search leads him to the Marquesas, which McMurtry terms “Melville country” (McMurtry 2001: 29, 15, 92), where, having brought along books such as Coming of Age in Samoa, he discovers without surprise that global capitalism has preceded him. In scenes that remind him of Native-American reservations, Marquesans dance cynically for Shangri-La seekers and watch passively as Coca-Cola is off-loaded on their docks. For all his disappointments and awareness that the slums of Pape‘ete have many of the problems that slums do in other “littoral” areas (acknowledged and glossed in something of Frisbie’s manner [Frisbie 1931: 155]), there are for McMurtry the expected pleasures. Having come to Oceania to escape from “the culture of overachievers,” he finds it comparatively free of Euroamerican neurosis. “If there were a Prix de Freud for mental health,” McMurtry quips, “many Westerners would want to award it to the gracious, chatty, café-au-lait Tahitians” (McMurtry 2001: 20, 28). Not much has changed here from a 1920 magazine article which claimed “the Tahitian . . . take[s] life easy. He will never become a nervous wreck” (Gooding 1920: 326). While acknowledging that if he walked around Pape‘ete he would “discover a multitude of social and political problems,” Tahiti, as “a place whose beauty neither writers nor painters nor mariners have ever managed to overstate,” fulfills McMurtry’s idea of an “earthly paradise,” a place where even poverty and colonial administration are softened by the sound of the Ocean” (McMurtry 2001: 16).

6

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms A. Grove Day, James Michener, and histouricism

“Let’s integrate!” the shark said to the kahawai, and opened its mouth to swallow the fish for breakfast. Maori saying

From literary tourism to histouricism Tourists can still find in these islands the picturesque languor of flowery Polynesia. But no one should overlook the forces by which, through economic initiative and under democratic ideals, a group of Pacific islands have been transformed . . . The true story of the creation of this commonwealth . . . should bring inspiration to all believers in progress. A. Grove Day and Ralph Kuykendall, Hawaii: A History, From Polynesian Kingdom to American State The democracy of colonies. For the foreigner, romances of “Aloha,” For Hawaiians, Dispossessions of empire. Haunani-Kay Trask, “Dispossessions of Empire”

Writing of the search for “authenticity” in an age increasingly skeptical of any “real” to be found, Dean MacCannell applies sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of front/back distinctions to tourism, seen in the epochal sense as both the dominant mode of “knowing”/experiencing foreign cultures and an embodiment of the material relations that structure varieties of encounter. MacCannell’s tourist “quests” after an authentic experience of difference: “touristic consciousness is motivated” by a belief that behind staged “fronts” there are concealed “back” regions (MacCannell 1976: 101). If what tourists recognize (when perception approaches preconception) as “front” appears to be clichéd or a reality substitute, they nonetheless believe it retains some connection to a hidden reality (as stereotypes are thought to be distorted echoes of actual behaviors). Tourists thus approach engagement with foreign peoples by being guided “behind” touristic

150 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms fronts, with an implied hierarchy arranged around the difficulty of escape from the “packaged.” Tour guides talk of showing what is missing from (behind) the tourist poster. The problem for the tourist (or secondary tourist/reader) who considers such matters is that “it is very difficult to know for sure if the experience is in fact authentic. It is always possible that what is taken to be entry into a back region is really entry into a front region that has been totally set up in advance for tourist visitation” (ibid.). Here MacCannell’s “front”/”back” paradigm applies to the assumed contrast between culturally “touristic” (fake) and “scholarly” (fact-based/genuine) writings, in which “tourism” is the “front” accused of “staging” history (presenting out-oftimeness to those taking time out), while scholarship claims a thicker, archivally grounded description of history. Scholarship is presumably legitimated through institutional cross-checks, while the tour guide is authorized without needing to show credentials or confirm sources. That the back regions scholarship discovers are, from other perspectives, including those of the subjects represented, only “fronts” or refractions of the principles and desires which inform the historian’s perception, suggests the instability of the tourism/fake–scholarship/real binary, and the ways in which consciousness itself is socio-culturally informed. To explore connections among “touristic” and public sphere “historical” writings as modes of regarding Oceanian places, peoples, histories, and cultures is to discover senses in which, as empire became a U.S. way of life in the Cold War period, the two became allied within a common project. A certain mode of historical scholarship and “touristic” promotional narratives expressed their desires and guided their readers’ gazes in complimentary ways. After the second World War, Hawai‘i, which from an American Pacificist point of view has always been imagined as what the rest of Oceania was destined to become, needed to be refigured. As Hawai‘i was forcefully integrated into the U.S., what was “Polynesian” about it was thought to be necessarily effaced and archaic. For all the tourist promotion of Hawai‘i in writers such as Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London, and for all the saccharine images of beach boys strumming under the palms, which were disseminated widely through hapa haole music and hula reviews, the fact that Hawai‘i had become “civilized” cost it much of what provided its allure for an elite set of tourists at the turn of the century. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of GIs were stationed in Hawai‘i and Hawai‘i’s geopolitical importance was stressed in the media in ways that naturalized it further as a U.S. space whose multicultural society was groomed for statehood. (Reservations about this were rendered spectacularly visible in the Massie case, which highlighted the question of whether Hawai‘i’s racially mixed population was “fit” for U.S. statehood.)1 For the most part, however, Hawai‘i’s racial aloha was represented as an embodiment of U.S. ideals. For the first time, the government promoted international tourism as a way for citizens to appreciate and contribute to foreign affairs. These processes required a shift in the gravitational center of U.S. cultural production about Oceania from primitivist fantasy toward an ostensibly more realistic and pragmatic synthesis of the old romances and drives within a vision of

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 151 national destiny. For scholars and writers in Hawai‘i who sought to publicize the islands, Hawai‘i history became a touristic selling point, a means of bolstering the cultural prestige of the Islands, while lauding the U.S. state for its democratic achievement. A most enthusiastic and influential booster, James Michener, argued, in “Hawaii: The Case for Our Fiftieth-State” (1953), that Every American who can possibly do so ought to visit Hawaii. It is a rare experience: physical beauty, exotic flowers, a new way of life and a social experiment of world importance. No American could visit these fortunate islands without feeling proud that they are part of his country. (Michener 1973: 115) The construction of U.S. expansion in Oceania required, in this sense, not so much what Cristina Klein terms an elision of the “history of U.S. territorial imperialism” as new modes of narrating and interpreting such history (Klein 2003: 120), a history about which, in Michener’s terms, U.S. citizens could congratulate themselves. The “new” history reactivated the centuries-old bifurcated narratives by gazing through military and touristic optics, while articulating these with an enthusiastic race-relations narrative in which, as John F. Kennedy put it, Hawai‘i “is what the rest of the world is trying to be.” (“While immigrants flocked into the mainland and plundered the West,” Leon Edel writes, “we showed the way to racial harmony” [Edel 1988: 27].) For the dominant mode of Cold War writing from Hawai‘i that advanced these views I coin the term “histouricism.” Almost invariably optimistic, familiar, and addressed at general audiences, histouricism’s characteristics include: 1

2

3

a conflation of the authority of history writing with the agency-mystifying and glossing qualities of touristic writing, along with a linking of the aims of history-producing institutions with the interests of the tourist industry, seen as vital to national concerns an imperial, developmental view of history, written from its imagined democratic result, that asserts a continuous historical U.S. relation to Hawai‘i, while employing romantic and distancing strategies, in which Hawaiian spirituality and socio-political forms are presented as atavism, so that alternative narrations of nation are thus “attached to the prehistory of the nation and become sites attainable only through regression” [Lloyd 1998: 181) an unconscious confusion about how to discuss race in relation to culture: histouricism styles itself as anti-racist while often falling back into racist categorizing and ignoring labor and race/class issues.

Whether in the form of social histories, novels, magazine profiles of the islands, or literary anthologies that claimed to be regional history, histouricism presents history as a “tour,” essentializes group characteristics, and takes on the structure of guidebooks. A series of events or group experiences are formulaically returned to and offered up nostalgically, accompanied by photographs, illustrations, and

152 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms profiles of colorful characters, rogues and heroes. In effect, this serves as a commercial substitute for “traditional stories and local traditions” (Rosenzweig 1986: 27). At the same time, the histouricism of the period – its consensus about the main lines and meaning of U.S.–Hawaiian historical relation, along with Asian immigration and the future of East–West relations – was self-consciously a media campaign, the promotion of both a place and a nationalistic viewpoint. The world was watching and Hawai‘i was (re)figured as a new “city on the hill,” or what Betty Farrington, echoing John Winthrop, called the “lighthouse of the Pacific” (quoted in Day 1993: 283). “Hawaiian statehood,” governor William Quinn would claim, “gives tangible evidence to awakening millions in Asia and Africa that the United States is no colonial power, but means what it says about equality of races and the democratic process” (quoted in Simpich 1960: 45). If U.S. citizens needed convincing about the effects of the “civilizing mission,” they needed only to visit Hawai‘i, which piece after piece reminded readers had been advanced from the Stone Age, through feudalism, to modernity in a century. Histouricism guides metropolitan readers behind the “front” of the hula girl and waving palms, icons on maps of the Islands, to the processes “behind” their appropriation that resulted in the integration and cultivation of Hawaiians and Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i is presented not as ruined Eden but as paradise redeemed in Cold War terms. As suggested, such amenable history, like the explicitly archivally grounded history written by U.S. scholars, was constituted in part by the elision of indigenous viewpoints, and written by people with no working knowledge of Hawaiian language, in which the Kingdom of Hawai‘i had conducted its international and domestic business for a century. In this sense, while there is a spectrum of views in Hawaiian historiography, that continuum remains within a colonial logic. Within histouricism, when a Native speaks it is generally to validate the U.S. perspective, by adopting the viewpoint that the triumph of Anglo-Saxon systems of governance was inevitable and benevolent in comparison to other colonial situations. “I have been privileged to see most of the Polynesian people living in the world today,” Michener writes, “and in most respects the Hawaiian is incomparably better off than his brothers . . . these are not just my opinions. I have spoken with some dozen Hawaiians.” (Michener does report that, aside from this representative dozen, “A few die-hard romanticists seek to restore the Hawaiian monarchy and establish a kingdom,” but notes mockingly that “since every one of them expects to be prime minister, the plan lags” [Michener 1973: 137, 140].) Similarly, the eugenicist Stanley Porteus, who presented himself as a liberal lover of Hawai‘i by juxtaposing his views with those of Southern senators, assures his readers in Calabashes and Kings: An Introduction to Hawaii (1945) that “in comparison also with other Pacific lands the impact of civilization on Hawaii was quite gentle” (Porteus 1945: 10).2 In seeking to naturalize a teleology in which the progressive march of U.S. democracy is set against the regressiveness of any notion of Hawaiian sovereignty, histouricism meshes imperial theories of history with informal, entertaining historical anecdotalism into what tourism theorists term “edutainment” (Urry 1991: 154), in which the boundary between “science and pleasure” collapses (Lutz and Collins 1993: 24–7). Without exploring the political implications, John Urry

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 153 discusses ways in which “Holidays are not so straightforwardly contrasted with education and learning as in the past. In a wide variety of ways much tourism is coming to be more closely interwoven with learning. . . . A great deal of research by professional historians has been undertaken to produce both the displays and the large number of supporting documents, given to or sold to visitors” (Urry 1991: 54, 110). In the case of magazines such as National Geographic and American History, the combination of “fact”-based, institutionally certified knowledges and entertainment masked senses in which both functioned as instruments of national policy. From the turn of the century, National Geographic mixed in consular reports, inventories of commercial resources, and even requests from “territorial authorities” in Hawai‘i for “home-builders who are strong and industrious” (Wood 1908: 299). The 1951 issue of American Heritage devoted to Hawai‘i was tantamount to an argument for statehood, as evidenced by Ralph Kuykendall’s summary position on the overthrow, that “Destiny had to wait until economic and cultural influence had drawn the nations closer together and prepared the way for a formal political union” (Kuykendall 1951: 31). The chatty, digressive tone of histouricist narrative preempts potentially conflictual dialogue or imperialist nostalgia and fits well with the notional compression of the period. Presenting itself as unassuming, casual, and addressed to the essentially moral, middlebrow imagination, histouricism is a Reader’s Digest condensation of history – predigested for the reader – which provides textual transport to a past that has the novelty and romance of a once foreign country. When this takes place around Hawai‘i, presented to metropolitan readers as at once foreign and domesticated, with the assumption that Hawaii can be more appreciatively visited by those who have been taught something of its history, there is a disordered mix of temporalities and pronoun-marked cultural relations. Hawaii is presented as a “there” to which members of the “we” may travel to discover the fitness of a “they” to join the “we,” though never quite. Hawaiians are both integrated citizens and poster children, posing at traditional activities. In Porteus’s Calabashes, a picture of two Hawaiians with a fishing net is explained, “except for the nails, cotton malos, and diving glasses, 100 percent Hawaiian” (Porteus 1945: 212). There is no disengaging in this from the sense of Oceanians as remnants of a colorfully tragic history. At the same time, histouricism is committed to a view of history – providential, nation-building history – that frames tourism as a culmination of national progress. Like tourist boards, the histouricist emphasizes both primitivity and its domestication within modernity. This forces histouricist promoters away from the simple nostalgic narrative toward multiply directioned narratives that celebrate tourism’s role in both development and cultural preservation. In the shift away from an emphasis on primitivity, valued aspects of primitivity are retained – aloha spirit, hospitality, hula, sensuality all remain as inextinguishable aspects of an Oceanian subjectivity that rub off on other ethnicities in Hawai‘i. As Hawaiians were further displaced, the pages of Paradise of the Pacific were filled with reaffirmations of Hawaiian hospitality: Robert Corbaley, for instance, wrote that,

154 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms No hungry one must leave their door. Hawaiians are a race apart, All hospitality and heart. Nor can the hand of time erase Or malihini thrift debase The pristine virtues of their race. (Corbaley 1934: 1) While such hospitality was celebrated, histouricism split it from cultural context and history. In a prefatory note to Ancient Hawaiian Civilization (1933), Frank Midkiff, later Eisenhower’s High Commissioner for the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, argues that “in no case were strangers visiting [Hawaiian] shores treated with other than hospitality and friendliness” (Midkiff 1999: i). However, when Hawaiians assert cultural memory, it is often regarded as romantic and nostalgic, as when Lawrence Fuchs in Hawaii Pono (1961) describes Hawaiians as forgetting how cruel and “feudal” their society was, and thus withdrawing into “an unreal past in which fact and fiction were often blurred” (Fuchs 1961: 75). In this Fuchs follows settler-academics such as E. S. C. Handy, who noted the “definite tendency on the part of Hawaiians to draw apart” and opined that it would be unfortunate for the Hawaiian people to “intensify their race consciousness so that they want to stand apart from other races,” and Andrew Lind’s observation that “the Native Hawaiian . . . famed alike for hospitality and his readiness to marry outside his group, has suffered seriously from lack of communal morale” (Lind 1951: 77). All encouraged Hawaiians with an inclusive belief that “the things on which the Hawaiians pride themselves most are things which do not really belong to any race but to the place” (Handy 1933: 17). Place trumps race and appropriates culture, and genealogy is to be dissolved into civic participation in the state. In contrast to the earlier cannibal tour (which structurally misses its object and finds modes of containing disappointment) or the lotus-eater fiction (set aside of, or just ahead of, a pursuing history that it dodges), in histouricism the objects of tourism are regarded not as what has been lost, but as what has been saved. Where cannibal tourism affects a liberal and critical politics and lotus-eater fiction aspires to apoliticism, histouricism has a celebratory political agenda. In its redemptive marketing, tourism recuperates and redistributes the aura of the past as the reward for industrial progress, as part of the vacation breaks motivating the labor that moves civilization. Histouricism does not deny that along the modernizing way “overthrows” occurred. Rather, it frames “overthrows” in ways that gloss or justify their costs from the vantage point of promotional narratives. Such narratives represent “natives” as having desired intervention, and as sharing its benefits. In other words, histouricism discloses tourism as never simple nostalgia but as fetishized history that breaks up Otherness in order to assimilate it to the gazer’s needs. Here tourism exemplifies what Frantz Fanon calls the “perverted logic” by which the indigenous past is fragmented, disfigured, selectively reordered, and parceled out (Fanon 1963: 210; see also Wendt 1987: 187–8). Consider, for example, the following typical accounts of how the U.S. acquired Hawai‘i:

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 155 In 1893 Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown by prominent businessmen and the U.S. military. Hawaii was suddenly under the jurisdiction of a United States provisional government. The Republic of Hawaii came into existence on July 4, 1894, with Sanford B. Dole, a missionary descendent, as president. The islands were annexed by the United States in 1898 and made a territory in 1900. Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959, ending the campaign for statehood that had begun at the turn of the century. Today Hawaii’s population exceeds one million and Honolulu is the country’s 11th largest city. Unique in so many ways, our islands offer endless opportunity for informative exploration, sightseeing and cultural enrichment. (Oahu Gold May 1996) *

*

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A revolution, led mainly by American residents who desired that the Polynesian kingdom should become annexed to its closest neighbor nation, in 1893 overthrew Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian queen, who was trying to force the people to go back to the days of strong rule by the crown. Despite a royalist counter-revolution in 1895, the Republic of Hawaii survived until 1898, when the Spanish-American War revealed to the United States the importance of Pearl Harbor as a Pacific defense station. Hawaii became an organized territory, self-governing under Congress. Visitors curious to view this new possession began to come in increasing numbers. (Day 1971: 56) Both passages obfuscate the illegality of the overthrow by presenting it apart from Hawaiian response, or the objection within the U.S. on a variety of grounds, constitutional to economic. The reliance on the passive voice in the passages makes the events seem guided by forces beyond human agency.3 The Republic “came into existence” on Independence Day, as an extension of the U.S. revolutionary impulse, and, after its strategic importance was “revealed” by the SpanishAmerican War, the Republic “became an organized territory.” The events are recited in the formulaic, upbeat tone of the tour guide. The reader who visits this “place” in history without prior knowledge is powerless to interrogate the facts and absolved from trying. Tour guides transfer responsibility for the expression of “facts” to the agencies for which they work. Their lines are performed from a script without an author, or a script generated and perpetuated by an archive. One of the above quotations is from a weekly tourist brochure, Oahu Gold, available on every block of Waiki¯ki¯. The other, arguably “more” touristic passage, is from a work of literary scholarship, Jack London in the South Seas (1971) by A. Grove Day, a University of Hawai‘i professor whom Michener called “the foremost authority on Pacific literature” (Michener 1986: xii). Both the tourist brochure and the scholar’s account sublate Hawaiian sovereignty to narratives of a democratic acquisition from which everyone is presumed to benefit. While Day describes the “residents” as defending the public against a queen who was “trying to force the people back,” he does not mention that nearly every adult Hawaiian in the

156 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms aftermath of the overthrow – close to 30,000 – signed petitions to the U.S. government pleading for restitution of the monarchy. The legality and desirability of the overthrow has always been staunchly contested in Hawai‘i, and not only by Hawaiians.4 At the overthrow Hawaiians wore headbands saying “Aloha ‘a¯ina” (love the land, the name of a political party) and refused to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag. Many haole-settler families remained staunchly royalist. The first passage implies a “campaign for statehood” among all of Hawai‘i’s peoples, irrespective of race or class interest, from the overthrow onward, and neglects to mention that, in the referendum on statehood, independence from the U.S. was not on the ballot. Hence, many Hawaiians did not participate in the election. Day’s histourical account implies that fed-up Hawaiians agreed to be “led mainly by American residents.” In actuality, these “residents” were a cabalistic handful of Anglo-Saxon industrialists, and not leaders of a populist revolution. Insofar as they were citizens of a nation recognized by many international treaties, their actions were treasonous violations of international law. They orchestrated an annexation by which they would personally benefit and carried it out with marines and the aid of unauthorized representatives of the U.S. government.

The spectre of A. Grove Day: American Pacificist scholarship, boosterism, and the racial unconscious of Americanization Americanization of Hawaii’s people was the watchword. However, many persons were not optimistic that this aim could be achieved, because so much of the population was made up of people from Asia. . . . The Oriental aliens were barred by law from becoming American citizens. Their children born in the islands were citizens under the Organic Act and the United States Constitution. Could they be made Americans in spirit as well? A. Grove Day, Hawaii and Points South

That the tourist brochure and Day’s histourical accounts of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom are similar in style, histourical vision, and a grounding racialism that blocks from view indigenous agency in making or recording history, suggests continuities between scholarship about Oceania and touristic writing. Day’s work exemplifies the upbeat, jingoistic spirit of U.S. public “scholarship” about Oceania – at once celebratory of the “Americanization” of the islands and nostalgically drawn to the region’s adventurous history (“Hawaii’s Romantic History,” as one of Day’s articles titled it). All dissenting views to this narrative are omitted, dismissed, misrepresented, or ridiculed. Thus Day describes the Blount Report, which was based on months of research and interviews, as a deliberate “whitewashing” that misled President Cleveland into opposing U.S. annexation (Day 1993: 217). Such apologetics informed newspaper columns, editorials, magazine articles, and anthologies about Hawai‘i and Oceania through the Civil Rights movements, when, as signaled by the Hawaiian Renaissance and the rise of

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 157 the ethnic studies program at the University of Hawai‘i, an oppositional discourse emerged to challenge Cold War triumphalism (Aoudé 1999). However, that in the post-Civil Rights period there was little objection to histouricism outside of Hawai‘i – which continued alongside the rising anti-imperialist, ethnonationalist scholarship – indexes the exotic (and marginal) position Oceania holds in the U.S. public imagination. Day’s fact-filled writings about Oceania – he wrote, edited, and collected well over fifty books about the region, in addition to entries on Hawai‘i for the World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica – illuminate the prolonged histouricist moment (roughly 1945–70) in which it seemed progressive for “kamaaina haole” to publicize the territory’s achievements on behalf of its various ethnic groups, none of whom, Day and others imply, were themselves authors of expressive literature or social history. Day angled his texts toward white readers outside of the islands, as is clear in a characteristic reference to “a time when our European ancestors were hugging the shores of their narrow seas” (Day 1992: 5). At the same time, his histouricist presentation of racial progress involved a call for civil rights for minorities. That this was resisted by the corporate oligarchy in Hawai‘i and Southern senators could make the Hawai‘i histouricists look like comparative liberals in the public sphere. Day and Ralph Kuykendall’s Hawaii: A History (1948), for instance, addresses “those who are concerned about that fitness of Hawaii’s people to become citizens” (Kuykendall and Day 1976: vi). For Day, racism is overt acts of discrimination, such as Jim Crow or miscegenation laws, which he is proud do not exist in Hawai‘i. Against open bigots, Day (whose wife was Mexican and whose dissertation, supervised by Yvor Winters, was on Native-American poetry) celebrates Hawai‘i’s diversity, though only insofar as ethnic peoples can be Americanized in his “Melting Pot of the Pacific,” or transformed into what he calls “neo”-Hawaiians: “The ‘neo-Hawaiians’ of today,” Day writes, “alert, healthy, and smiling – are an outstanding proof of the power of American ideals to build citizens even on islands far from the continental coast” (Day 1993: 237). By these standards, Americanization is the highest state, and much of Oceania remains relatively behind on the developmental scale. While Day never used ethnic slurs or begrudged a capable non-white person office, the assumption throughout his work is that white people have uplifted other ethnic groups, so that where non-white people succeed it confirms the power of U.S. ideals. At no point does histouricism give readers a means to consider the cultural costs of Americanization, or make space within its discourse for those who are being “Americanized.” Whether consciously or not, Day often reverses the responsibility for damaging U.S. policies, such as the outlawing of the Hawaiian language in schools in 1896, during the provisional government period. He refers to “the abandonment of the Hawaiian language as a medium of instruction” (Day 1992: 82), as if Hawaiians had voluntarily commited linguistic suicide. Today, in an age of language revitalization, nearly every surviving kupuna (Hawaiian elder) recalls the punishments they received as children for speaking Hawaiian in school, with the tragic result that most stopped speaking and the next generation never learned. Such unpleasant details are systematically ignored or glossed. Certainly, in authors

158 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms that Day admires, such as Melville, a critique of this process was available. In his “South Seas” lecture, Melville “beg[ged] to offer up an earnest prayer” against annexation, and claimed to have thrown down the Hawaiian newspaper when he read of a movement to “abolish the Hawaiian language in the schools and exclude those children who speak it” (Melville 1987: 420). However, Day introduces the “South Seas” lecture by crediting it with the “prediction” that the islands would “eventually be annexed to the American Union” (Day 1970: 273), as if Melville endorsed the overthrow. A telling quality of Day’s account of the overthrow, discussed above, is the ease and absurdity with which it glides from annexation by “residents” to their “closest neighbor nation” – as if islands 2,300 miles from North America had a geographic proximity – to a discussion of the tourist industry and the role of literary writers in promoting Hawai‘i. After his justifying sketch of the overthrow, made in the context of a book about Jack London in Oceania, Day continues: “When the Londons toured the islands in 1907, however, most Americans did not know the charm of this group of mid-Pacific islands, now the Fiftieth State. Jack set out to describe some of its wonders for his readers” (Day 1971: 56). This promotion of Hawai‘i as an under-recognized U.S. attraction is what Day and many of his colleagues were most invested in with their “historical” accounts and literary and social scholarship. The form of Day’s books about Hawai‘i and Oceania, generally involving collations and recyclings of shorter pieces written for popular venues, follows a touristic structure – anecdotes about pirates, rogues, blackbirders, or other “rascals in paradise” (as a bestselling collection of profiles Day co-authored with Michener called them) are jumbled together as histourical attractions. (Day lectured on “Pacific Literature” on cruise ships.) Oceanian sites become tourist markers when consecrated by literary representation. Thus Day describes Twain’s Letters as “laden with dozens of descriptions of scenic features of the islands that are still landmarks today” (Day 1987: xii). Through London or Twain or Melville – and avoiding at all points their anti-imperialistic writings – Day describes the “charm” of the islands: London kept repeating that he could not understand why Oahu, which he called “the garden of the world,” was not thronged with tourists. . . . Jack kept shaking his head about the lack of interest of the American people in their recent possession. “They don’t know what they’ve got!” he said. “Just watch this land in the future, when once they wake up!” He could not guess that, partly because of his writings, more than a million people a year would come in the 1970s to the Pali Lookout to visit this panorama in the Fiftieth State. (Day 1971: 62) In this sense, descriptions of the postwar construction of Hawai‘i as “a blank appeal to the tourist world” (Sumida 1992: 215) that denies history minimize the damaging effects of histouricism. Day does not deny history, and cannot be accused of ignoring “facts.” Rather, every word of his texts implies that it rests on capacious archival research and insider’s knowledge democratically aimed at wide

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 159 audiences. Day provides no sources or notes, admits no uncertainties, posits no alternative interpretations, and reprints essays thirty years later without revision, as if revision would admit ambivalence. At the same time, whether seeing “through” literary texts or the research of prior scholars, he angles history toward promoting Hawai‘i. Thus, in the “Foreword” to Hawaii: A History, which was “a required text for the large courses in History of Hawaii at the University” for several decades (Day 1974: 20), Day skips between an imperial vision – “it is believed that a reading of Hawaii’s eventful history will give many clues to the future of America’s role in the Pacific era” – and a touristic assurance that “the romance of swaying palm trees and hula skirts has not passed away” (Day and Kuykendall 1976: v). In such passages, where scholarship, imperial politics, and touristic promotion have become fully conflated as part of a democracy-extending mission, “front” (Pacific scholarship) and “back” (touristic desire) are coin of the same realm. In this promotion of Hawai‘i it is not so much Day at issue as a structural position that he occupied within the institutions of the period, including the universities and publishers which validated him, the Cold War imaginary of which he seems an overdetermined instance, and the statehood movement. If Michener ultimately plugs into the main nerve of American ideology vis-à-vis Oceania, behind him are the town-and-gown local experts and informants, with their system of journals and newspapers, and the university Days, whose “expertise” Michener promoted (on the Day–Michener connection see Grobel 1999: 56–7). That conditions existed within and outside the academy in which Day functioned as expert reveals core values underwriting major U.S. socio-political institutions. If Day’s representations have little of value to say about Oceanian peoples and cultures and the complexities of intercultural relation, they disclose the means by which his expertise could be constituted. What is at issue then, as Anne Anlin Cheng argues, is not “the real versus the unreal,” but the “question of how those categories come to acquire their particular status and currency” (Cheng 1995: 180). After statehood Day’s views became fixed, though statehood always remained for him the culminating moment of the U.S. telos in the islands. He recurrently uses phrases such as “From Polynesian Kingdom to American State,” or “From Primitive Times to Statehood,” and habitually references nineteenth century Hawai‘i as the “future fiftieth state.” Day’s post-statehood attention turned to establishing and promoting a tradition of fine “Pacific” writing that asserted a durable Euroamerican cultural connection to the islands. If annexation fulfilled “what seemed to be the destiny of the Hawaiian islands” (Day 1993: 213), once Hawai‘i officially became U.S., its history and culture were, retroactively, “American” history, and had always been U.S. history in the making. Day regards any revival of indigenous political will as “backsliding” (ibid.: 104). Thus, through his readings of Melville, Twain, Stoddard, and London – writers he claims “helped mould the intellectual character of these islands” – Day outlines an American Pacificist trajectory. Twain’s letters are “an early prophecy of what America’s role in the Pacific was to become in the century ahead of him” (Day 1987: 92). Regarding London, Day asks, “What other writer at this early date better glimpsed

160 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms the role of America in Asia and in the Pacific, ocean of the future?” Of Melville: “through his eyes we can see what the Pacific, America’s ocean of the future, was like during America’s past” (ibid.: xxi, 60). The phrase “through his eyes” typifies Day’s habit of authorizing his viewpoints by attributing them to literary figures. Thus he argues that Twain “would not . . . have satirized the missionaries themselves, for these were the ones who brought the light of religion and civilization to the islands” (ibid.: 100), despite the fact that Twain’s narrow-minded journals frequently accuse missionaries of bigotry and hypocrisy, as in his comment about British missionaries: “a hundred preachers to save 50,000 niggers [Hawaiians], & they decreasing at a rate of 12 percent. Double the preachers & you double this percent” (Twain 1975b: 135). (In Roughing It, Twain writes of Hawaiians, who are “almost as dark as negroes,” “As soon as we set sail the natives all lay down on the deck as thick as negroes in a slave-pen” [Twain 1872: 456, 498].) The degree to which Day’s remediation constitutes a conscription of “classic” writers into the project of promoting Oceanian destinations comes out in the guidebook snippets that punctuate his writing. In the middle of “social history” Day writes, “This was the first Volcano House, on a site not far from the present world-famed hostelry reached by automobile from Hilo in less than an hour” (Day 1993: 185). In a literary introduction he argues that Maugham’s “best descriptions of Pacific amenities are to be found in a story that should have attracted droves of sun-seekers to head at once for French Oceania” (Day 1987: 177). (Like Twain, Maugham described Oceanians as “niggers.”) Likewise, Day lauds Twain’s decision not to mention leprosy in his “Letters” for fear of “discourag[ing] foreign investment.” More tellingly, Day argues that Twain, who discovered his comic voice while mocking key events in Hawaiian history in works containing derisive illustrations of Hawaiians, made important contributions to the literature of the Hawaiian islands because “what he wrote is still being . . . used in advertisements, and quoted over dinner tables” (ibid.: 286, ix).5 Though Day’s writings rarely attracted the broad mainland audiences he sought, his works remain popular among tourists in Hawai‘i, and are frequently cited by Americanist scholarship, and he played a significant role in authorizing Euroamerican writing about Oceania. For a forty-year period, Day’s diligent, public-spirited work functioned decisively, as Jonathan Arac says of F. O. Mathiessen, “in making possible the American academic study” of literature about Oceania (Arac 1985: 90). This involved delimiting the field in the service of what Mathiessen described as “the dynamic extension of democracy” (quoted in ibid.: 95), with evasions, denials, and omissions made in the interest of democratic wholeness feeding “a postwar myth of empire” (ibid.: 99). The racial politics undergirding this myth in Oceania are clearest in Mad About Islands: Novelists of a Vanished Pacific, a collection of profiles about his canon of “Pacific” writers written over a thirty-year period. In his introductory chapters, as in the profiles themselves, Day reproduces the race-based developmental narrative that percolates up through the archive from the nineteenth century.6 Thus, in “London’s Heart of Darkness,” Day speaks of London’s yacht leaving the “friendly great region of Polynesia” for the Poe-esque “threshold of Melanesia,

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 161 the islands of black men, Oceanic Negroes – a region running from Fiji all the way to the Solomon Islands and the tip of dark New Guinea” (Day 1987: 166). Because the peoples of New Guinea have darker skins than those of Polynesia, New Guinea becomes “dark” or “black,” and places such as Mailita are “horrible” with “avid black headhunters” (ibid.: 170). At best, Day lauds London’s ability to “descry strong qualities even in a small Melanesian” (Day 1990: xxv). Here then is Day, in a work that in 1987 assumes his audience’s complete ignorance about Oceanians, distinguishing among Oceanian types: The people of Melanesia, the “black islands” that extend from the mass of New Guinea eastward to the Fiji group, are termed Oceanic Negroes. . . . They closely resemble the earliest inhabitants of the continent of Africa. Equally primitive are the Melanesian regions of the Solomons and the New Hebrides. Their histories reveal constant local wars in search of human heads and bodies, for the ancestors of most Melanesians were bold cannibals and proud warriors whose lives reveal what conditions must have been like in the Old Stone Age. (Day 1987: 21, 22) In contrast, Day sees Polynesians as further evolved, since at the time of encountering Euroamericans they were “usually governed under a tribal system resembling the feudal ties of Europe in the Middle Ages” (ibid.: 30). These islanders, Day writes, “have large, deep faces, with long and broad noses and eyes which lack the Mongolian ‘slant.’ The beauty of Polynesian women is one of the great themes of South Sea literature” (ibid.: 28). Day prefers Polynesians – beauty aside – because, in contrast to the “black” Melanesians, who coveted material possessions, they were “interested in such things as etiquette, government, religion, literature, and arts and crafts” (ibid.: 30).

Histouricist par excellence: James Michener’s Hawai‘i and Hawaii The semiofficial guide to our lovely shores . . . Today, when a ship or airplane deposits visitors on our shores, sometimes as many as half of them arrive with copies of his book under their arms. And the important thing about this is that they have all derived from Michener’s writing an appreciation of the wonderful strains of the human family that have blended together to help us build our paradise. Congressman Daniel K. Inouye on Hawaii (1962) If you like your history in novel form, you’ll enjoy James Michener’s Hawaii for its overall perspective. Fodors Hawaii (2004)

162 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms Within American Pacificist thought it has always been assumed, whether as warning or prophecy, that the effects of “civilization” in Hawai‘i prefigure what will happen socio-politically to the rest of Oceania. In the U.S. imagination, Hawai‘i gauges the cost-benefits of “progress” in the islands. For anti-conquest writers such as Herman Melville, Hawai‘i in 1843 represents the worst case scenario, in which “the small remnant of the natives have been civilized into draught horses,” and “evangelized into beasts of burden” (Melville 1968a: 196). Melville’s views of Hawaiian government, as expressed in the “appendix” to Typee, were certainly muddled, offensive, and influenced by British informants in the wake of the Paulet affair (Kaiwi 2003; Avallone 2003). However, his strongest impressions were that disease and vice were devastating once happy, healthy, unsuspecting peoples. In Typee, Marquesans are just beginning to be contaminated by civilization; the Tahiti pictured in Omoo as “half-civilized” represents the midway point of a “fatal embrace.” Henry Adams, more ambivalent in his aristocratic anti-conquest sentiments, repeatedly compares various Oceanian islands to Hawai‘i in order to deplore the possibility that, “In twenty or thirty years, the Americans will swoop down, and Tahiti will become another Hawaii, populated by sugar-canes and Japanese laborers” (Adams 1982: 412). For Michener, the figure regarded as most authoritative about Oceania during the Cold War period (the New York Times claimed that to “think of the Pacific is to think of Michener” [quoted in Klein 2003: 120]), Hawai‘i tells the opposite story. In his view, Hawai‘i history illustrates a spectacular triumph of U.S. civilizing principles, and duplicates the development of the U.S.’s best self. “Like America,” he writes in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, characteristically dismissing the grounds for indigenous rights claims, “Hawaii was settled entirely from without. I appreciate Hawaii because one can see here, postponed by a couple of centuries all the influences and experiences that some generations ago combined to produce America” (quoted in Hayes 1984: 140). Michener, in other words, asserts that all racial groups in Hawai‘i are equally settlers and co-contributors to an exemplary democracy. For all Michener’s progressive beliefs about multiculturalism, however, it is clear throughout his work that for him the formation of modern institutions in Hawai‘i, like the making of the U.S., results from the industry of a particular mix of Anglo-Saxon traits, ultimately guided by a “tremendous New England force” of character (Michener 1984a: 679). The view is common, as in W. Storrs Lee’s sense, extending the beliefs of the early missionaries themselves, that missionaries transplanted a presumably missing “New England conscience, a sense of right and duty, a sense of values and of moral obligation, concern for posterity” (Lee 1966: 385). Along these lines, Michener presents the U.S. settlers in Hawai‘i as actors in a Freudian psycho-drama, in which competing components of AngloAmerican personality – stern missionaries (superego), beachcombers (id), and Christian traders (ego) – play out a telos of national maturation. In the end, for Michener, “Hawaii is an extension of New England” (Michener 1973: 141). At the same time, contemporary Hawai‘i reads in Hawaii as what Stephen Sumida calls “an allegory in which the Polynesian represents Nobility and Aloha; the Chinese represents Tenacity and Shrewdness in business; the Japanese represents Loyalty

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 163 and Competence; the haole, that is, the Caucasian, represents Technological Power, Ambition, and, somehow, Godliness” (Sumida 1991: 72). Where the settling of Hawai‘i differs from that of the U.S. continent, for Michener, and where he believes it has a pedagogic role to play, is on the subject of race relations: there is no legacy of slavery to contend with in Hawai‘i, no segregation. On this point, Michener inspired and moved in alliance with a series of effusive articles in Life, Newsweek, and other mainstream magazines. Part of the appeal of imagining Hawai‘i as racially harmonious, whatever the material conditions dividing ethnic groups in the Islands, was that it “allowed Michener and other commentators to recast American race relations in Asian–white terms rather than in the more fraught black–white terms” (Klein 2003: 261). The legendary Polynesian hospitality, or aloha spirit, provides a base ingredient for what Rob Wilson describes as “the melting pot sublime” (Wilson 2000a: 173). Racial problems here are solved by being dissolved. For Porteus, “the Hawaiians have been the universal blood donors to the melting-pot and exhibit every possible kind of interracial progeny. They have disproved, for all time, the theory that mixed bloods are necessarily inferior” (Porteus 1945: 129). Even Lawrence Fuchs, following Michener’s method in profiling whole “races” in terms of their collective ambitions, sees “aloha” as “an authentic Polynesian tradition which rubbed off on the Islands’ newcomers as the years went by” (Fuchs 1961: 85).7 This view of history – that modern Hawai‘i is the creation of U.S. institutions and New England moral industry and teaching – grounds Michener’s argument for statehood which, fortuitously, promises both to contribute to realizing the U.S.’s oldest trade ambitions and Cold War containment requirements. “By every man-made law of good government, education, philosophy, language and airplane,” Michener wrote in “Hawaii: The Case for Our Fiftieth State” (1953), “Hawaii belongs to North America, and it is one of the appropriate breaks of history that this focal group of islands should be available to serve as America’s western gateway to Asia” (Michener 1973: 100).8 In Michener’s view, Hawai‘i is “available” in several complimentary senses: it is a “focal group” in the geopolitical sense and it is a mythic tourist attraction. Michener correctly predicts that tourism and the military will facilitate the switch from a plantation economy to a liberal democracy, though he evades the dynamics by which underclasses – formed largely along racial lines – will join or service the military or work in the tourist industry, perhaps by cleaning hotels. Among the many authors who have promoted tourism in Oceania – and nearly every U.S. writer in Oceania has – Michener is the most assured, civically demagogic, and spectacularly successful. While he claimed the classic role – to “entertain and instruct” (Grobel 1999: 238) – he saw himself as a promoter of state and corporate interests, backed by a set of political beliefs (in 1954, for instance, he became president of Fund for Asia, Inc.). In a series of articles for Reader’s Digest, the U.S.’s most widely circulated magazine (an average issue was read 168 million times [Hayes 1984: 97]), he blazoned the Islands, at times embarrassing even tourist officials. Of “Hawaii: A State of Happiness,” the public relations director of the Hawaii Visitors Bureau wrote, “Sometimes I wish Hawaii were as fine as you

164 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms make it out to be. . . . [you have written] a grand plug . . . it’s about all we could ask for” (quoted in ibid.: 142). Daniel K. Inouye likewise praised Michener’s writing for bringing “the attention of the world to this glamorous, lovely area” (quoted in Day 1987: 242). At the same time, Michener was widely considered, as Day put it, “the person who has done most to make his fellow Americans aware of the dangers and challenges that the United States must face as the course of empire, taking its westward way, has come full circle and is now eyeball to eyeball with the East” (quoted in Klein 2003: 121). In testimony given on behalf of Hawaiian Airlines in the trans-Pacific route case (1959), Michener (whom the report calls “an expert in interpreting the fundamental social and economic trends taking place in the Pacific Ocean area”) characteristically links politics, economics, and tourist promotion: “Hawaiian Airlines can serve as our national emissary to . . . both the Orient and the South Pacific, partly because of the magic of her name; we represent a way of life here. We represent equality between people. We represent an allure that is marketable” (Michener 1959: 1, 17). In the same speech he shuttled between assertions that “The new State of Hawaii is an instrument of international policy” and reminders that “People in these islands have a positive facility for dealing with travelers to and from” Asia and the South Pacific (ibid.: 14, 17), twisting together fabled Polynesian hospitality and the notion that Asian Americans are culturally equipped and disposed to act as greeters for Asian tourists. By far Michener’s most influential promotional work is the massive Hawaii. First published in the same year as statehood was achieved, with full-page ads in all of the major book reviews and newspapers, the book sold 200,000 copies within the first two months. In succeeding years it would sell over 5 million copies and be made into a blockbuster movie. The movie itself, like most films shot in Hawai‘i (whether set in the past or the present), displayed the landscape as essentially undeveloped. Such movies remove from the viewer’s frame all destructive effects of development in Hawai‘i and present images that articulate with tourist brochures.9 As Michener later claimed to have anticipated, U.S. citizens were curious about their latest acquisition: “Long before Hawaii became a state, or had assumed its central role in the Pacific, I perceived that this would happen, and that Americans of all persuasions would be concerned about Hawaii and would want to know more about it” (Michener 1973: 100). Certainly, one reason Michener wrote Hawaii was to inform a mass audience about Hawai‘i’s history, and the book was, for the most part, taken by reviewers as historical representation, or what the Houston Chronicle termed a “biography of a people” (Michener 1984a: flap-copy). The book was hotly contested in Hawai‘i by reviewers who objected to its ethnic stereotypes and distortions of history. University of Hawai‘i history professor Charles Hunter, for instance, accused Michener of “ignoring historical fact” (quoted in Lindley 1960: 75).10 No Hawaiian character in the novel comes close to saying anything articulate about the Hawaiian relation to ‘a¯ina, the importance of mo‘oku¯auhau (genealogy), the relation between ali‘i and maka‘a¯inana, or any aspect of the many branches of Hawaiian knowledge. Yet Hawaii was widely praised on the U.S. continent for its research and cultural authority. It is often included in the

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 165 historical bibliography of encyclopedia entries on Hawai’i, as well as in most tourist guides to the Islands. Hawaii is undoubtedly more responsible for the popular view of the history and cultural formation of Hawai‘i in the U.S. imagination than any other single work. In his introductory note Michener wrote that, while a novel, the book was “true to the spirit and history of Hawaii.” (He would later say of his method, “I take a pledge not to fake anything, not to give spurious quotes or portray a person contrary to what the facts are” [Grobel 1999: 44].) The book is clearly the product of extensive and understandably ill-digested research (Michener wrote its thousand pages in a year), and both models fictional characters on historical ones and invents dialogue for what are presented as historical situations. Arguments among AngloSaxon residents about how, why, and whether to overthrow the government are staged to give the main lines of their reasoning and follow accounts of conversations recorded by participants in the overthrow. For many critics Michener’s use of “faction” raises questions about how accountable he is to standards of historical accuracy. However, one might argue that the book’s demonstrable inaccuracies, fabrications, and gaffes in describing cultural practices are less damaging than the running interpretative gloss on Hawaiian history that Michener provides on his unfolding story. Whether what are presented as “facts” are facts, Michener reads facts and fiction alike through a didactic view of the meaning of Hawaiian history and Hawaiian character that precedes, exceeds, and refuses to be contradicted by “research.”11 Despite the wiggle-room that shifts in Michener’s narrative point of view provide him, and the suggestion at the end of the book that it has been written by Hoxworth Hale (the part-Hawaiian, missionary-descended industrialist), it seems clear when Michener presents his own political views and historical evaluations. At these editorializing, preachy moments, Michener switches from limited omniscience, a particular character’s perspective, to an omniscient point of view. Nothing in the novel allows one to regard what look like direct summative statements as unreliable narrative, or simply Hoxworth Hale’s cosmopolitan angle. The content and tone and socio-political content of these passages is consistent within the book, and reinforced through its connection to (repetition of) Michener’s non-fictional ideas about Hawaiian history as espoused in essays for Reader’s Digest. It is thus Michener and not an implied narrator who characterizes Lili‘uokalani on the eve of the overthrow as “a stubborn anachronistic woman . . . totally unaware that the nineteenth century was ebbing to a close and taking with it the concepts of government to which she adhered.” Her intention, Michener writes, is “to take Hawaii back to the good old days that France enjoyed in 1620” (Michener 1984a: 688, 674). “It was not a strong monarchy to begin with,” Michener writes. In 1872 the great Kamehameha line had ended in sickness and frustration, to be followed by a succession of amiable but incompetent alii. One had sought to revive paganism as the consolidating force of Hawaiian life; another had tried to abrogate the constitution and take Hawaii back to an absolute monarchy unrestrained by any middle-class legislature; there had been palace

166 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms revolutions, the election of kings according to their personal popularity, and a shocking scandal in which one king was caught trying to peddle an opium concession twice over to two different Chinese gamblers. (ibid.: 673) It is not enough, in other words, for Michener to celebrate the power of U.S. ideals. He must assert as fact that the overthrow resulted from the weakness of Hawaiian institutions and from inept or corrupt leadership. This occurs throughout histouricist writing from Herman Melville, who described “Kammehammaha III” (sic) as “a fat, lazy, negro-looking blockhead” (Melville 1968a: 188–9), and Mark Twain, who portrays buffoonish Hawaiian royalty “playing at empire” (Twain 1872: 486), to Gerrit Judd IV, who argues that “the conclusion is inescapable that, left to their own resources, the Hawaiians were incapable of maintaining a respectable government in contact with the civilized world” (Judd 1967: 9). For Day, whose Hawaii and its People is an important source for Hawaii, Lili‘uokalani’s desire to restore “alii authority . . . led to the downfall” of her crown (Day 1993: 213). In a telling moment, Michener throws in a “factional” touch, based on a proannexationist report, in which the monarchy might have been saved had not Lili‘uokalani told U.S. envoy Albert S. Willis that it was Hawaiian custom to “behead traitors,” so that she would not be able to grant amnesty to the orchestrators of the overthrow. As Noenoe Silva notes, “Queen Lili‘uokalani strenuously objected on numerous occasions that she had said no such thing” about beheading Dole if restored to the throne (Silva 2004: 167). The point was momentous, as several accounts describe Cleveland as troubled to the point of political ambivalence by Willis’s report of Lili‘uokalani’s statement, though Cleveland would later claim that, when he contemplated “the means used to complete the outrage [overthrow], I am ashamed of the whole affair” (Wright 1972: 17–18, 21). Day considers Lili‘uokalani’s denials of her exchange with Willis “the most important place where Liliuokalani’s sometimes disingenuous accounts differ from documentary history” (Day 1977: 74). In other words, for Day and Michener, a comment – possibly misreported, fabricated, and certainly decontextualized – becomes “documentary evidence” against which an illegally deposed sovereign’s counterstatements are simply disqualified. Neither considers that Lili‘uokalani, who was imprisoned in her own palace and repeatedly caricatured in racist U.S. cartoons, might be capable of her own angry jests or sallies, and neither notes the obvious fact that beheading traitors, while perhaps a European tradition, has no basis in Hawaiian tradition or nineteenth-century practice. It is this sort of approach to “fact,” in a sweeping romance that aims at once to be entertaining, tourist promoting, and exculpatory of U.S. imperialism, that makes Hawaii histouricist at all points rather than historical. Given Michener’s nationalistic convictions, that is, one crucial challenge in writing Hawaii was to persuade his readers that the passage of sovereignty over the Islands from Hawaiian to U.S. hands was essentially non-violent, necessary, and achieved through force of U.S. character and principles (faced by natives who lacked the ability for self-government) rather than the result of opportunism,

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 167 whitened ideology, and military-backed theft. In the end, for Michener, strong institutions prevail over weaker ones and their having done so is the measure of their strength. Post facto analysis discovers and celebrates what is already the case. Beginning his saga with the geological birth of the islands or long-view history serves this end, denying, in the larger scheme of things, the significance of one thousand years of Hawaiian settlement. As Day understood the message of Hawaii, paraphrasing a passage early in the book that describes Hawai‘i as “a paradise in potential” (Michener 1984a: 17), “Paradise is not an existing spot at which one may arrive, but rather an empty stage to which people of many groups may come, bringing with them their material and cultural assets, by which an Eden may be built” (quoted in Hayes 1984: 148). In this analysis, Hawaiians are as diasporic as everyone else, have developed no special, genealogical relation to the ‘a¯ina, and have no capacity for government that could have survived the coming of technological modernity. This seems because, while Michener always presents Hawaiians as admirable, hospitable, frank, and courageous, he believes (like the missionaries) that they have hardwired characterological weaknesses. Michener’s imagining of the events which forced the Hawaiians to leave Bora-Bora – religious dissension over bloody Oro worship – emphasizes that those who sailed were “defeated people” before their arrival in Hawai‘i (Michener 1984a: 81). Despite his fictional account of Hawaiian motives for voyaging, and his playing loose with Polynesian spirituality, Michener asserts throughout his work that he offers “a realistic view yet one layer deeper into the subject than popular literature has shown us before” (Sumida 1991: 69). In this deromanticizing mode, he insists that “later ages would depict these men as all-wise and heroic, great venturers seeking bright new lands; but such myths would be in error, for no man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure” (ibid.: 81). This originary failure and defeat is reiterated at key points throughout the novel. In the mid-nineteenth century an ali‘i says that because Hawaii is “small and weak” it “must one day fall prey to America,” that “the day of the Hawaiian is dead, but the years of the white man are upon us.” At the overthrow an ali‘i is described as “the final symbol of her defeated race”; later a missionary descendent expresses sympathy for Hawaiians as “lousy, defeated, wonderful people” (ibid.: 442, 421, 704, 1007). When a Sanford Dolelike character claims, “the indigenous citizens are for the most part illiterate, steeped in idolatry, committed to vain shows of monarchical display and totally unsuited to govern themselves,” Michener’s narrative commentary is, “in these harsh but true words . . . he wrote as a profound patriot” (ibid.: 689). The general reader of such words has no way of knowing that, historically, Hawaiians from the mid-nineteenth century onward had higher literacy rates than most of the population of the continental U.S., and a greater percentage of practicing Christians. (As Samuel Kamakau put it in 1869, outsiders “interested in education look at each other and say, ‘This cannibal island is ahead in literacy; and the enlightened countries of Europe are behind it’” [Kamakau 1992: 420]; surprise at Hawaiian literacy rates is a staple of nineteenth-century visitor literature – see, for instance, Wise [1849: 305].)

168 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms Michener ends the book with praise for the “Golden Man,” a new virile breed in this thoroughly masculinist novel, who is a “unique contribution of Hawaii to the rest of the world.” What is golden in this new man – Michener’s contemporary Hawai‘i-as-America version of Crèvecoeur’s “new man” – is “a product of the mind” rather than intermarriage. It is an “awareness of the future and [the] rare ability to stand at the conflux of the world,” able to see “both the East and the West” (Michener 1984a: 973–4, 1129). However, if the Golden Man sees East and West, one is left wondering whether he recognizes the ground he stands on as an Oceanian place. Michener’s representative contemporary Hawaiian, Kelly Kanakoa, whose forty-generation genealogy is the subject of a library book Kelly takes tourist women to see, does see Hawai‘i as Hawaiian, and for him this means being a happy-go-lucky beach boy. In response to a scriptwriter who agreed with the criticism that the novel’s outcome was “a libel on the noble Polynesian voyagers who first found and possessed” Hawai‘i, Day claimed that he “tried to point out” that “Kelly not only was marrying a beautiful heiress to a Chinese fortune, but that he also was a golden-voiced idol among residents and tourists alike, and nobody could desire more than that” (Day 1977: 118; Sumida 1991: 82).

Histouricism and Cold War anthologizing practices in Oceania The real recording secretaries of history were the explorers, travelers, correspondents, creative writers, men of science, commerce, arts, letters, and research who passed on to us the benefit of their contemporaneous reconnaissance. W. Storrs Lee, Hawaii: A Literary Chronicle The visitor . . . can sit in the very chair where, fifty years ago, a Queen sat. Stanley Porteus, Calabashes and Kings: An Introduction to Hawaii

To re-present a text is to direct readers to certain of its qualities, or to relevant historical and cultural contexts, for critical, aesthetic, or didactic purposes. Questions of what, why, and how to represent inevitably involve ignorances (ignorings) of texts that might have been chosen and qualities of texts that might have been emphasized. If these seemingly obvious structural features of criticism are often overlooked when discussing individual texts, it is harder to ignore representational structures and assumptions when addressing or assembling a body of texts. With anthologies, which function to define or draw a circle around a field, evaluative principles are visibly at work. In these senses, among the many forms of non-indigenous representations of Oceania, literary anthologies are a particularly telling form of histouricism – of the arranging of entertaining cultural histories in forms that cover their own ideological tracks. U.S. anthologies made up of literary, historical, or cultural descriptions of Oceania, most emphatically when assembled by non-native

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 169 “experts” for readers positioned as non-natives, function as compounded forms of Pacificism. The anthologizers of these collections – which revisit pre-occupied, expectation-laden sites – inherently take on the structural position of tour guides. In their re-representations of an already hyperrepresented region, they guide by selecting what is most worth looking at. The tourist cannot look at everything, and so consults guides presumed to know, or to have screened, potential sites of interest. As the tourist has expectations and desires, the task of the guide is at once to meet these and to disclose hidden qualities of familiar sites, taking the reader behind the fronts of Elvis films or tourist posters. The ways that selections are arranged and framed, the tone established in introductory materials, headnotes, and section titles, orients readers. Whether a guide (or a critic) succeeds with readers, or retains trust and authority over time, depends upon the viewer regarding the object in a spirit consonant with the guide’s. Contemporary academic critics apply a rigorous, reflective set of critical touchstones for how well an anthology guides readers into a “region,” working with an expanded understanding of the term “region” in keeping with the general shift in U.S. cultural analysis from unitary myths to plural rhetorics (Fisher 1992). Such touchstones might include questions such as, What authorizes the editor to speak on behalf of the “region”? For whom and for what does the anthology speak? How well does the anthology represent the peoples of the “region”? What aspects of regional history and culture does it foreground or (de facto) suppress? How inclusive is it of the various (gendered and raced) voices that constitute the dialogics of any “region”? If the anthology describes a colonial setting, does it make a place within its own frameworks for the colonized to speak, or does it move in alliance with colonial logic in subordinating the experience of colonized or disenfranchised peoples in the interests of the colonizers’ vision? Does it consult the peoples that are being represented about the accuracy of cultural description? Does it confirm or complicate preconceptions or stereotypes that attach to any regional imaginary? What, finally, is the narrative that the anthology constructs about its given “regional”? What is striking today about U.S. anthologies of Hawai‘i and Oceania-based writing before the Civil Rights period is the degree of consensus about what events count as history, a bracketing of questions of authority or inclusiveness, and a belief that in the “melting pot of the Pacific” there is only one literary tradition that can be considered literary. Whether consciously or not, the anthologies of the period tell a similarly directioned histourical narrative, two-toned to glamorize the romantic history of the region while centralizing the role of white observers as settlers and narrators. Collections such as Hawaii: A Literary Chronicle (compiled by W. Storrs Lee) and A Hawaiian Anthology (edited by Gerrit P. Judd), both published by major New York houses in 1967, are consciously historical narratives. Lee, who also authored The Islands, a history of the “waves” that overran Hawai‘i, emphasizes that his anthology has sequence and continuity; it tells a chronological story. . . . With a little joggling, it could be fitted into the category of biography, for it presents a life history of

170 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms Hawaii. . . . Anyone perusing the volume from start to finish should gain at least a panoramic impression of the steps by which Hawaii emerged from primitive existence to become successively a feudal domain, a kingdom, a republic, a territory, a state. (Lee 1967: xiii) Judd’s book sees statehood as conferring “new dignity and new self-respect to Hawaii’s people” ( Judd 1967: 136). It is divided into three sections, the longest of which, “Hawaii’s History,” is offered as a corrective portrait of Hawai‘i because “the real Hawaii, as it is and was, is much more fascinating than the caricature created by the advertising agencies” (ibid.: 11). Porteus concurs that “we have been too busy in building up our Hawaiian paradise complex,” and the “intelligent visitor is entitled” to a more “unbiased” account, yet his book ends with the thought that, “if you only let Hawaii have its way with you, that nervous, hurrying spirit . . . will disappear” (Porteus 1945: vi, 245). Day and Carl Stroven, in True Tales of Hawaii and the South Seas (1966), arrange stories in reverse chronology so that “the reader, besides encountering memorable stories, may find it easy to make something of a historical excursion as well” to see “the region pretty much as it was, in spirit as well as in fact” (Day and Stroven 1993: viii). Despite the touristic titles of Day’s (often co-edited) anthologies, and their claim to prioritize literary excellence, such collections as The Spell of the Pacific, The Lure of Tahiti: An Armchair Companion, The Spell of Hawaii, and Horror in Paradise: Grim and Uncanny Tales from Hawaii and the South Seas (with Bacil Kirtley) do present a version of “history.”12 Day and Stroven’s A Hawaiian Reader, which James Michener described in his preface as “a birthday book to the new state” (Michener 1984b: xi), aims to introduce Hawai‘i’s story. A review in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, reprinted in the flap copy, lauded the ability of the anthology’s “wise selection[s]” to “highlight Hawaii’s history and . . . to capture the spirit of the periods through which the Islands passed in their transformation from the late Stone Age to a cultured state of the Union.” The histourical narrative these anthologies tell is constituted by a doublegesture: the celebration of Hawai‘i’s colorful past (whose aura remains for tourists) in the literary riches of Euroamerican recorders, and the subordination of indigenous and non-white settler points of view. The one requires the other, and proceeds out of a conviction that, as Day put it in Hawaii: Fiftieth Star (1960), “most people who know about modern Hawaii agree that it is a truly American community in every way that matters” (Day 1964a: 164). “Hawaii’s going to become a state pretty soon,” Michener recalls saying to Day, “and I think Americans ought to know, from the pens of those who did the building and watched it, what happened there” (Michener 1959: xii). Of the ninety-five selections in The Spell of the Pacific (1949) only one – a chant provided by the Maori anthropologist Sir Peter Buck/Te Ranga Hiroa – is not by a white author (in the American Heritage issue on Hawai‘i, Hiroa, director of the Bishop Museum, was the sole indigenous author, and wrote about Oceanian pre-contact voyaging). Where indigenous points of view are represented they generally refer to the pre-monarchy

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 171 period, for example, the selection from the Hawaiian creation chant, the Kumulipo, that Day and Stroven incorporate in an appendix to A Hawaiian Reader. Alternatively, an Oceanian view is occasionally introduced in order to confirm the colonial interpretation of historical necessity and progress. In this mode of educating the lay reader about Hawai‘i history, W. Storrs Lee includes two indigenous authors out of fifty-four selections. As the headnotes to the respective selections emphasize, one involves the rejection of Hawaiian religion and the other the rejection of Hawaiian systems of governance. Lee introduces his selection from ¯ pu¯kaha‘ia’s conversion narrative (which Lee titles “More Better Go Henry ‘O Than Stay”) with the jaunty, authoritative assessment that, “the case of Opukahaia was typical. In his boyhood on the Big Island he had witnessed the massacre of his family . . . a Yankee ship suddenly seemed far more inviting than the dull routine of a heiau.” (In a few words he dismisses as “dull” the entire tradition of priestly learning, and considers doing so witty.) In introducing his selection from the Hawaiian historian Davida Malo (Lee supplies the title “In Bondage to the Chiefs”), he simplifies a complex patriot by suggesting that “Malo bitterly rejected his own pagan culture and could not write sympathetically of his people and their past” (Lee 1967: 20, 111). Not surprisingly, Lee does not note Malo’s commitment to grass-roots movements opposing the increasingly political power of foreigners as evidenced in his circulation of petitions to the effect that all foreigners should be dismissed from government. As missionary wife Laura Fish Judd recalls, “the chiefs were afraid of his radicalism” in part because “David recommended the old order of things as better than the new” ( Judd 1966: 212). At the same time, like Day, who dedicates several of his works to Polynesians “with aloha,” Lee dedicates his book to Mary Kawena Pukui, for her service “in the preservation of Hawaiian literature,” without including any of the extensive literature Pukui preserved. No resistance voice, such as that of Lili‘uokalani in Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (1898) was included by any histouricist anthologizer, let alone resistance music or poetry, such as Ellen Prendergast’s “Kaulana na¯ Pua,” with its pledge to “ku¯pa‘a ma hope o ka ‘a¯ina” (remain ever loyal to/steadfast in defense of the land). This in a sense performs an unconscious need within histouricism to suppress Lili‘uokalani’s cry that the “people of the Islands have no voice in determining their future” (Lili‘uokalani 1980: 369). The few representations of native voices that contest U.S. colonialism within histouricism are twisted to reaffirm the colonial interpretation of history. A case in point is Jack London’s frequently anthologized “Koolau the Leper.” In their short headnote, Day and Stroven consider this “among the best of all Jack London’s stories” and note that it “is based upon an actual episode, a tragic clash between the forces of the law and an unfortunate Hawaiian” (Day and Stroven 1984: 160), a formulation that criminalizes Ko‘olau from the start and mystifies what in London’s thoroughly distorted version of the story is factual. “The differences between fact and fiction are not important,” Day writes. “The Koolau of his book is true in spirit to the desperate pariah of history” (Day 1987: 152–3).13 Recent London scholarship acknowledges, as Day never does, that “Koolau the Leper” attacks U.S. colonialism, deploying leprosy to allegorize the “dismembering and

172 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms putrefying effects” of contact with Westerners (Edmond 1997: 200), as well as asserting the vulnerability of natives in a genetic contest for survival. London thereby dons an “imperialistic prophylactic” (Eperjesi 2005: 107, 127) against both U.S. colonialism and the diseased Islanders. At the same time, as Dennis Kawaharada points out, the terms of London’s anti-conquest amount to little more than a projection of his own ideals: it is “a classic example of a writer from a colonizing culture visiting a colony and usurping the voice of the indigenous people by telling their stories, imputing to the natives the world view of the colonizer and portraying the natives as accepting the fate of colonization” (Kawaharada 1999: 86–7). The masculinist value London heroizes through his version of Ko‘olau is a defiant belief in individual freedom (“I have lived free, and I shall die free,” says Ko‘olau, announcing the story’s Patrick Henryesque motto [Day and Stroven 1984: 174]) in contrast to the more community-oriented values of Hawaiian culture. The extent to which London distorts Hawaiian culture has been detailed by Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui in a comparison of London’s “Koolau” with the account of the ka‘ao (legend/romance that includes chants) told by Ko‘olau’s wife Pi‘ilani in “The True Story of Kaluaikoolau” (1906). London cannot see Ko‘olau and his wife Pi‘ilani as Christians and Hawaiian patriots at the same time, a syncretism clear in many lines in Pi‘ilani’s account, such as “in the season of Makalapua [spring season] of the year of our Lord 1864” (Kaluaikoolau 2001: 7). Pi’ilani and her husband will not be separated because they believe in the sacredness of Christian marriage, at the same time that it is vital to Ko‘olau that his bones be buried and cared for in his one ha¯nau (sands of his birth). In comparison to this conveyence of the nuance of Hawaiian culture at a moment of colonial occupation, London’s story, and its interpretation by London scholars, displays utter confusion about the material lives of Hawaiians both before and after Western incursion. Among the many absurdities of London’s story is the touristic notion, popular at the turn of the century, that Hawaiians did not work to produce food. (In 1900, Joshua Slocum wrote that “Islanders have only to put up their hand and take what nature provided them” [Slocum 1956: 158].) What is most striking about “Koolau the Leper” in terms of histouricist narration is the theory of history that London projects into the mind of Ko‘olau, so that it seems that the reader overhears the representative Hawaiian freedomfighter speaking the doom of his own race. To overlook this central implication of the story, as has nearly all criticism of the story, can only result from sharing at some level the primary assumption London attributes to his Hawaiian protagonist in the story’s epiphanic moment: Koolau forgot where he was, forgot everything, as he lay and marveled at the strange persistence of these haoles who would have their will though the sky fell in. Aye, they would have their will over all men and all things, even though they died in getting it. He could not but admire them, too, what of that will in them that was stronger than life and that bent all things to their bidding. He was convinced of the hopelessness of his struggle. There was no gainsaying

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 173 that terrible will of the haoles. Though he killed a thousand, yet they would rise like the sands of the sea and come upon him, ever more and more. They never knew when they were beaten. That was their fault and their virtue. It was where his own kind lacked. (London 1984: 173–4) This use of the native character to express the characterological “lack” of his “own kind” as the ultimate explanation for the “success” of U.S. colonialism – like Michener’s book-length emphasis on Polynesian “failure” – carries the weight it does in part because of the repression of the counter-narration available in indigenous texts. Were Day to have included Pi‘ilani’s text one would at once notice the contrast between London’s U.S. and Pi‘ilani’s Hawaiian viewpoint, become aware of both London’s ignorance of Hawaiian values and cultural forms and the reckless sensationalism of his plot and style, and be led into the complexities of cultural exchange that constitute much of Islander material history in the colonial period. In other words, a comparison of London’s and Pi‘ilani’s text refuses to reveal anything so schematic as much of postcolonial criticism – faced against colonialism rather than toward indigenous culture – predicts and then finds. It turns out, for instance, that London is an atheist, while Pi‘ilani is a devout Christian, and that her being so does not necessitate turning away from central tenets of Hawaiian belief and cultural practice: she can believe in both the sacrament of marriage and the importance of being the protector of her husband’s bones. For all its celebration of “mixture” in terms of making “golden” citizens, histouricism (like Pacificisms in general) has an inbuilt structural resistance to recognizing new cultural forms as other than death or conversion. Christianity must be the abrogation of all indigenous (pagan) religious customs rather than “a marker of all kinds of possibilities and limits” (Diaz 1994: 49), in which Christianity is Oceanianized as much as the other way around in ways contingent upon conjunctions of local and colonial forces. In Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home (1973), for instance, the protagonist notes that “Christianity has been changed in the direction of the fa‘a Samoa” (Wendt 1996: 180). Day and Stroven certainly knew of Pi‘ilani’s text, although it was not translated into English until 1986, as they knew of works such as S. N. Hale‘ole’s ka‘ao, La¯‘ieikawai (1864), which Day notes in Books About Hawaii had been translated by Martha Beckwith (1919). Hale‘ole had specifically recorded Hawaiian stories because, as he put it in his foreword to La¯‘ieikawai, “If the past traditions of our people are not kept, then how will future generations know what happened here on these islands.” Day knew of the extensive archive of Hawaiian poetic traditions and story-cycles, having co-authored (with Amos Leib) an annotated bibliography of Hawaiian mythology in English, which included the Kamapua‘a cycle and the Pele and Hi‘iake cycles (translated into Victorian poetry by Nathaniel Emerson). Other chants, songs, and stories were collected by his colleagues, among them Alfons Korn in the English Department. They knew of novel-length versions of the Kawelo or P¯ikoiaka‘alal¯a legends, or Moses Nakuina’s Wind Gourd of La‘amaomao,

174 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms and might have selected these as alternatives to their array of excerpts from missionary texts and Victorian travelogues, just as they might have selected chapters from books by Cook Islander Johnny “Florence” Frisbie rather than giving pride of place to Annie Dillard’s “Sirens of the South Seas.” More than pandering to tourists seems to be at work. Day and Stroven assert that the criteria they use for their selections is, “Is the work of high literary value? Is it interesting? Is it representative of its place and time and author?” and, finally, does it “arouse in the reader a new appreciation for the literary riches of the Pacific” [Stroven and Day 1949: xv]). And yet Day seems to have believed in a fundamental segregation between the Euroamerican texts that he regards as the “literary riches of the Pacific” and indigenous literatures, consigned to the realms of anthropology or folklore: “the native people,” Day writes, “have had their own fictions that differ markedly from the mode of writers in English” (Day 1987: 271–2). Likewise, in applauding the selections of A Hawaiian Reader, Michener claimed that Polynesian writing, even in translation, “is so alien to the modern world that it might have alienated the casual reader” (Michener 1959: xvi). Only at the end of his career, literally on the last page of Mad About Islands, does Day see the emergence of work that might be anthologizable alongside that of his “Pacific”: There are signs, however, that the two cultures are approaching common ground. In 1977, Albert Wendt of Samoa published a novel, Pouliuli, that dives deeply into the waters of his heritage. The main figure is an aging, highranking chief of those islands who is overcome by revulsion for all that this sabbatarian and conformist society cherishes. The book, valuable as ethnology as well as story, also displays qualities of poetry, fable, and folklore. Signs are abroad that will bring together the minds and hearts of Occidental and Oceanian alike. (Day 1987: 272) In this presumably generous gesture toward envisioning Oceanian and Euroamerican minds and hearts moving closer, Day of course must misread Pouliuli at the moment of sensing the book’s power, and misread it in a characteristic way. In suggesting that, once again, we are in the presence of an Oceanian becoming revulsed with and rejecting his own conformist culture, Day fails, for instance, to note that the high-ranking chief who quests for personal freedom is in complex ways “mad,” that the book’s title means “darkness,” and that, faced with an image of where Samoa is headed, Faleasa is disgusted by his “nation’s . . . tragic mimicry” and “absence of faith in things Samoan” (Wendt 1980b: 131). The complexities of Wendt’s subject position and colonial/postcolonial history are irrelevant to Day. The two “cultures” (Samoa here a metonym for “Oceania”) can only approach “common ground” through a work that Day perceives as preferring “Western” notions of “individualism” to Samoan tradition. The differences between cultures lessens – not as a result of a colonial process that Wendt’s poems, essays, and novels bitterly criticize – to the degree that the Oceanian writer seems to move toward

Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 175 Western values without any corresponding movement from the other side. For Day, Wendt’s books are “valuable as ethnology,” presumably to the Western reader, as if this writer of Samoa were finally useful to the extent that he might add to anthropological knowledge about Samoa, although Wendt had repeatedly advised readers that his work should not be taken as ethnography. Reading Oceanian culture production, that is, requires a change in prescription that the Cold War histouricists were unwilling to fill.14 However, Oceanian writers, as I will suggest in my conclusion to this book, regard the terms on which establishment figures such as Day or his New Zealand anthologizing counterpart C. K. Stead were prepared to incorporate Native voices as a moment of danger. “There’s talk of a merger,” writes Maori poet Hone Tuwhare (who had published five collections by the time Day read Wendt as a “sign” of approaching common ground), and “a know-all / insect on stilts has just walked out / on top of the waters to supervise / the talks.” The river resists “the tides upswing” and then, Snap! Daddy-long-legs has joined his ancestors by way of a hungry trout’s stomach & stomach-ejector. Happens to people, too, nowadays – with Sharks hangin’ around a lot. (Tuwhare 1994: 194–5)

Conclusion Changing pre-scriptions: varieties of antitourism in the contemporary literatures of Oceania

Change your pre scription man. Then we’ll talk . . . Sia Figiel “To the Tourist Who Wears Gauguinic Glasses”

Re-envisioning Oceania, antitourism, and the traps of “authenticity” Where does Ma¯oritangi fit in this world of teenage mutant Ninja turtles? Yet I did protest and fight as he cut through the middle Of my heart and, seeing that rich blood flow red as a river Wondered if there was time to escape this dinner. Witi Ihimaera, “Dinner with the Cannibal” It’s easy to forget that there’s life and love and learning Between Asia and America Between Asia and America there’s an ocean And in this ocean The stepping stones are getting real. Teresia Teaiwa, “Amnesia”

“Up to a few years ago,” writes Albert Wendt in “Toward a New Oceania” (1976), his rallying address to Islander artists, “nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi [Euroamericans in Samoan] and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists . . . semi-literate tourists. . . . Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudoscholarly to the infuriatingly racist” (Wendt 1993: 16). The sheer massiveness of this “whole bullshit mythology of the Pacific created by the West” (Wendt 1990: 57), along with the ignorance of non-Islander audiences about the effects of colonialism in the islands, involves Oceanian writers, at anything beyond communal and regional levels, in what Steven Winduo calls the project of “unwriting”

Conclusion 177 and repositioning Oceania (Winduo 2000: 599), and underlines what Konai Helu Thaman calls the “need to interrogate the images and the representations that we have inherited or are creating” (Thaman 2003: 5).1 To represent Oceania is to enter a saturated, muting discursive formation – named in this book Pacificism – that is characterized by an epistemologically violent confinement of Islanders linked to destructive material relations. Given that the perpetrators of colonial violence, especially from within a U.S. ideological framework, do not willingly recognize themselves as such, both because they have been mesmerized by the touristic forms into which Pacificist throught is recurrently drawn and because Empire has become an unreflective way of life, Oceanian “unwriting” and rewriting (now by some reckonings in its “third wave”) might be approached as varieties of antitourism.2 The makers of antitouristic art, insofar as they engage Pacificism head on, aim to bring about a crisis within touristic perception by exposing its modes of seeing and relating as flawed, by clarifying living conditions in the Islands, and by dispelling the “ethnonostalgia” (Owens 1992: 12) that follows centuries-old assumptions that indigenous cultures must vanish in the face of modernity. Ultimately, antitourism produces a new scene of reading and new reading procedures in which Islander priorities are centralized. “Tourism,” as Teresia Teaiwa suggests through her use of the term militourism, includes many senses beyond the physical presence of tourists, and refers in the first instance to forces and ideologies (in particular ideologies of development), and not necessarily to the complex local cultures of tourism that often form among Islanders, locals, and tourist workers. On the ground, tourism is not (as often represented) always or simply false-consciousness, as is signified by the myriad scenes and senses in which Islanders perform for Islander tourists. Rather, the “tourism” that figures in antitourist discourse is a massive network of representations or modes of relation, narrative and material, that covers over and reconstitutes a power relation that is both (neo)colonial and gendered. This web of relations is constituted within colonial institutions, media, and all systems of representation that require a devaluation of Oceanian knowledges. The fundamental arrogance and lack of concern for Islanders in these modes of relation are epitomized in nuclear testing, and in Henry Kissinger’s notorious comment in 1969 in relation to Micronesian calls for independence, “There are only 90,000 people out there, who gives a damn.” The image of fallout marring the paradise Westerners have themselves constructed (seen, for example, in the paintings of Ralph Hotare and John Pule, in poems and songs such as Teresia Teaiwa’s “A Coconut a Day Will Kill You,” or in Robert Barclay’s novel Melal ¸ ¸) thus expresses a grounding outrage at the literal and symbolic desacralization, displacement, and disparagement of Islanders authorized and obfuscated within the Pacificist archive. “Maybe just to beautify the image in a tourist magazine,” writes John Pule, foregrounding the senses in which tourism as a system of representation glosses material effects, “put a little colour in the mother’s yellow eyes. Paint a hotdog in the child’s hand and, if the original picture has Kwajalein [site of U.S. nuclear testing] in the background, instead have them posing in front of a travel agent. Show the reef at night when the sea is sparkling and hide the missiles that fly from California” (Pule 1992: 111).

178 Conclusion The urgency and life-affirming principles involved in anti-nuclear politics/ poetics – a grounding love for the Islands as living, nourishing, and richly storied – apply as well to anti-development literature throughout Oceania. This recurrently involves contesting the attempt of corporate “developers” to displace indigenous people from hereditary lands, and often to rename or to alter the land itself. Such assaults on the history associated with every feature of the landscape, and desecration of the dead buried in the land, are based on competing narratives and epistemologies. As Epeli Hau‘ofa notes, “to destroy land . . . is to sever [Islanders] . . . from their history, their identity. . . . such acts are therefore sacriligious and are of the same order of enormity as the complete destruction of all of a nation’s libraries, archives” (Hau’ofa 2000: 468–9). Patricia Grace’s novel Potiki (1986) dramatizes this belief in opposing the vision of developers who see a “million dollar view to be capitalised on” – a site for development that will “benefit . . . not only ourselves, but everyone” – with the tribal conviction that “none of the things” that the developers promise “would be of any advantage to our people here.” Were the tribe ever to move their “tipuna” (ancestors) it would “not be for what you call progress, or for money” (Grace 1987: 89, 90, 94). For Grace, a people is its stories – “stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles” – and these stories engage “the stories from newspapers and television that we read and viewed each day” (ibid.: 41). To imagine alternatives is a form of creating and living them. Antitourism as advanced in this conclusion writes back in a variety of ways against Pacificist logic, or what holds in place the power relation that makes nuclear testing, environmentally unsustainable destructive practices, and corporate tourism in Oceania first thinkable, disguisable as “development,” and then material. None of these antitouristic modes are predicated on telling the Truth about Island life. Rather, all are committed to promoting respect for the dignity, sovereignty, and complexity of Islander peoples, cultures, and particular communities, which are not sealed off and pure, but committed to intense crosscultural dialogue in multiple registers. In this, antitouristic art is directed less at refuting Pacificist iconography than at countering what the widespread circulation and institutional validation of such representation signifies. It shows how Islanders live among the effects of Pacificist imaginings: systemic racism, displacement of Islanders from land and culture, environmental degradation, colonial educational and media systems that circulate distorted views of Islanders that Islanders themselves watch on T.V. and read at school, and disproportionate drug abuse, poverty, illness (physical, spiritual, mental), suicide, and incarceration. Incarceration in both literal and figurative senses is at the heart of the complexes named here by “tourism”: that, in Lionel Fogarty’s words, “stealers raw our atmosphere” is related to the fact that “the land is not free / Dreamtime is not free . . . a lot of my people in jail” (Fogarty 1995: 100, 54). The frequent descriptions of imprisonment in contemporary Oceanian literatures protest the ways that imprisoning vision, the lockings up of peoples in colonial systems that lock out Islander languages and cultural forms, is a form of jailing and a contributing cause of it. Significantly, in many literary representations, as in many prisons themselves,

Conclusion 179 jail is the place where – with the repressive colonial system starkly revealed – Islanders turn to cultural expression for strength. (Prominent examples of this include the representation of incarcerated Maori redirecting their lives in part through practicing haka and other cultural forms in Riwia Brown’s reworking of Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors for the screen, or the practice of Lono worship in a number of continental U.S. prisons.) The degree to which Islanders are imprisoned, and in U.S. contexts shipped as part of a prison-industrial complex to continental facilities, is precisely what is hidden within touristic writing, at the same time that studying incarceration often becomes the focal point of so-called sociological scholarship, or explorations of Islander psychological disorders or despair. Imprisonment, in such analyses, in keeping with histouricist logic, reactivates myths that Islanders lack a strength of character, that resistance tends toward criminality, or that Islanders are recalcitrant towards modernity and in need of rehabilitation. Antitourism tears away at the preconceptions and assumptions about Islanders that underwrite, paper over, or misplace agency for these repressive, imprisoning conditions. It rejects the forces that have pre-scribed the ways that Islanders are imagined in the public sphere. It works to clear a space within which audiences – Islanders and non-Islanders – will be compelled to re-envision the region’s “shape, plumage, and pain” (Wendt 1993: 9). At the same time, successful antitourism resists creating or reinscribing stereotypes or modes of imaginative confinement.3 In other words, if to say what something is not seems to promise to say what it is, when that thing-in-itself is as vital, changing, contested, and plural as “culture,” the point is less to perform a simple reversal than to replace the reassuring simplifications of Pacificism and histouricism with an appreciative, engaged sense of the complexity of the subject that must evade anthropological centering. Simple reversals of Pacificism, presentations of photographic negatives in which the white becomes black and vice versa (with whites now flat caricatures that are easily dismissed), risk an enervating, non-productive enmeshment in what they oppose: “All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against” (Anzaldúa 1987: 78). Thus, while attacking colonial frameworks, many antitourism authors implicitly or explicitly celebrate stories that colonialism distorts or blocks from expression. “My writing is exposé and celebration at one and the same time,” writes Haunani-Kay Trask. “It is a furious, but nurturing, aloha for Hawai‘i” (Trask 1999: 19–20).4 Where Pacificist writing glosses and romanticizes history, relegates Islanders to caricatured and minor roles, and rarely positions Islanders as part of the audience, Oceanian antitouristic writing puts the pains and pleasures and social situations of Islanders center stage. At the same time, through its frame of reference, antitourism positions Islanders in front row seats, whoever actually attends. As Reina Whaitiri puts it, in a review of Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes, this is done by prioritizing Oceanian expressive forms: “Maori ways of doing things and of seeing are treated as normal, while Pakeha ways are often confusing, unaccountably complex, and unfriendly” (Whaitiri 2000: 556). For Robert Sullivan, in Star Waka, while visual art is “accessible to all,” the “symbolism remains Maori / and will

180 Conclusion always be for Maori” (Sullivan 2000: 10). Antitouristic writing emphasizes the importance of impressing (in forms from chants to novels to rap music) the echo of Island accents and languages on the walls of English (Diaz 1994: 42; Henderson 1999), in making the English, as John Pule puts it in The Shark that Ate the Sun, “thick with Pacific languages” (Pule 1992: 82). Antitourism insists on “the need to use forms that are from the inside . . . to tell stories” (Figiel 1998: 98) and insists that “it’s time we took over our stories” (Figiel, quoted in Keown 1999: 101). Where colonial/touristic writing belittles and infantilizes Native speech, as if creolized Englishes and pidgins signified inability to command thought, antitourism celebrates the play and local innovation of Island Englishes. “My voice and choices,” writes Sudesh Mishra in his exuberantly polyvocal Lila, “are meant to alter from within the architecture of the great colonial bungalow. English is part of an enforced legacy I’ve grown to love, but extensive renovations are in order” (Mishra 1994: 39). What Mudrooroo argues about Fogarty’s language, that it uses the “language of the invader” to “smash open its shell and spill it open for poetic expression” (Mudrooroo 1995: xii), is true for much Oceanian literature. Where Pacificist writing disconnects non-Islander audiences from the material relations that underwrite misrepresentations of Island peoples, antitouristic writing works to reconnect audiences viscerally to the diverse material conditions in which Islanders live today, and most importantly to the needs of common people. In a poem such as “To the Woman Selling Handicrafts outside Burns Philip’s Doors (a word to the tourist),” Sano Malifa, for instance, describes the homelessness behind the tourist market: See the stringing of pearly shells. How lovely! But you don’t understand how they’re stringing their life beads outside these doors, like corpses, the concrete mattress gathers the cold and pumps it home. (in Wendt 1980b: 279) The class analysis inherent to antitourism includes in such moments an emphasis on the increasing gap between the lifeways of Islander elites – who promote tourism without sharing the wealth – and the lives of other Islanders. As Konai Hulu Thaman writes in Langakali (1981), “The Masters of our land / Have sold our souls / To the new religion, moneylenders / Experts and the watchdogs of Vegas” (Thaman 1981: 16). Under such conditions many Islanders, as Epeli Hau‘ofa emphasizes, are innovative in the ways they “depend for their daily existence much, much more on themselves and their kin, wherever they may be, than on anyone’s largesse, which they believe is largely pocketed by the elite classes” (Hau‘ofa 1999: 34). Antitourism critiques the comprador class, to the degree that, as Frantz Fanon argues, it organizes “pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the name of tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a national industry,” and involves setting up the country

Conclusion 181 as “the brothel of Europe” (Fanon 1963: 153, 154). In reference to this elite sector, some of whom advocate “tradition” in art and government structure to keep Islanders “servile” and exploitable, Wendt writes, “we must not consent to our own abasement” (Wendt 1993: 13).5 Vital to the antitouristic re-envisioning of the region has been the affirmation in the arts of regional community itself, based on shared priorities and concerns for peoples living in vastly different colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial situations, among Islanders linked in a “Sea of Islands” (Hau‘ofa 1993). To think of small islands in a vast sea, Hau‘ofa argues, is to partition the Islands, obscure ancient systems of exchange and minglings of culture, and to imagine Islands as tiny, isolated stepping stones caught up in (dependent upon) the desires of colonial, and now neocolonial, corporate powers and Asia-Pacific constructions. This is essentially what Pacificism has done. For Hau‘ofa, alternatively, a “holistic perspective” sees the Islands in “the totality of their relationships,” so that what happens on Kwajelien is felt around Oceania. By Islands in this formulation Hau‘ofa refers not just to the Islands themselves – although the Islands remain “home” both literally, in the lines of kinship and genealogy, and in emotional geography – but to all of the communities of diasporic Oceanian populations whose movements contribute to “world-enlargement” (Hau‘ofa 1999: 30). Within this expansive community, in which art may be “sourced from different cultures and traditions” (Thaman 2003: 2), a pan-Pacific literature has emerged that is at once “young” in terms of its institutionalization and ancient in its mobilization of expressive traditions. (I refer here to Wendt’s oft-quoted description of Oceanian literature in English as “the youngest literature in the world”; see also Subramani [1992: ix].) Despite the vast differences in Island situations, Oceanian arts are discussable as a movement, “a literature,” because Islander situations share family resemblances in the domains of cultural values and colonial history. The range of viewpoints from what might be called a “Brown Pacific” (Salesa 2003) in some respects resemble Paul Gilroy’s notion of a “Black Atlantic” as a “counterculture of modernity.”6 As counterculture, the Brown Pacific is not opposed to technological, political, or economic modernity, though it rejects the Eurocentric assumptions that underlie modernity’s notion of progress and development and its exploitation of resources. Against this linear time-line, Native worldviews and ecologies are almost invariably seen as romantic or atavistic, as in tourist art, which is required to appear pre-modern. In relation to technology, what Manulani Meyer says of Hawaiian epistemology resonates through much of the region. Knowledge-belief structures neither militate against technological innovation nor uncritically embrace it. They set “the tone for how one handles technological influence and places it within a structure of values, priorities, and spiritual beliefs. This is not a discussion of narrowing worldviews, but of a specific cosmology that breathes in the many aromas of influence” (Meyer 2001: 128). The widely emphasized need to (re)turn to indigenous epistemologies in attempts to plot a course for Pacific studies is accompanied by a sense that Islanders need to (continue to) make use of new technologies (Wesley-Smith 2003; see also Hereniko 2003a: xiv). It is a set of values, a substance of a culture that perpetuates best

182 Conclusion practices, Meyer and others suggest (Thaman 2003; Smith 1999; Gegeo 2001; Winduo 2000), rather than the endlessly innovative new forms cultural expression might take, that is fundamentally at issue. When it comes to the arts, it is as often as not, as Hau‘ofa and others have pointed out, non-Oceanians who see “change” and technological innovation as evidence that Islanders are “losing” their culture. It is outsiders, Wendt writes, “who try to impose on me what they think my culture is and how I should live it and go about ‘preserving it’” (Wendt 1993: 13). Such desire for traditional, “authentic” art, or even the desire that Oceanian writers should, in keeping with antimaterialistic values, be “above” considering the market when they write, is quite recognizable as a reconstituted form of the racist, condescending nostalgia that has driven Pacificisms for several hundred years. What might be considered the politics of “authenticity” in considerations of Oceanian art has a complicated relation to colonialisms, past and present, and especially to tourism, which is never one thing but a tremendously flexible and resourceful sector of transnational capitalism that endlessly seeks to reappropriate oppositional positions to itself. In an age when transnational capital tolerates or stimulates saleable versions of difference in order to more effectively manage it (Hardt and Negri 2000: 198), and settler multiculturalism is often deployed against indigenous peoples who are “invited to join pluralistic coalitions” but “disinvited to assert the priority of their specific rights” (Allen 2002: 112), the emphasis in even oppositional contexts on an aesthetics of difference can tend toward tourism. This now potentially applies to all forms of what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls “trading the other,” a “vast industry based on the positional superiority and advantage gained under imperialism. It is concerned more with ideas, language, knowledge, images, beliefs, and fantasies than any other industry” (Smith 1999: 89). Within this trafficking in Otherness, the idea that, because Islander artistic renaissances involve reconstructions, reimaginings, redeployments of culture, they are “inauthentic” duplicates the “politically irresponsible” and intellectually unfruitful anthropological rage for confession on the part of Islanders that contemporary practices are not pure (Mykkänen 2003: 2). The challenges of antitouristic arts within such new hegemonic pressures to monitor and adjudicate “authenticity” include avoiding appropriation to the terms of the market (which fetishizes “authenticity”) in ways that reduce the dignity of Island peoples. To the degree that market pressures on aesthetic vision can never be absolutely avoided, the challenge is for cultural work within it to change the scene of reading, to make reductive touristic viewpoints face the callousness of their investments. The moment of institutionalization for the arts is in this sense at once a (tourist) trap and an opportunity to bring about paradigm-destroying/opening crises. Oceanian arts, as signaled by the international success of films such as The Whale Rider and Where We Once Belonged, or the novels of Albert Wendt, Kerry Hulme, and Sia Figiel, are and will increasingly be drawn into what Native-American writerscholar Louis Owens calls “multicultural tourism,” a literary tourism in which readers (and publishers) “want not literature that challenges them to think and feel in new ways but literary works that provide a comfortable, easy tour of colorful

Conclusion 183 Indian Country.” This kind of literary territory, whose “borders can be known and marked,” functions as an imaginative form of literary reservation “to contain wild Indians.” To the degree that it is safe, it is open to being “imaginatively reoccupied and appropriated.” In contrast, Owens argues, “crossing conceptual horizons can be, and in fact must be, hard work.” The Native novel should not be a space “from which a reader or student may return unchanged or unthreatened . . . Literary terrorism is preferable to literary tourism” (Owens 1998: 45, 42, 46). That Oceanian cultures are pre-scripted as touristic places special pressure on creative resourcefulness in resisting appropriative recodings within literary tourism’s scenes of reading, in which Islanders are expected to perform the Truth of their cultures and to speak with a homogeneous voice. What Albert Wendt says of the situation in New Zealand applies to Oceanian literature in general: “the majority Pakeha culture expect Maori to have one point of view, yet they don’t expect it of themselves. Even when they analyze a novel by a Maori novelist, they want to believe that’s the Maori view” (Sarti 1998: 207). To oppose colonial falsehoods with a static reversal, as suggested, is to create tableaux that are, if new and improved, touristic in their logic. A work such as Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues, while clearly an attempt to rewrite Michener’s Hawaii by duplicating aspects of its structure from an anticolonial, womancentered viewpoint – by turns Hawaiian nationalist and U.S. multiculturalist – can be predatory of culture as well. In response to the book’s mixing of history with glamorous and sensational adventure involving lepers, priceless pearls, and terrorists, the reviewer for Library Journal described Shark as “entertaining and educational” (quoted in San Juan 2002: 73), much as reviewers responded to Michener, and with as little knowledge of Hawai‘i history or critical attention to Davenport’s sources or descriptions of culture. When Davenport distinguishes the hula performed by her characters from “the cheap, flirtatious hula danced for tourists,” one might in this sense ask whether the book duplicates the strategies of the tourist industry (Lyons 1995). The world of “authentic” difference, in which difference is a value in itself that can be frozen into essence and product, in other words, is inherently recuperable by the crassest forms of tourism, whether in Kodak hula shows or in the terms set by art dealers (“sniffing around the world for something totally nouveau” [Figiel 1999: 198]), literary critics, textual travelers, or economists who patronizingly consider their commodifications of difference as a primary means of supporting “authentic” Oceanian cultural survival.7

(Post)colonial de-tours: behind the market with Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel Margaret Mead was a travel agent Margaret Mead was a dictator too Margaret Mead has dictated the way the entire travelling world thinks About Samoana – Sia Figiel, “WOW! In Many Parts . . .”

184 Conclusion In a 1990 interview, Albert Wendt states that “A lot of my writing has been an attempt to break all the stereotypes of Pacific Islands peoples in the literature and films of the West” (Wendt 1990: 56). Insofar as Oceanian antitourism imagines a potentially large international audience looking over the shoulders of an Islander gathering, one of its goals, as Wendt, Reina Whaitiri, and Robert Sullivan put it in their introduction to Whetu Moana, is to shift “the western gaze from current and historical myths onto the expressive reality” of contemporary Islanders (Wendt et al. 2003: 2). For Wendt, as for many Oceanian writers, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa epitomizes this arrogant and misdirected “gaze,” along with the astonishing credulity of audiences that regard it as “science.” This “gaze” is ongoing, and Mead’s naive, romantic work, with its projection of anthropological agenda onto Samoans, retains an uncanny hold on the U.S. imagination, and has a solidly entrenched place in national social history. “To most non-Samoans, my country is Mead’s Samoa,” writes Albert Wendt. “Even when I point out to them the enormous errors in her book, most of them want to go on believing her. Why?” (Wendt 1983: 11).8 For Wendt, as for Figiel, that is, Mead is both travel agent and tour guide, retailing a pre-scripted narrative of free love, who positions the reader as a tourist. Whether touristic credulity is actual, total or more of the post-tourist desire that Islanders be or act a certain way is secondary to Islanders. The question of how to shift the desires that drive a market that remains held by Mead-like images, a market which Wendt himself is obliged to inhabit, where Samoans may be encouraged to be travel agents, is posed with wit and poignancy in several scenes in Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979). Wracked with tuberculosis (he is literally being consumed), Wendt’s narrator, Pepesa, delivers the following speech – a speech echoed in many forms throughout the region. Many tourists, mainly Americans, are now coming to Western Samoa as I write this humble novel. Our government, which is run by the New Zealand palagi, wants them to come by the shipload so that Samoa can earn money for what the government calls “economic development.” My country does not need writers like me; it wants tourists; and I am sure that after I die Samoa is going to be like Hawaii and Tahiti and all the other tourist centres which are tropical paradises in the posters but which are con-men paradises for stripping tourists naked. The tourist trade is going to be the new missionary trade, only this time the bible is to be the Yankee dollar, and the priests are to be the tourist owners, and the altar of sacrifice is to be our people, and the choirs are to be “natives” in “genuine Samoan dress” from Hollywood, singing “genuine Samoan songs” from Hawaii, and dancing “genuine Samoan dances” like the hula. (Wendt 1994: 189–90) For Pepesa, “tourism” signifies a new form of colonialism in which comparador elites sacrifice the people for the “Yankee dollar.” Touristic development continues the work of the missionaries in diverting Samoans from traditional beliefs by

Conclusion 185 rewarding them for becoming mimic-men who pander to the preconceptions of tourists. The new missionaries offer cash as salvation, or as the end of the redemptive telos away from the pre-Christian past, aspects of which perversely gain value as art objects or tourist relics of a fragmented past disconnected from practice. The touristic template from Hawai‘i is being lowered on Samoa to the degree that the concept of something “genuine” seems itself spurious. Within this scenario, Wendt’s favored mode of antitourism is to assume the role of the trickster novelist (teller of tall tales) as a literary continuation of modes of mimicry, signifying, or parody pervasive in Oceanian societies, and that have historically been polyvocal ways of negotiating power and engaging intrusive elements in what Caroline Sinavaiana describes as “backtalk from the margins” (Sinavaiana 1992, 1999).9 In the new touristic “market,” Pepesa and his friend Tagata dupe U.S. tourists, telling them in “cowboy English” learned from westerns that they are leading them to “the real genuine Samoan markit,” which is managed by Tagata’s parents. (That Tagata appropriates and redirects this cowboy idiom, then, is not simply evidence of his colonization.) They perform a further charade in which another friend simulates poverty to sell the tourists what they call ancient turtle-shell heirlooms that are actually made of tooth-brush handles (Wendt 1994: 187–8). This antitouristic scene in the course of Wendt’s epic, intergenerational novel is more than a satiric turning of the tables on the Westerners, including, implicitly, Western readers who look to Wendt’s novels for autoethnological insight into the “Genuine Samoa,” with only a trickster novelist’s word to go on. “A novelist, so a palagi tourist once told me, has got to be honest (with whom, he did not say)” (Wendt 1994: 159), Pepesa writes, foregrounding the senses in which his novel, full of upside-down fables and in-jokes, is a performance of the complexities of being “honest.” (“Those who believe that truth . . . is straight and narrow,” writes Epeli Hau‘ofa, “should not visit our country or they will be led up the garden path or sold down the river, so to speak, since we have no rivers” [Hau‘ofa 1993: 8].) As Paul Sharrad argues, Wendt includes refigured mythologies among other warnings against “taking his fiction as an anthropological entrée into the lives of ordinary Pacific Islanders” (Sharrad 2003: 63), at the same time that the realistic aspects of his text will be invested with authority. It is not entirely possible for him to write in a way that would press Samoans to reconsider the terms on which they engage globalizing forces without at the same time assuming the structural position of the tour guide for readers in search of a clearer picture of Samoan life. Wendt cannot be as blankly opposed to the workings of tourism as his initial statement frames him to be. Rather, in the process of seeming to take the reader behind the scenes of the arranged tourist market, his novel doubles the performance of the boys, and only arrives at another front. If, as Robert Chi suggests, Wendt often “interpellate[s] the reader as a tourist” and functions as a trickster “go-between” (Chi 1997: 62), it is with pained irony toward the colonial history behind the contemporary scene of literary exchange, in which even the exposé of indigenous collusion becomes a commodity. The mood – especially in scenes

186 Conclusion where his characters themselves are put in the position of tourists and catch themselves regarding landscapes “reminiscent of backdrops in a Technicolor movie of the South Seas” (Wendt 1996: 171) – might be compared to Ralph Ellison’s discussion of his “writer’s necessity of cashing in on the pain undergone by my people (and remember I write of the humor as well)” as a “way of confronting, often for the hundredth time, that same pain and that same pleasure” (Ellison 1964: 23). If the representation of hoodwinking tourists can be seen as in some sense an extension of Oceanian mimicry, such as fale ‘aitu, “houses of spirits,” comic sketches that parodied authority, including colonial officials (Sinavaiana 1999: 184), the installation of the tourist in the text as a figure for modes of misrecognition and for misframing questions of culture does more than attempt to exorcise the bad mana of tourists, while acknowledging the pressure that Islanders face to seek tourist dollars and underscoring the cultural costs of doing so. Rather, introducing the tourist as naive consumer of culture raises questions about culture that go beyond the dismissal of the Western fantasy of unspoiled purity. In Michael Taussig’s sense of “parody [as] the place where mimesis exposes construction” (Taussig 1993: 68), Wendt’s early texts manipulate the reader into replacing simplistic desires for “authenticity” with questions about how, why, for whom and for what, and on what occasions the term “authenticity” is established and maintained. Wendt suggests that, however much a “joke” such a scene may be, it remains a deadly joke for a people pictured as absorbing the worst aspects of Western society while giving up some of the best of their own. For the everresourceful Tagata, this is finally too much, and he hangs himself, explaining his reasons to Pepesa in a farewell note: “The papalagi and his world has turned us and people like your rich but unhappy father and all the modern Samoans into cartoons of themselves, funny crying ridiculous shadows on the picture screen” (Wendt 1994: 226). A similar sense of futility is felt by Siniva, a brilliant woman in Sia Figiel’s novel Where We Once Belonged (1996), who returns to Samoa after years of study abroad in New Zealand only to feel acutely how much her traditional culture is being reworked and abandoned in “post”-colonial Samoa by external and internal forces. Like the speaker of Kauraka Kauraka’s “Darkness within the Light,” who ridicules a returnee with a “New Zealand degree” for not being “aware of the darkness within your light” (in Wendt 1995: 50), Sinava feels that “foreign knowledge” has “blinded [the] heart[s]” of those around her. However, as she rediscovers her “Samoan-ness,” her interior life splits away from the world around her. She destroys her B.A. and M.A., insignias of both Western “knowledge” and the hopes that her community has invested in her by sending her to New Zealand, the expectation being that she would return with knowledges useful to the national modernizing process. She is thus ostracized by her own family, who interpret her desire for a return to pre-palagi, pre-modern, pre-Christian life as an untenable form of madness and a betrayal of promise. (On the complexities of representations of madness in Oceania literature see Luangphinith 2004.) This leaves her on the margins of society haranguing tourists.

Conclusion 187 “Go back to where you came from, you fucking ghosts! Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!” Palagis were confused when they heard such words – most of them were shocked, shocked that someone recognized them doing what they usually did: Peeping-Tomming for a past, an illusion long dead, long buried in museums of their own making. They were ashamed and looked down, buying ulapule or coconut earrings from an old woman out of guilt. (Figiel 2001: 181) That the tourists, in Figiel’s editorial moment, are “ashamed” suggests a shock of recognition, a guilty acknowledgement of their own thinly repressed desires. They atone in the only way they know how, by being good tourists, or spending among people who clearly need the money. Anyone coming to Figiel’s book with preconceptions about Pacific paradises or Mead-like “free” sensuality may likewise be tempted to look away, though the unsparing compassion and vitality with which the book is narrated compels the opposite reaction. If (for opposed reasons) the peeping tourists and Siniva both want culture purified, Figiel insists that contemporary problems are messy and need to be looked at through innovative, postanthropological pre-scriptions. Figiel’s telling of the story largely through the perceptions and grass-roots voices of the girls who have been the object of so much Pacificist imaginings – and whose humor and intelligence is obliterated in Pacificist work – makes it impossible to see young Islanders in accustomed ways. The girls speak, first of all, to other Samoan girls, while making adults (particularly males) more aware of their situations. (The emphasis across Oceania on stories addressed to “young artists” suggests an urgency among writers to provide nourishing alternative educational materials to the colonial ones the authors grew up with.) If, in following Alofa as she “comes of age” in Samoa, Figiel has no direct interest in a corrective rewriting of Mead, her thick, engaged, polyvocal descriptions – the plentitude and exactness of detail – make abundantly clear the caricaturistic, monologic offensiveness of Mead’s vision. Figiel’s work is antitouristic in every sense. It centralizes Oceanian priorities; it conveys the richness, diversity, and humor of local speech and expressive forms, often including frames of reference and untranslated Samoan that lock out the non-Samoan (speaking) audience; it does not displace old romantic falsehoods with romantic “Truths,” but engages its own community critically on issues of collective concern, from the point of view of the emotional and psychological development of those most threatened and ignored in all the master narratives of “development.” Figiel sideswipes Mead and Freeman and Melville and Stevenson derisively at points in her work (these references are discussed in Keown 1999). However, what she rejects most vehemently is the principle – most evident in anthropology but common to all forms of Pacificism – that assumes that cultures, like individuals, have an essence or organic center that is accurately knowable from its surfaces. A Pacificist model of culture presses toward homogeneity, stasis, confinement. It assumes, as Greg Dening says of “fatal impact” theory, that cultures are timelessly present or in freefall decline, rather than recognizing that

188 Conclusion “the essence of culture is process” and that “one moment is no more hybrid than the last, one response no less creative than that which was made before” (Dening 1980: 39). At the same time, Figiel makes it clear that questions of gender and varieties of violence toward women are crucially at stake, most damagingly when they have been overlooked, in every aspect not only of Pacificism, but also of cultural scholarship and various modes of antitourism. The opening line of Where We Once Belonged – “When I saw the insides of a woman’s vagina for the first time I was not alone” – begins an expansive attack on Pacificist exoticism at the same time that it establishes the book’s abiding concern with its protagonist’s awareness of herself as woman and the larger thematic insistence on the complexities of knowing. Stated matter-of-factly, the way a girl Alofa’s age would say it, the line immediately relates to the narrator’s “coming of age.” Lili and Moa, the girls in Alofa’s circle, are “already menstruating” and they are curious about their own bodies. As Figiel has said, it is an “at your face lesson in anatomy – removed from any notion of romanticism that the reader might have” (Figiel 1998: 100). Any sense that the vagina Alofa sees with her friends promises the free-love eroticism associated with Samoa is undermined when the reader learns, a few pages later, that the girls see the image in a pornographic magazine that they discovered in the apartment of Mr. Brown, an Australian bank employee whose apartment Lili cleans. The magazine drops from a cupboard when Alofa reaches for a box of cornflakes (“Just to say I’ve touched a box of cornflakes”). The implication is that, while the girls are coming of age (Alofa’s menstruation arrives while she looks at the pictures), pornographic images are brought to Samoa, not indigenous or spontaneous to it, and that there is something unwholesome behind the cornflakes that Alofa wants to touch because palagi actors in cornflakes ads are always smiling. Instead, the girls discover both commodified images of women, whose smiles they recognize at once are “not cornflakes happy” (Figiel 2001: 10, 12), and U.S. junkfood, as it were, in one box. What is most at issue in the scene, however, emerges after the magazine is discovered in the schoolbag of Afi, a girl who has been bullying Alofa’s circle, having been planted there by Moa. After Afi is severely beaten and her head shaved (a bracing reminder that sexual curiosity is hardly smiled on), she not only refuses to retaliate, but apologizes to Alofa, which leads Alofa to reflect on how much she has misjudged Afi by fixing on her “surface,” which Alofa likens to a tablecloth. This leads to a sense of the blindness of judging a table by the cloth that covers it, a “principle . . . applicable to human beings.” The notion that under the tablecloth there may be another covering, an “inside surface,” is extended from individuals to cultures: “the inside of a people is hard to get to simply because there are so many layers. Every time you think you’ve taken one layer off, another one appears” (Figiel 2001: 17, 18). In this opening scene nothing is quite what it seems. Mr. Brown, the reader later learns in a section titled “A Good Man,” is impotent and loves Lili. He refuses to take her to Australia because he fears she will have no ‘aiga (family) there, which breaks both his and Lili’s hearts. For Figiel, as she puts it in a discussion of the book, the chapter “deconstruct[s] the notion of the free-love

Conclusion 189 sex savage Polynesian maiden. Love is not free. It is not for free. Lili knew that. At 17 she knew it” (Figiel 1998: 101). Likewise, Figiel does not allow acts of “tough love,” such as the violent disciplining that Afi suffers for an act she did not commit, to be regarded as confirmations of Derek Freeman’s idea of Samoa as endemically and irrationally violent. That it is not possible to generalize about Samoa at all, least of all as an entity discrete from external influences, such as the global economy which saturates the culture with Hollywood images, is emphasized in a chapter titled “The Centre.” “The Centre” at once critiques the notion of anthropological centers, and gives the reader an under-view of the material conditions behind a tourist destination. Figiel takes the reader on an anti-guidebook tour of Apia, Western Samoa, the presumed center of “all commercial and governmental activities, tourism and trade.” When one really looks at this “centre,” Figiel emphasizes, one finds a series of centers, each themselves layered, and must ultimately conclude that “There is no consensus as to what the centre of Apia is. Everyone has their own version, their own definition” (Figiel 2001: 65). For London Missionary Society members, for instance, the center is the Ioane Viliamu Building; for Catholics the Cathedral; for a particular Chinese-Samoan boy, the Kung-Fu theater; and so on, until Figiel reaches the market, which is itself “divided into sections” (ibid.: 80) that are themselves subdivided. The point, as Figiel writes of this section in “A Writer’s Story,” is that “everyone has their own perspective – whether of fa‘a samoa or of anything else – there cannot be a collective definition of that. The difficulty comes in asserting that difference – in saying that I see things differently! that perhaps there is no centre after all!” (Figiel 1998: 96–7). Samoan culture is not and never was an entity that stands still for display or autoethnographic definition. What is more relevant than finding the “authentic” Samoa, the book stresses, is feeling the confusing forms of violence, confinements, and threats to selfformation, identity, and self-worth that the girls feel in the context of Samoan culture as it exists in this new market, which, with its homeless and destitute, is a visible reproach to a culture that once took care of its own. If some men fail as husbands, leaders, and fathers, the (neo)colonial contexts of a “developing” nation are part of the problem, though not determinately so. The growing pains of the girls are nested within the transformation of a market as it impacts culture and disrupts systems of authority. This “market,” linked to the globalized economy and awash in Hollywood iconography, produces psychological divisions at all levels of culture that threaten Alofa/“alofa” (as with the word “aloha” in Hawaiian, one central meaning of “alofa” is “love” or spirit of compassion and warmth for others). In guiding the reader through this market – as through the “coming of age” of the girls – Figiel stresses the details that tourist literature occludes. At the end of the day in this center-that-is-not-a-center, those who cannot sell necklaces to “tourists and other Samoans” sleep in dirty, fly-filled streets, behind which the harbors are filled with dead dogs and “waves cry diesel tears and banana peels, oil, and human shit, too.” From this angle even the sun (around which all revolves) looks like it is for sale, hanging “like a pumpkin with a ten tala sign written in ink

190 Conclusion taped around its belly” (Figiel 2001: 74). This de-tour behind touristic fronts traps literary tourists into reflecting about their own situation vis-à-vis tourist centers and raises questions about the ways in which elites invest in tourism without a nuanced consideration of the human costs behind the market. At the same time, the market is a vital space, full of life, languages, humor, and the idiosyncratic and diverse styles with which people live their lives. Figiel’s energetic storytelling modes, at once drawing on world culture and traditional oral forms ( fa¯gogo and su‘ifefiloi ) and refiguring Samoan mythology, suggest that the circulations represented by the market – including the circulations of peoples who leave and return – need not sacrifice primary cultural values. Figiel describes how “The Centre,” the first section of the book to be written, was inspired in part by a market place in the Czech Republic, when systems there were changing rapidly. “Though there was a melancholic imprint of history on everyone’s face,” Figiel notes, “there was also a sense of happiness” (Figiel 1998: 97). There is without doubt a melancholic imprint evident in “The Centre,” a cheapening and denaturalization that attends the “old gods,” who needed sea and sky, seeming to be replaced by a hungry “new god” housed in “big extravagant falesa . . . with plastic flowers” (Figiel 2001: 89). Yet there is a sense of possibility as well that is duplicated in the final steps Alofa takes at the conclusion of the novel. Like Tagata, Siniva cannot accept the Samoa of the tourist market and commits suicide, and like Tagata she leaves an explanatory note for the protagonist and the reader: “Suicide – it is the only way. For isn’t that what we’re all slowly doing anyway? Each time a child cries for coca-cola instead of coconut-juice the waves close into our lungs.” In a variety of ways, Siniva asserts, what Samoans are consuming consumes them: “We eat Death and we are eaten by Death, too” (ibid.: 237, 238). After reading Siniva’s letter, Alofa feels “for the first time alone.” Within the enclosure of the novel she is brought from being embedded within a circle – “not alone” as she enters womanhood – to a feeling of isolation, individuation, and questioning: “What if there is truth in [Siniva’s] observations?” And yet in her moment of despondency, as “we” turns into “I,” and as sure as she is that Siniva is a traitor and that she will haunt “us,” Alofa is cheered by the flight of the Tuli of Tomorrow, whose “voice [birdsong] is music to [Alofa’s] feet.” She starts “walking-walking . . . away from Siniva’s grave” and toward “the new gathering place where ‘we’ once belonged” (Figiel 2001: 239). While Siniva’s uncompromising relation to culture as bounded contains a morally compelling caution, it appears limiting and self-destructive in the context of the new mixes and challenges characteristic of contemporary Island life, something that Alofa is drawn “away from.” Figiel leaves the reader with a sense of loss and possibility, a problem, and the thought that it is perhaps important that the culture be “haunted” as it moves toward the necessary engagement of the challenge of reimagining itself. “Gathering” here is not simply physical meeting, but gathering together the traditional and introduced, with both positive and looming resonances of the word “Gathering.”

Conclusion 191

Living histouricism: Alani Apio’s Ka¯mau and Ka¯mau A‘e the missionary sons are still inventing history pigs, pigs, pigs Imaikalani Kalahele, “Ode to Fort Street” History is studied as if we were visiting a museum . . . they force oppressed victims to absorb an alien, desiccated, sterile memory fabricated by the oppressor, so that they will resign themselves to a life that isn’t theirs as if it were the only one possible. Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America

On O‘ahu, whose name is mistranslated for tourists as “the gathering place” (Pukui et al. 1976: 262), the market is so pervasive and saturated with external influences that the indigenous culture seems buried under layers of histouricist narrative. As Wendt’s reference in Leaves of the Banyan Tree suggests, Hawai‘i has been known around Oceania as the worst case scenario, the place where Islanders are most threatened with cultural death by assimilation. Given the degree of U.S. colonialism, the question of how to be Hawaiian in the modern context is as old as the Hawaiian Renaissance, when John Dominis Holt explored it in the essay “On Being Hawaiian,” as well as in his brilliant novel Waimea Summer, both of which explore the traumatic ways in which race-based colonial views conflict with genealogical understandings of relation to undermine cultural pride and belonging (see Najita 2001).10 With the sovereignty movement an established presence, and renewed, acrimonious attempts on the part of U.S. interests to legislate Hawaiians out of existence as a people, Lilikala¯ Kame‘eleihiwa asserts that “The question that arises continually for Hawaiians is and has been ‘Pehea la¯ e pono ai’? that is, ‘How is it that we shall be pono’?” (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 10). Pono is untranslatable; dictionary definitions include the senses “goodness, uprightness, morality, moral qualities, correct or proper procedure, excellence, well-being, prosperity” (Pukui and Elbert 1986: 340). Beyond this, as Kame‘eleihiwa clarifies, pono is intimately bound up with land and sovereignty, so that loss of pono follows the loss of either. In this sense, the common mistranslation of the state motto – the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness – drains the political valences from the meanings of pono. When Kauikeaouli wrote the motto – “Ua mau ke ea of ka ‘a¯ina i ka pono” – he clearly meant that the “sovereignty of Hawai‘i was protected by pono behavior.” Written for “La¯ Ho‘iho‘i Ea” (restoration of sovereignty day), after the Paulet affair in 1843, the motto puns profoundly on the multiple meanings of the word “ea” – including breath, life, and sovereignty (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 184–5). Because in the contemporary literatures of Hawai‘i the question of how to recover pono is inseparable from the colonial domination and desecration of Hawaiian lands, signified for many by the toilets of tourist hotels in Waiki¯ki¯ flushing into the environment, Hawaiian writers are often drawn to forms of antitourism. Counter-narration remains urgent because, as argued in chapter 6, histouricism in

192 Conclusion Hawai‘i has been constituted by the massive double-gesture of a legitimating telos, which valorizes the colonial processes by which Islanders were led into modernity, and blocks or distorts insurgent voices within the public sphere. Indigenous dissent and resistance, that is, continue to be pathologized or criticized as lacking in “aloha.” At the same time, as Frantz Fanon notes of colonial history in general, “all those saints who have turned the other cheek . . . are studied and held out as examples” (Fanon 1963: 67). This follows the Pacificist heritage of taking Native voices seriously primarily in contexts where they directly or indirectly confirm the legitimacy and necessity of the colonial processes. If for the nascent missionary project the image of young ¯ pu¯kaha‘ia weeping over his ignorance on the steps of Yale College played a ‘O crucial role, structurally, in the Cold War period Florence “Johnny” Frisbie was required to say, in Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka, “I’ve never known a native who wouldn’t prefer his country run by the Americans” (Frisbie 1948: 90).11 As suggested in the introduction and chapter 1 of this book, such control over the narrative apparatus has involved an inversion of principles of hospitality, based on structured forms of ignorance which are tightly entwined within the developmental narrative of modernity itself. It is not then a coincidence that Pacificist representation is perpetuated today within the languages of corporate tourism, broadly conceived, and that tourist promoters call themselves the “hospitality industry.” The “histouricism” promoted by this industry functions to reassure tourists that colonialism in Hawai‘i benefits Hawaiians, disconnecting tourists from their implicatedness in a history whose effects are ongoing, while suggesting that something of the old, auratic Hawai‘i remains, and is in fact protected by tourism through a broadly articulated “heritage industry.” Most Hawaiian and “local”/settler artists in Hawai‘i who reference tourism protest all aspects of this narrative, from the appropriation of ideas of hospitality (ho‘okipa) to the idea that corporate tourism benefits Hawaiians.12 In an effort to connect tourists to the economic, social, and political conditions on which their presence is grounded, they emphasize in their various antitouristic modes that, while much of the Hawaiian culture and spirit endures, survival requires struggle and faces threats on many sides. In poems, essays, novels, plays, spoken-word performance, artwork, and a range of musical styles, Hawaiian artists engage corporate tourism as materially, psychologically, and environmentally destructive, a figure for the discursive constructions of the Islands that reduce Islanders culturally and spiritually. Repeatedly, this is understood to be a forceful and fraudulent usurpation of the position of “hosts,” as in Ma¯healani Kamau‘u’s lines “‘Host Culture.’ / What euphemistic bullshit – / Pure, unadulterated H.V.B. / They act like / They was invited – / Like all these years, / We been partying” (in Wendt et al. 2003: 96). In Vicky Kneubuhl’s Ola Na¯ Iwi (“Let These Bones Live”) the spirit of Liliha returns as a tour guide whose descriptions oppose the Hawaiian history purveyed by Pua, a Hawaiian “in bed with the developers” (Kneubuhl 2002). (As in Cook Islander Sir Tom Davis’s Makutu, the protagonist attempts to prevent sacred objects from being sold and housed in foreign museums.) To all who participate thoughtlessly in corporate tourism, Trask writes in Fanonian

Conclusion 193 mode of how Hawaiians are pressured into cultural prostitution and “cannot understand [their] cultural degradation because [they] are living it” (Trask 1993: 195). Trask’s frequent, acerbic references to tourism in From a Native Daughter (1993), Light in a Crevice Never Seen (1994), and Night is a Sharkskin Drum (2002) – in lines such as “A whole people / accustomed / to prostitution / selling identity / for nickels / and dimes / in the whorehouses / of tourism” (Trask 1994: 65) – are likewise challenges, exhortations, and provocations toward consciousness about the effects of accepting tourism as “last resort.”13 A critique along these lines is performed in Alani Apio’s plays Ka¯mau (1994) and Ka¯mau A‘e (1998), in both of which tourism stands in for colonial ideology while indexing the material conditions of Hawaiians in the age of the hospitality industry. In Ka¯mau, the protagonist, Alika Keleiha‘aheo‘on¯ak¯upuna Kealoha, works as a guide for Aloha Tours, in the course of which, as part of a “Hawaiian History Tour,” he recites “facts” that might have been scripted by James Michener or A. Grove Day. In these histourical narratives notable features become monuments to a triumphalist U.S. telos. Passing ‘Iolani Palace, Alika, whose middle name translates as “proud offspring of the ancestors” and whose last name means “the love,” informs a busload of tourists that, In 1893, Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last reigning monarch of Hawai‘i, gave up her throne to become part of the United States. First, a Provisional Government was set up to convince Congress that we were really ready to be a state. Then in 1898 we became an official Territory and in 1959 we were finally admitted as the Fiftieth State. Passing the statue of King Kamehameha, Alika assures his audience that before Kamehameha I, aided by Euroamerican forces, unified the islands, “Hawai’i was ruled by feudal chiefs in constant battle with each other for dominance over the islands.” Developmental narrative is central to this histouricist narrative: in Waiki¯ki¯, Alika tells his audience, “there’s a reproduction of an ancient Hawaiian village, complete with grass shacks”; at the same time, “there’s even talk of building a space-port on the Big Island of Hawai‘i” (Apio 1994: 25, 23). As comforting as such a teleology may be to tourists, with its juxtapositions of what Hawaiians were to what as U.S. citizens they may become, it is heartwrenching to Alika.14 With a precision that extends beyond the tourist scene to the massive legacy of American Pacificist beliefs about Island history, culture, and contemporary social conditions, Apio holds up the ideological construction of Hawai‘i, or what Hawai‘i means to U.S. tourists, actual or potential, in order to show how that understanding structurally requires an ignorance or active ignoring of what those constructions mean to Hawaiians. “When I was studying in college,” says a tourist named Mrs. Clements, who happens to teach U.S. history, and who might herself be reciting from any number of sociological textbooks on Hawai‘i as melting pot, “I found Hawayee . . . the most fascinating place of all because here you all are – so many different races and religions in such a small space – but you all seem to get along just fine.” What makes this possible, Mrs. Clements continues,

194 Conclusion “is something called aloha,” which she imagines as a variation of “Southern hospitality,” and about which she would like Alika, “as a Hawaiian,” to elaborate. Alika answers honestly that aloha is hard to define and does involve hospitality (“it’s like if you got lost here and you needed my help, then I’d take you home, feed you, offer my house to you” [Apio 1994: 22, 23]), but his scenario of lost tourists taken home by evicted Hawaiians indicates a certain incommensurability between colonialism and traditional understandings of aloha. The irony is amplified by the fact that Alika’s family is in the process of being displaced from ancestral land. Alika’s mother, whose spirit speaks during lulls in his guidebook speeches, tries to steer him toward a surer embrace of aloha (“our aloha’s been sold and used, but for us Hawaiians it’s all we got” [Apio 1994: 48]), but “aloha” – described by kumu hula (hula teacher) Olona Kaipo Ai as “the intelligence with which we meet life” (Meyer 2003: i) – seems hard to practice under the circumstances.15 These circumstances involve the ruthless commodification of “aloha” and other Hawaiian values, at the same time that cultural practices like barter and collective education are disparaged. As if he is being done a favor, Alika is offered the chance to share the prosperity of the “changing times” by facilitating the sale of his family’s land and ko‘a (fishing shrine) to the tourist company he works for. The implication is that the company has hired him – and offers to promote him – with an eye toward appropriating the land. As an extension of corporate generosity, his cousin who lives as a fisherman will be allowed to continue to use the beach if he will “show the tourists how the ancient Hawaiians used to fish. That way he can keep fishing, make some extra money, and the tourists are happy” (Apio 1994: 23–4). In the logic of tourism, they can continue their traditional ways only by performing them for money, and the fact that they can become objects of tourism (“old ways” or their simulation being primary attractions for tourists) means that tourism is already inherent to them (O’Carroll 1997: 41). Resistance to this arrangement, presented as a boon to everyone concerned, is criminalized in advance. Under such conditions, Alika drinks heavily and his cousin Georgie becomes domestically violent, and subsequently commits suicide. (Within the Hawaiian extended family or “‘ohana,” cousin and brother would not be distinguished as in the U.S. nuclear family.) In scenes that juxtapose the family coming apart with Alika performing for tourists, Apio makes clear that behind every histourical telling there are alternative narratives and a legacy of pain, and dramatizes how the telling of falsehoods ultimately distorts the psychology of the teller, who must act self-destructively whether he resists the hotel or does its bidding (literally). What glosses and romances the U.S.’s colonial teleology in the Islands debases Hawaiians and abuses the memories of Alika’s ancestors in an ongoing colonial scene. Within this scene of encounter Alika is openly used. He is as much vended as vendor, as much on display as the monuments. As Jane Desmond documents, since the 1910s, hotels have sought to employ Hawaiians as “greeters” or tour guides to give a body to the image in tourist promotion (Desmond 1999: xv). Only late in the play, for the space of one scene, does the histourical account stick in Alika’s throat, and, haunted and tugged by family voices, he drops the required façade and says:

Conclusion 195 You know folks, when I joined this company, I was just out of high school. And when I started work they gave me speeches to memorize about the places that we would be visiting. But folks, today I’m having a hard time giving the speech about the place because it’s not true. You see, they want me to tell you that our last reigning monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, wanted to give up her throne, her palace, and her kingdom to the United States for protection. Mostly because they don’t want you to feel bad. They think you’re going to feel bad because what really happened is that basically some American businessmen backed by U.S. armed forces overthrew the Queen. They took over our government, took away our rights as Hawaiians and took our land. Nobody on this bus had anything to do with that. I know that. But folks, something really wrong happened. (Apio 1994: 52) Mr. Clements tells him that he and his wife have saved for twenty years to visit Hawai‘i, and that his own family was displaced from their land by corporations and left no option but to work in coal mines: “we all got sob stories . . . So now, why don’t you just give us that speech we paid for” (Apio 1994: 53). Mrs. Clements admits to having some sense of wrong mixed in with her meliorist narrative of Hawai‘i, but can only return, in the face of global injustice, to the importance of “loving and being loved . . . aloha and sharing aloha” (ibid.: 55). When his “Boss” comes out of the audience, Alika does what most Hawai‘i audiences hope he will do: he quits his job, saying he hates “pimping” his culture. However, his Boss replies with a lesson that many audiences in Hawai‘i would reluctantly accept, not as pono but as political and economic reality: “You still don’t get it, do you. It’s not your land and these aren’t your islands anymore. The game’s survival. I’ve got a family to feed and so do you” (ibid.: 56). With his cousin Michael going to prison for allegedly stabbing a Hawaiian officer when he refuses to vacate the Makekona beach – the dumb-show in the stage directions implies that, while reaching for a shark’s tooth pahoa, Michael was beaten and arrested before he got the knife (criminalized in advance) – and with his haole partner Lisa and her child to feed, Alika “gets it” and puts back on his uniform. The play ends where it began, with Alika reciting from the same canned histourical script.16 The only thing that will relieve the pain for Alika in the multiply ironic terms of Apio’s sequel, Ka¯mau A‘e (1998), is a measure of interpellation into the ideology of tourism, or Alika’s acceptance of the belief that tourism is the best road to survival for his family and community. The action resumes nine years after that represented in Ka¯mau with Michael’s release from prison. His full name is now given as Michael Kawaipono Mahekona; as the play progresses he will be called Kawaipono, which translates as “the pono waters.” Kawaipono has been released early due to the efforts of a Hawaiian sovereignty group, ‘Ai Po¯haku (‘ai = eat + pohaku = stone, “stone-eaters, after Ellen Prendergast’s “Kaulana N¯a Pua,” also known as “Mele ‘Ai Po¯haku” [“stone-eating song”]) led by a woman named Wainani (“beautiful waters”), who sees his claim to the family’s ko‘a or “active fishing shrine” (Apio 1998: 34) as an opportunity to get something for the

196 Conclusion Hawaiian people. In contrast to Kawaipono, whose non-negotiable obligations to the ancestors are to protect the ko‘a, Wainani is a canny strategist, able to manipulate tourists and the media for leverage, who is ultimately willing to sacrifice Kawaipono’s ko‘a for her version of the greater Hawaiian good. In the time of the play, the most immediate adversary of ‘Ai Po¯haku has become Alika, who as a reward for hard work and corporate loyalty now manages the hotel that has been built on the ancestral land Michael went to prison for threatening to defend, and who has shed the misgivings that tormented him in Ka¯mau. From his position as manager, Alika has come to believe that he has “the chance to help a lot more people” than just his family: over 200 full-time positions filled by Hawaiians. Teaching our culture, teaching our history. Going home and feeding Hawaiian families . . . I’ve learned more about our history and culture here than I did up at Kamehameha – or even from T¯ut¯u. Our Ho‘okipa program has become the model industry-wide. (Apio 1998: 61) For Michael, this position is simply a caving in to “da machine” that has caused Alika to bury his “na‘au alive.” If the “history” and “culture” sold in this new hotel are an advance on Cold War histouricism, the “real” they present in the form of “culturally sensitive” tourism (edutainment) is hardly closer to a living, emotionally sustaining culture. That Alika has learned more about his history and culture in a ho‘okipa (hospitality) program than from his grandfather or teachers at Kamehameha (a school for Hawaiians) indexes the extent of colonization (the struggle to get Oceanian and Hawaiian reading materials into the curriculum at Kamehameha is ongoing). His final speech thus performs its own limitations, summing up the attitude of those who have given up all hope of fundamentally changing the system, and who instead attempt to work within it to advance appreciation for “Hawaiian values” in the altered context of capitalist culture. Alika chastises Wainani for claiming that ‘Ai Po¯haku represents the majority of Hawaiians: Nobody does. And you know why? because the majority of Hawaiians don’t care. . . . We’re too much of everybody and everything else. . . . We may learn Hawaiian but we think american. We don’t know the old ways: men separated from women, everything sacred, religion everywhere. What’s that mean? Our own people gave it up. . . . The old gods demanded absolute devotion. You speak English, they only understand Hawaiian. You and them are so out of each other’s contexts it’s absurd. This all-or-nothing, chop-logic history, in which one has either the purity of the Old Gods worshipped the Old Way or the nostalgic impurity of tourism – arrived at from the opposite direction of Figiel’s Siniva – so infuriates Kawaipono that he “‘oki’s” (cuts the “piko” or umbilical cord that joins them) Alika from his fourteen generation connection to the Mahekona ‘ohana (Apio 1998: 67–8).

Conclusion 197 Many tourism and globalization theorists, of course, would side with Alika, and add that cultures all over the world have been revived, or been encouraged to reinvent themselves with creative syncretism, or even been strengthened by using the tourist industry as a vehicle.17 In such a reading, “tourism” can be manipulated by Hawaiians as easily as the other way around, as Wainani and Alika believe in different ways, given the fixation of transnational capital on the bottom line. However, the terms of Apio’s play lead the audience to question the costs of such benefits. Alika’s own partner, Lisa, a haole who is presented sympathetically in both plays, acknowledges to Kawaipono that Alika “got sucked into it, and he doesn’t want to fight anymore. He just wants to fit in.” It is Lisa who pleads with Alika and Kawaipono to stop “killing the one thing you both believe in! . . . You both love your ‘ohana” (Apio 1998: 50, 68). Most importantly, Apio’s antitourism focuses attention on how divisions among the play’s characters about how to help Hawaiians (the characters seem to represent different entities within the Hawaiian community) have a political source in U.S. colonialism. Given that colonialism cannot be willed away, that the state-run HVB (Hawai‘i Visitor’s Bureau) continues to promote the idea that its conduct benefits Hawaiians and is essential to the state’s economic survival, and that the media feigns sympathy while recoding disagreements within the Hawaiian community as inability for selfgovernment, it is not obvious in the terms of the play what tactics or approaches should be employed at the political level. Kawaipono makes his choice – for which no one can blame him – and at the end of the play he is led back to jail in handcuffs. What is obvious, however, and what Apio’s plays render in emotional terms, is that Hawaiians need true self-determination in order to best work out for themselves the question of “Pehea la¯ e pono ai?” – how best to address the needs and concerns of their la¯hui (race, nation) – within the “sea of islands” that comprises a large part of the globe. This nesting of Island issues within regional identification is what Manulani Meyer suggests in her expression, “my grounding is Hawai‘i, my backyard is the Pacific” (Meyer 2003: xvi). CODA: CHANGING PRESCRIPTIONS Although we cannot control what happens to a perception before we become aware of it, we can retroactively revise the value which it assumes for us at a conscious level. We can look at an object a second time, through different representational parameters, and painstakingly reverse the processes. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World I cannot go back – I never left. Joe Balaz, “Moe‘uhane”

The anger expressed in the antitourism of Trask, Kamau‘u, Apio, and many others is of course only one aspect of Hawaiian writing. The variety of that writing, ¯ iwi, itself a fragment of Hawaiian cultural production, can be seen in the journal ‘O

198 Conclusion founded in 1998 by the late Ma¯healani Dudoit, who saw the creative energy of the Hawaiian movement at the millennium as a “huliau, a turning point, a time of ¯ iwi are in Hawaiian, which has been change” (Dudoit 2002: 8). Sections of ‘O undergoing a revitalization through immersion and charter schools. (For an earlier collection of Hawaiian writing and art see Balaz [1989].) As difficult as the times are, and with the navigational challenges and opportunities globalization presents, mana is being recovered in Hawai‘i, as symbolized and enacted most visibly in the voyagings of the Hokule‘a over ancient routes. Such retracings in a range of media assert that in Hawai‘i, as in much of Oceania, the process of “changing prescriptions” refers not so much to going back as to wiping off the colonial optic to discover contemporary continuities with what has been obscured. Many Oceanian thinkers and cultural practitioners refer to moving forward into the future while facing the past, or to “backing into the future” (Osorio 2002: 7; see Hau‘ota 2000: 458). In this spirit, Kapulani Landgraf’s photographs and the accompanying poetic tributes to wahi pana (legendary places) of the islands of Hawai‘i reclaim storied landscapes from the epistemological violence of colonial naming, illustrated Hawaiiana, and the forms of amnesia these authorize (Landgraf 1994; Bacchilega 2001). To recall the Hawaiian place names and the stories behind them has revolutionary force: in the mind of the person who does not know the name Mokoli‘i, the small island off Ko‘olau Poko can only register as the offensive “Chinaman’s Hat.” In addition to documenting the disrespect done to “sacred places gone for coin” (Trask 1994: 11) – places that nonetheless remain significant for the history of which they are a part – Landgraf uncovers much of what has been neglected. Her work reasserts the mana of lichencovered and disordered stone remains of heiau (temples). Like Winduo’s “unwriting,” her photography often involves refocusing viewers’ attention to what has not so much been erased as overwritten, ignored, neglected, or overgrown. While such acts of changing colonial pre-scriptions are liberatory – one aspect of the creative dialect that a “minor literature” in the Deleuzian sense engages in – it is more and other than a return to sender of the immense postcard that Oceania has been to Euroamericans (Malek Alloula, quoted in Behdad 1994: 8). Rather, Oceanian movements in the arts, as suggested, are a rallying of imaginative forces into an emerging regional awareness. “We are the sea,” Hau‘ofa writes. We must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces that we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places, and from which we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not allow anyone to belittle us again, and take away our freedom. (Hau‘ofa 1999: 37) For Hau‘ofa it is vital to think in such pan-Pacific ways because, in an age where globalization’s pundits are describing the world as flat, Islands are small places, and “as individually, colonially-created tiny countries acting alone,” they could “fall off the map” (Hau‘ofa 1997: 125).

Conclusion 199 The cultural homogeneity that globalism threatens is most effectively resisted not by isolated communities struggling for survival, but through alternative ways of looking at the world. In much theorizing on globalism, the “local” is thought of as that which resists being interpellated within global neoliberalism, or as that which is small, relatively self-contained, and resistant. “Local” might more accurately be described in Oceanian arts as modes of regarding the same phenomena from different, Island-centered perspectives (Ihimaera 1993; Thaman 2003; Hereniko 2003b). For Hau‘ofa, such an imagined Oceanian consciousness, the shared sense of “a world of social networks that criss-cross the Ocean,” is “independent of the Pacific Islands world of official diplomacy and neocolonial dependency” and essential to freeing all Islanders, on or off islands, from “externally-generated definitions” (Hau‘ofa 1997: 124–5), including directives from aid-granting institutions about the structures that contemporary Oceanian governments and economies should take. If external definitions have included the range of intergenerational questions about “authenticity” generated within U.S. diasporic communities (Radhakrishnan 1994), with Islanders the paradigms might be formulated differently. Oceanians in the U.S. need not be considered as simply another wave of settlers; rather, they might be regarded as indigenous peoples circulating within an Empire whose insides and outsides have become increasingly blurred (Dirlik 2004: 289). This is the vision presented by Taueva Fa‘otusia, who writes, “But this is America you say / Not a contradiction I agree / But we are still what we are / Polynesians from across the sea” (Fa‘otusia 1999: 10). Diasporic Islanders, in John Pule’s metaphor, take soil with them to their new homes to mix with the soil there to create a grounded place from which to speak (Pule 2002), and from which to draw upon world culture while enriching the soil/culture of their new homes. Within such an expanding world “outside” the Islands, Hau‘ofa argues, the “social centrality of the ancient practice of reciprocity” creates and sustains forms of circulation, commensurate with the mobility of the global system itself, that enables supporting local struggles while thinking beyond the level of “national boundaries” (Hau‘ofa 1999: 35–6). Much of Oceanian art, dance, performance, photography, film – whether or not it “makes it” in(to) the global marketplace – is a way of affirming such networks, linking up localities, and creating and maintaining alternative spaces. In Witi Ihimaera’s terms, these “should be constructed like a house with a heart” (Ihimaera 1993: 72). If Islanders are knocking down walls within the domains of English to let a breeze blow through, my hope is that, as American studies reconceptualizes its boundaries – “worlds itself” constructively in coming to terms with its legacies around the globe (Gillman et al. 2004) – it will knock down its material and psychological blocks to seeing Island situations in their complexity. Angela Davis’s call for response-ability with which I began my introduction, the image of a “rope” that anchors people culturally while allowing them to recognize a historical poetics of relation, may be a way of envisioning the creation of communities that “can respond to new historical needs” (Davis 1993: 33). At the same time, Davis implies that learning entails an ethics of protecting the spaces one visits, and includes

200 Conclusion pulling with what Trask describes as the “rope of resistance” – a reproductive line of “ideas/books, history/politics” that join generations and communities in counter-hegemonic struggle (Trask 1994: 55–6). In any healing relation, action must come from all sides. If in Oceania Natives and settlers have bound-together histories, the struggle to decolonize relations among U.S. citizens and Islanders remains an institutional and philosophical challenge, given the ongoing Pacificist media campaign, the need for Oceanian self-determination (political and economic), and the inhospitability of U.S. disciplinary structures to indigenous articulations. If Oceania has long been “inside” the U.S., both because of colonialism, and because of the growing Oceanian diaspora – and if “Hawaiian and Pacific Islander” is just being recognized as a census category separate from “Asian” – Oceania remains distanced and disordered in the U.S. imagination. Wherever the reader of this book lives, it is pretty sure that touristic images of Oceania continue to represent Islanders in simplistic Pacificist ways. What my discussion of antitourism as a congeries of responses to Pacificisms suggests is that Oceanians know that representations have the power to injure and confine, or to work for liberation, and that imaginative acts are never free or inconsequential. As historian of Pacificist representation Bernard Smith notes, imagery has always been “a component of decision-making” for those who entered Oceania (Smith 1992: 191). Oceanian artists must play the leading roles in steering those held within Pacificist imaginings toward different modes of perception and decision-making. The references to a range of Islander texts in this conclusion, as elsewhere in this book, are meant to suggest that, however under-recognized within the current frames of U.S. postcolonial studies, Islanders have in fact created an extensive and diverse body of creative and critical materials. These provide a mobile optic for looking freshly at the complexities of the region, and for countering centuries of structured ignorances about Oceania. To see the necessity of changing how one looks – even to keep one’s ignorance before one – is to begin to change one’s relation to what one looks at, and to open one’s consciousness to more appreciative and engaged possibilities. In Figiel’s terms (see chapter epigraph), such openness to prescriptions that are themselves always changing is a precondition for meaningful talk.

Notes

Introduction 1 Following the lead of Albert Wendt in “Towards a New Oceania” and Epeli Hau‘ofa in “Our Sea of Islands,” “Oceania” (reinflected from its earlier usages) has begun to replace “Pacific Islands” as a descriptor (see Hau‘ofa 1999: 31) of an enormously varied region. Though “Oceania” and “Pacific” are often used interchangeably, in this book I opt for “Oceania,” in part because, as discussed in chapter 1, “Pacific” has in my view functioned as a consequential, glossing misnomer. Within the language of APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation), the region is divided into “Pacific Rim” and “Basin,” with Oceania/Pacific as basin. As many have noted, all of these terms are Western impositions, as are the divisions “Polynesia” (many islands), “Melanesia” (dark islands), and “Micronesia” (small islands), coined by Dumont D’Urville (1832), and the outmoded “South Seas.” The recent play upon the term “Nesians” by Oceanian poets and musicians suggests one Island recoding of colonial terminologies, and counter-memory to colonial am-nesia. However, “Pacific” remains the institutionally sedimented term, as in the Center for Pacific Islands Studies and the journals the Contemporary Pacific, Pacific Studies, and Journal of Pacific History, in which much of the work of Pacific studies is published. No indigenous term for the whole region could have existed, given the thousands of languages spoken, before Western incursion. Thus, a poetic term such as “wansalawara” (one-salt-water/one ocean-one people in Papua New Guinea tok pisin [see Lal 1987; Hau‘ofa 1997: 140]), used as its title by a student newspaper at the University of the South Pacific, reflects a combination of Western influence and indigenous innovation. At the same time, the specificity or generality (pan-Pacificism) of Islander self-identifications will vary according to context (Hereniko 1994b). 2 In “Possessing Tahiti,” Dening writes that “Possessing Tahiti was a complicated affair. Indeed, who possessed whom? Native and Stranger each possessed the other in their interpretations of each other” (Dening 1996: 167). (On the haunted resonances of the term “possession” see also Stephen Greenblatt [1991].) The term “the beach” as a space of interaction precedes Dening; see, for instance, Eugene Burdick’s desultory remarks in 1961 on “the Beach” as a figure for the destruction of Oceanian purity through cultural invasion (Burdick 1986: 215, 228, 294). However, Dening has most significantly developed it as the Oceanian version of “frontier” or “contact zone” (Dening 1980). The phrase “bound-together” appears frequently in Dening’s work, beginning with the series of videotaped lectures entitled “The Bound-Together History of Kama‘¯aina and Haole in Polynesia.” Playing against Dening’s sense of the beach as original scene of meeting, David Chappell notes that “Islanders did not simply wait for the outside world to overwhelm them. The border of a seafaring people does not begin on the beach but beyond it” (Chappell 1997: xvi). On the entanglement and two-way appropriations of material culture see Thomas (1991) and Hopepa (1999).

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3 Wesley-Smith describes Pacific studies, used interchangeably with Pacific Islands studies, as “a loosely organized field of inquiry based on a wide range of literatures about the region drawn mostly from disciplines in the social sciences and humanities” (Wesley-Smith 2003: 119). He provides a helpful historical overview of the development of different programs for Pacific studies as related to national planning and the exigencies of particular local socio-political formations, and he explores three primary rationales that have informed the curricula/research agendas of Pacific studies programs: a pragmatic rationale, in which nations support efforts to “know” peoples (largely peoples who they will administrate); a laboratory rationale in which it is believed that Pacific Islands provide unique “isolate” (graspable as whole) environments to study issues of general human concern; and an empowerment rationale, in which institutions are designed to provide institutional space for Islanders and interested non-Islanders to engage in research from Oceanian-centered perspectives (Wesley-Smith 1995). Perhaps more than most area studies, Pacific studies have historic linkages with national interests (White and Tengan 2001; Hanlon and White 2000; Quigg 1986). For recent discussions of the drive within Pacific Island studies to become decolonized see Diaz and Kauanui (2001), Hereniko (2003a, 2003b), Teaiwa (2001), Subramani (2001), Gegeo (2001), Borofsky (2000), and Wood (2003). 4 In addition to Reimagining, Wilson has written a series of nuanced critical and poetic essays on the problems and potentials of the “Asia Pacific” concept, and co-authored the Introduction, with Arif Dirlik, to Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (1994). In Reimagining Wilson establishes (and then worries into various forms) a dialectic between “Asia-Pacific” (chap. 1) and “American Pacific” (chap. 2), both of which are presented as multiple and contested. Among many writings that work in specialized ways at junctions of American studies and Pacific studies see Allen (2002); Joyce (2001); Sumida (1991, 1992); Mykkänen (2003); and the essays in White and Lindstrom (1989). 5 This cannot be attributed to a scarcity of materials that might have represented Hawai‘i in ways consonant with the Heath’s refinements of what qualifies as “literature” and/or “American,” or its re-envisioning of U.S. literature as multicultural from (before) its putative origins. Nearly every entry in the Heath could have a counterpart in the literatures of Hawai‘i (Lyons 2003: 140). There are roughly a million pages of writing in Hawaiian in the nineteenth century (much of it now translated), including novels, stories, oli (chants), mele (songs), and poems, not to speak of an extensive, varied settler literature. 6 While the University of Hawai‘i has recently expressed an institutional desire to become more of a “Hawaiian place of learning” (mission statement), the obtaining of credentials remains a serious problem. For instance, the University of Hawai‘i offers no Ph.D. in Hawaiian language or culture, thus making it difficult for scholars working in these areas to get the degree that would meet the national and university hiring standards. In addition, the university has an ongoing colonial bias against hiring cultural practitioners whose credentials are established by non-academic processes accepted within indigenous communities. One does not become a Kumu Hula or master carver or navigator, for instance, by receiving a university degree. 7 While my use of “position” here refers to the relation one asserts toward an assumed audience, elsewhere I draw upon Morrison’s suggestion that writers and readers are always “positioned” in relation to each other, in relation to objects of knowledge, and in relation to assumptions about what constitutes knowledge. This restores an omitted emphasis on race/gender/cultural location in particular from the earlier, universalist categories of “implied reader” and “implied author.” In suggesting that, “regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white,” Morrison suggests that, in needing to mark nonwhites, texts assume the centrality or normativeness of “whiteness,” and refuse to develop “criteria and knowledges . . . outside the categories of domination” (Morrison

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1992: xii, 7). For Morrison, at the same time that the writer assumes a position, and the text through its establishment of norms positions the reader as insider/outsider along a variety of raced/gendered axes, the text betrays the author to the audience at the same time that it releases the haunted, spectral figures that partly comprise it. All Hawaiian definitions in this book are checked against Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary. For a discussion of how ‘a¯ina signifies beyond its dictionary definition see Kame‘eleihiwa (1992), and on Hawaiian views on hospitality see Fong, who argues that hospitality is an ideology: “behaviors and practices which are tied to native perspectives of life and how the world works” (Fong 1994: 2), the sayings in Pukui (1983), and the description of “politeness and hospitality” in Handy and Pukui (1998: 185–8). The received view, much open to abuse as my chapters argue, is that “hospitality is required. . . . To flatly refuse Hawaiian hospitality is a genuine insult” (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee 1972: 2.9). Puakea Nogelmeier gives as one definition for “kuleana,” “privilege and responsibility” or “the privilege to learn and the responsibility to properly use and perpetuate” (Nogelmeier 2003: xv). During the nineteenth century the word kama‘a¯ina began to be appropriated by white settlers born in Hawai‘i to distinguish themselves from other whites in the Islands, and from there it devolved into a description of whites as “kamaaina haoles” (Wright 1972: 20), who could play the role of quasi-native informants. For a suggestive reading of the longings and disavowals implied in this appropriation see John Eperjesi’s critique of Jack London’s desire to be regarded as kama‘a¯ina, or what Lili‘uokalani termed “quasi-Hawaiian” (Eperjesi 2005: 106–20). Ward Churchill’s essays in Acts of Rebellion (2003), for instance, speak to many issues facing Oceanians, such as self-determination and the dangers of plenary power in the new world order (3–22, 111), “radioactive colonization” (111–40), “ethnic nullification” (123–41), and “cinematic colonization” (185–217). For instance, from the moment that writing about Oceania began it involved levels of collaboration. In twentieth-century Hawai‘i there have likewise been haole, such as Theodore Kelsey, who learned Hawaiian and spent a lifetime involved with the culture, who proceeded in different ways than those highlighted in chapter 6 of this book. University scholars Samuel Elbert (linguistics), Martha Beckwith and Katherine Luomala (folklore), Kenneth Emory (anthropology), and Alfons Korn and Bacil Kirtley (English) are among those who, collaborating with Oceanian scholars, contributed in different and sometimes problematic ways to the valuing and perpetuation of Oceanian knowledges. While such collaborations, beyond the scope of this analysis, caution against simplistic readings of Pacificist scholarship and representation, it is fair to conclude, with Trask, that, in the colonization of Hawai‘i and in the imaginative colonization of Oceania in the U.S. public sphere, the most sympathetic of the scholars above were generally politically mute.

1 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be 1 Paul Sharrad argues that, in general, “the Basin has been represented not as a political space or an economic one in an active, productive sense, but as a passive receptacle of observation, a space for European adventuring, an area of natural science, history, anthropology, and ‘development studies’” (Sharrad 1990: 597). The tendency to concentrate on “development” in Oceania, in particular on how the Islands negotiate modernity/globalism, is strictly ongoing (Borofsky 2004). 2 “The Errand Bearers” appeared in the New York Times to celebrate the opening of the first Japanese embassy in the U.S., following Commodore Perry’s historic mission to Japan. On the constitutive irony of “America” as an “empire for liberty” see Dimock (1989). 3 John Hay, designer of much U.S. foreign policy in the period of high imperialism,

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wrote: “the Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic is the ocean of the present, and the Pacific is the ocean of the future” (quoted in Gibson 1993: 10); on Hay’s policies see Drinnon (1980: 255–78). Hay follows a long line of U.S. projectors about Oceania, such as William H. Seward, who earlier wrote, “The Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theatre of events in the world’s great hereafter,” and Henry A. Pierce, who wrote that, “In view of the future domination of the United States in the N. & S. Pacific Oceans,” it was important for the U.S. to gain control of Pago Pago in Samoa (quoted in Anderson 1978: 46, 47). In the aftermath of Dutch withdrawal, Western Papua was “sold out to Indonesia” by the U.S. and Australian governments as part of “Cold War strategy to keep Indonesia out of the communist camp” (Martinkus 2002: 1). The U.S. continues to support vicious Indonesian repression of Western Papua’s independence movement, both to defend U.S.-based corporate interests in the Freeport mines, and as part of the shift in national strategy from anti-communist containment to an aggressive “war” on terrorism. In response to questions from Western Papuan students about the U.S. hate for Papuans experienced by sufferers of human rights violations, U.S. ambassador Boyce responded: “I am not sure the people from outside hate the Papuan people as much as they love Papuan resources” (quoted in ibid.: 39). For a critical analysis of how “the Pacific continues to be produced as a kind of dreamwork in which the interests of capital provide the dominant hermeneutic for transcoding its multiple and tangled flows” see Eperjesi (2005: 104). In 1993, the Openness Initiative began declassifying documents relating to nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, which included stories of Islanders thinking that fallout from the exploded coral reefs was snow and catching it on their tongues, and U.S. scientists speaking about the opportunity such incidents provided for monitoring the effects of radiation. Islanders complain today that they were not clearly informed about when they were receiving clinical care and when they were participants in government experiments. See Keever (2005) on nuclear testing in Micronesia, and on ¸ ¸ (Barclay 2002: the effects of testing, including “jellyfish babies,” see the novel Melal 80–2). For critiques of U.S. colonialism and lack of concern for indigenous cultures in Micronesia see Kiste (1994) and Hanlon (1998). Today Micronesians continue to relocate, with large communities in Honolulu and, more recently, Arkansas, where 10,000 Micronesians, or roughly one out of seven of the population, have moved to work for Tyson chicken. See Klein for a discussion of the cultural politics of the stage and film versions of South Pacific and of Michener’s attempts to “recast American race relations in Asian–white terms rather than in the more fraught black–white terms” (Klein 2003: 261). See also Wilson (2000a: 163–89), on Michener and Oceanian responses to his legacy, and Sumida (1991). For the most detailed and revealing account of Michener’s formative years in Oceania as a “ComSoPac” historical officer, working under the supervision of Samuel Eliot Morrison, see Michener’s memoir (1992a: 23–91). This includes several references to the model for Bloody Mary as a radical whom he portrayed, “not as a potential revolutionary but as a Tonkinese woman with a pretty daughter to care for” (ibid.: 149). Among the more useful of the many historical overviews of U.S. involvement in Oceania are Dodge (1965), Johnson (1995), Dudden (1992), Caruthers (1973), Strauss (1963), Gibson (1993), and Heffer (2002). These books, which tend to concentrate on the rim countries, generally with a chapter on Hawai‘i, build upon massive, more specialized studies, such as Macy (1972) and Starbuck (1989). Extensive W.P.A. research on U.S. activity in Oceania, involving thousands of shiplogs and hundreds of thousands of newspapers, was conducted in the 1940s as a way of providing the basis for laying claims to many Islands (Dodge 1966: 11), examples of which are collected in Ward (1966). On early representions of Oceania in

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U.S. culture see Eperjesi (2005: 26–34) and Leon W., who concludes that, “by 1820, American residents had an image of the Pacific Ocean and its shores that had resulted from innumerable perceptions and beliefs based on everything from maps to hearsay” (Leon W 1995: 29). Leon Edel, who settled in Hawai‘i, challenged the idea that in the early nineteenth century Hawai‘i was a “frontier,” arguing that it had an “aristocracy of learning and a middle class of shop keepers” at a time when “the Wild, Wild West knew no religion but rapacity” (Edel 1988: 27). Subramani likewise notes, “There are idealised metaphors of South Seas paradise, romantic portrayal of Polynesian Adam and Adonis, on the one hand, and racial stereotypes of cannibals and calibans, on the other. They are all distorted images. But they have had a great influence in the region as well as outside” (Subramani 1992: 7; see also Souter 1999). On the racial dimension to Euroamerican distinctions between Polynesians and Melanesians see Kjellgren, who notes that even today “travellers go on ‘adventure tours’ in Melanesia to experience ‘primitive cultures’; they go on ‘island getaways’ in Polynesia to experience ‘Polynesian hospitality’” (Kjellgren 1993: 110; see Douglas 1996). The Polynesia/Melanesia distinction is attributed to Dumont d’Urville, who based his distinction on absences – the absence of a common language-base in Melanesia, the absence of tapu systems as a pervasive feature of Island governance, and the absence of considerations about how Micronesia complicates the taxonomic split (Rainbird 2003). Said is critiqued, by critics who stress the importance of his work to them, for his totalization of colonial discourse and inattentiveness to gender and class. For Behdad, Said’s essentialism “leaves no room for the possibility of difference among the various modes of orientalist representation and in the field of its power relations” (Behdad 1994: 11). For gender critiques of Orientalism see Lowe (1991), McClintock (1995), and Schueller (2001). Eperjesi finds Said’s definition of imperialism as the occupation of land too restrictive in that it neglects economic forms of imperialism (Eperjesi 2005: 19–20). The view that American Orientalism begins in the twentieth century is often attributed to Said, although Said argues that There is a dense body of American writing . . . which shows a peculiarly acute imperial cast, even though paradoxically its ferocious anti-colonialism, directed at the Old World, is central to it. One thinks, for example, of the Puritan ‘errand into the wilderness’ and, later, of that extraordinarily obsessive concern in Cooper, Twain, Melville, and others with United States expansion westward, along with the wholesale colonization and destruction of native American life; an imperial motif emerges to rival the European one. (Said 1993: 63)

12 As Lowe (1991) and Said (1979) suggest, Orientalisms are almost inherently comparative, since cultures over time become strongly identified with the nation (Said 1993: xiii). As argued by critics of Orientalism in various contexts, such as Michael Dash on Haiti (1992) and Robert Nicole on Tahiti (2001a), Orientalist representation generally has a nationalistic connection. For Rod Edmond, who has provided the most thorough analysis of the conventional aspects and objects of colonial discourse in Oceania: “There are general features which distinguish much French writing about the Pacific from British and North American representation” (Edmond 1997: 19; see also Cheek 2003). 13 Rowe is more attentive to how Typee, through referencing Porter’s aggression in the Marquesas, addresses a “burgeoning U.S. colonialism in the Pacific” as part of the U.S. imperial conception of Oceanian islands as stepping stones to Asian markets (Rowe 2000a: 79), but Rowe concludes that Typee emphasizes the relation between the institution of slavery and overseas colonialism to critique domestic political forms.

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Likewise, several critics have argued that Melville links “internal colonization of Indians and external empire building” (Schueller 1995: 48; see also Nelson 1993). Bob Krauss describes the Marquesas as “the ancestral home of the Hawaii Visitors Bureau, the place where the modern tourist culture of the Pacific began,” because Typee was authored there. He concludes his account of “the ancestral home of Hawaii’s tourist industry” with a description of meeting “a modern Fayaway in the valley. She is Valerie Ah-Sam, age 20, who was running the Chinese store. . . . She admitted bashfully that she has never heard of anybody named Herman Melville” (Krauss 1995: A19). Likewise, when John Bryant visits the Marquesas for the sesquicentennial of “Melville’s Polynesian adventure,” he observes “one lovely Fayaway of about 25 years” (Bryant 1994: 7, 8). Fayaway, in other words, like Gauguin’s Teha‘amana, is every island girl, whatever her ethnicity. History touches these girls lightly, unlike the historical girls. Melville’s Fayaway, if one believes Henry Wise’s account, could be seen as a “maid-of-all-work” in the French colonial camp “ironing an officer’s trousers” (Wise 1849: 358). Fifty years later, as Gauguin’s friends and neighbors in Tahiti recalled, the painter left Tahiti for the Marquesas because his syphilitic sores were so bad that “no woman [including Teha‘amana] would sleep with him anymore. The women of the Marquesas were poorer and more savage, and he would have better opportunities there, he said” (quoted in Danielson 1966: 243). Melville makes Queequeg pan-Oceanian: “Queequeg was from the island of Kokovoko. It is not down in any map, true places never are” (Melville 1988: 55). Though the details used to describe Queequeg are drawn from all over Oceania, he is often assumed to be based on Maori sources, perhaps because Kory-Kory’s name derives from Korokoro, a Nga-Puhi chief described by the missionary Marsden, a believer in avid Maori cannibalism. Melville habitually applies names from one part of Oceania to Islanders from other areas, as in the seeming translation of Manoo, himself a Malay translator in Hiram Paulding’s Journal, to Marnoo in Typee. Along these lines one might ask if in cross-cultural encounters care is not adequately viewed as the product of Levinasian regard for the “face of the other” as prior to knowledge, or as Rawlsian hypothetical “veil of ignorance” that brackets cultural difference (Rawls revises this position in Laws of Peoples), or an anthropological filling in of gaps with knowledge, what constitutes Melville’s greater care? Suggestive answers to this question are offered in Herbert (1980), Bryant (1996), Sanborn (1998), and Calder (1999). Especially tourists who have learned from historians such as Whipple that “the meat was considered so sacred that it could not be touched with the hands. Although eating utensils were not used for any other kind of food, special forks were required for manmeat” (Whipple 1954: 80). Teresia Teaiwa writes of a Fijian woman who tells her grandchildren, All those cannibal forks in the museum? We’ve got some in the motel lobby too. Well, they never existed before the white man came. My grandfather was one of the first carvers of cannibal forks. He was so skilled, the preachers and anthropologists sent him around the islands to teach other native men how to carve cannibal forks. (Teaiwa 1997: 17) For a detailed discussion of the relations among the trade in heads, the trade in muskets, and the escalation of intertribal battles and cannibalism, subsequently read back as Maori traditional practice, see Obeyesekere (2005: 92–106, 126–41). The pop-gun scene in Typee seems to reference the musket trade in the Marquesas and elsewhere and parodies the topos of putting guns in the hands of infantile natives (Melville 1968a: 144–5; on the musket trade in the Marquesas see Thomas 1991). Like so much in Typee that insists on the intellectual simplicity of the Taipi, this scene

Notes 207 minimizes the complexity of the exchange economies that took place in the Marquesas during the early contact period. 18 A typical assessment runs, “The Marquesans were cannibals indeed, and ate the bodies of their dead enemies; there seems no doubt that Melville was correct on this point” (Woodcock 1972: 27). Peter Shaw writes, As Melville’s discovery scene indicates, cannibalism was not limited to the ingestion of the enemy’s virtue. One learns from anthropology, furthermore, that the Typeeans ate children as well as adults, their own tribesmen as well as enemies (and hapless strangers found on the beach). Furthermore, human flesh was eaten not only in ritual but was also part of the Typeean diet. . . . It was practiced by women and children as well as men. (Shaw 1994: 165) For a review of accounts of Marquesan cannibalism, see Dening 1980: 247–9, especially his critique of Ralph Linton’s ethnography of the Marquesas, on which many Melville critics have depended for “scientific” evidence (ibid.: 270–83), including Shaw, who copies Linton almost verbatim. Convincing eye-witness accounts of cannibalism in the Marquesas are found in William Pascoe Crook and Edward Robarts, both of whom lived in the Marquesas for several years and spoke the language. Robarts’s single account (1974: 116) suggests that cannibalism was rare and, if not idiosyncratic, confined to priestly functions that would require extended contextualization. The existing anthropological record and indigenous oral accounts lead to nothing remotely resembling Linton’s Freudian complexes or the sensationalized theories expressed in National Geographic essays (see Church 1919). Against this one might consider the first documented case of cannibalism in Oceania to be that of the Spaniards in Guam who “carried a few buckets filled with the intestines of slain Guamanians to be distributed among the sick as a cure for scurvy” (Hezel 1983: 2). On cannibalism as trope see Kilgour (1993) and Phillips (1998) and as discourse see Hulme (1998) and Sanborn (1998), and for a more materially based and probing critique of the discourse see Obeyesekere (1992b; 2005). Like Obeyesekere I am concerned primarily with “cannibal talk,” and remain skeptical about both the evidence given for ritual cannibalism and the ends to which that evidence is used. The ongoing appeals to cooked bones found in burial sites, for instance, as the evidence for, and as the foundation for theories of the form and function of ritual cannibalism, seem inconclusive, given the range of reasons for which various Islander societies cooked bones (see, for instance, Kamakau 1992: 163, 232). Threats to bake bodies in an imu are thoroughly conventional (see Nakuina 1994: 4). 19 Slotkin alludes to a passage in Moby-Dick: “For as the appalling Ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” (Melville 1988: 274). That this passage comes from the author of Omoo suggests how far Melville himself has moved from the pseudo-ethnological emphases of his first books. 20 If a romantic, touristic emphasis on the encounter of civilized and primitive dominated Melville studies through the 1970s, today emphasis has shifted toward earnest appropriations of Melville for any number of projects assessing mid-nineteenthcentury U.S. socio-political institutions and cultural formations. Contemporary Melvilleans treat the same Oceanian figures and images (scantily clad Fayaway, tattooed cannibals, taboo), but do so with a distinctly anti-racist, anticolonial emphasis. In this, contemporary critics, consciously or not, work against the American Pacificism of earlier Americanists. However, with a few exceptions, Melville criticism vis-à-vis the Pacific has not fundamentally changed, even when it focuses on unmasking discursive violence toward natives, in its elision of Island-centered history or epistemology. As suggested in the introduction, without such an engagement with

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Oceanian cultures – which requires a hard-earned intercultural transdisciplinarity – Oceania remains a mirror for Americanists, a meditation on self rather than a window into cultural exchange, and the bound-together entanglements of colonial relation.

2 Opening accounts in the South Seas 1 During the revolutionary, transitional period, and through the War of 1812, knowledge about Oceania was seen in cooperative terms. For instance, in 1779 Benjamin Franklin addressed a letter “To all Captains and Cammanders of the American Armed Ships,” urging safe passage to Captain Cook and his poeple as “common Friends to Mankind” who should be granted “all the Assistance in your Power” (Franklin 1992: 86–7). 2 The irony struck Melville, who wrote about Chase’s narrative: All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might, in all human probability, have been avoided, had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti, from which they were not very distant at the time, & to which, there was a fair Trade wind. But they dreaded cannibals, & strange to tell knew not that for more than 20 years, the English missionaries had been resident in Tahiti; & that in the same year of the shipwreck – 1820 – it was entirely safe for the mariner to touch at Tahiti. (in Lyons 1999: 141)

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Melville suggests that had sailors landed in Tahiti before the arrival of missionaries there might have been reason to fear cannibals, though with exceptions, involving actual or symbolic ingestion of eyeballs by chiefs, cannibalism was not part of Tahitian culture, and Tahitians generally welcomed Westerners. This last point is what Melville stresses in his treatment of Chase in Clarel (1876), where he reiterates: “the isles were dreaded – every chain; / Better to brave the immense of sea, / And venture for the Spanish Main,” and concludes, “So deemed he, strongly erring there.” For a fuller account of Melville’s response to Chase see Lyons (1999: xi–xxix). In Two Years Before the Mast, Dana writes, “I had in my chest an account of the passage of the ship A. J. Donelson, of New York, through those straits, a few years before” (Dana 1964: 284). Likewise, the reference to Tinian recalls the adventures of Alexander Smith, the hero of Charles Lenox Sargent’s The Life of Alexander Smith (1819), who escapes Northwest Indians by way of Tinian before joining the Bounty – Sargent thus makes a U.S. citizen the patriarch of the famous Pitcairn colony. Many details of the mutiny in Pym are drawn from accounts of the Comstock mutiny, led by Comstock, who has the colonial dream that “he would take the vessel to some island inhabited by savages, and after murdering all his crew, join with the natives, teach them the art of war, and raise himself to the dignity of a king” (quoted in Heffernan 2003: 88–9). See Heffernan for an exemplary attempt at reconstructing the interactions among the survivors of the mutiny, Lay and Hussey, and their Island hosts. Although the reference is to the Solomon islands, site of Morrell’s “Massacre islands,” Poe puns on the biblical Solomon (invoking the riches of Ophir), and draws upon works such as John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, which Poe reviewed in 1837, which furnishes details for the desiccated landscapes of Tsalal (Pollin 1976: 331). Another possible source is The Conquest of Spain, in which Bernal Diaz claims that “Tlascalans kept men and women imprisoned in wooden cages until they were fat enough to be sacrificed and eaten” (quoted in Phillips 1998: 194). In a cartoon opposed to the expedition and its polar ambitions, the Wilkes officers are pictured in congress with polar bears and penguins (Viola 1985: 13). See Lenz (1995)

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and Greenfield (1992) on the generic conventions and cultural poetics of the American polar exploration narrative. The most influential book in this regard was J. C. Symmes’s Symzonia. Clearly, the name “Pym” conflates Poe and Symmes. Reportedly, Poe’s last words were “Oh Reynolds, Reynolds.” Even after the Wilkes expedition returned, Poe insisted that it be called “The Expedition of Mr. Reynolds” (Poe 1984: 1252). In chapter 16 of Pym, Poe paraphrases Reynolds’s speech to Congress at several points. In an odd review of a preliminary account of the Wilkes expedition, Poe noted that some “disgrace has attached itself to its conduct,” but emphasizes that, though the “mere history” would be written by Wilkes, the expedition would always be associated in Poe’s mind with Reynolds, whose “mental powers” claimed the “high honor” of the expedition (ibid.: 1252, 1251). The review of Reynolds’s Address, written during the formation of the expedition, praises Jefferson’s advice to Lewis and Clark as “second only to the Declaration of our Independence” in national importance (Poe 1984: 1246). Here Poe adopts an imperative mode, merging with Reynolds’s rhetoric in giving advice on how to outfit and manage the voyage, including policy for dealing with savages. Because “the savages in these regions have frequently evinced a murderous hostility – they should be conciliated or intimidated,” Poe writes, assuring readers that “the armament of the expedition should be sufficient” to help unfortunates living “among hordes of savages” (ibid.: 1236, 1245). Pym speaks in a similar vein in describing the outfitting of the Jane Guy, and as Pym approaches Tsalal, Poe tips his hat to the maligned Reynolds, “whose great exertions and perseverence have at length succeeded in getting set on foot a national expedition, partly for the purpose of exploring these regions” (Poe 1994: 159). Drinnon argues that “Paulding’s stand on abolition and removal made his appointment as secretary of the navy acceptable to Southerners and Westerners”; he claims that the Paulding letter was “probably written by Joel Poinsett” and reflects “the received wisdom around the fireside of white America” (Drinnon 1980: 129, 130). Goetzman likewise argues that the sailing orders are not Paulding’s, but are written “over Secretary Dickerson’s signature,” though the letter reprinted in the Wilkes expedition is signed by Paulding (Goetzman 1986: 273). J. K. Paulding was a relative of Hiram Paulding, author of Journal of a Cruise of the United States Schooner Dolphin among the Islands of the Pacific Ocean, an important source for both Pym (on the Comstock mutineers, whom Paulding rescued) and Melville’s Typee (for its vivid descriptions of Taipivai). Paulding instructed Wilkes: “You will permit no trade to be carried on by the squadron . . . except for necessaries and curiosities, and that under express regulations established by yourself” (Paulding 1962: 226). As Dening notes, regulating trade protected against “inflationary prices” (Dening 1980: 124). Fanning had been selected by President Madison for a government-backed expedition, but the War of 1812 forced Fanning to abandon his expedition. Along with Reynolds, with whom he formed the South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition (1829), Fanning continued to petition Congress for an exploring expedition. Of particular interest to Poe would have been his “Views Upon the Practicability of Sailing or Advancing to the South Pole” (Fanning 1970: 472–7). Fijians were exhibited and exhibited themselves throughout the nineteenth century, as did the couple known as “Fiji Jim and Wife.” In one “troupe of cannibals” the female member was a former “domestic servant” from Virginia, and other members had spent time working in California before entering the business of exhibiting themselves (Bogdan 1988: 178–87). Barnum similarly concocted stories regarding the addition to his show of “four wild Fiji Cannibals, ransomed at great cost from the hands of a royal enemy, into whose hands they had fallen, and by whom they were about to be killed and perhaps eaten” (Barnum 1927: 683). The Cannibals played in New York’s Bowery Theater to sold-out audiences for twenty

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performances. Woodworth’s son, Selim, had sailed with Morrell. The Poe–Morrell/ Woodworth connection is discussed in detail by Burt Pollin, who suggests that, while Poe must have been able to “evaluate properly this spurious and meretricious book” (Pollin 1976: 163), it is not clear whether Poe knew that Woodworth was the ghostwriter. The text is full of exotic touches, clearly meant to titillate readers, involving naked girls, savage rituals, and near escapes. 13 On the complexities of exchange during the early contact period see Thomas (1991), and for specifics about the bêche-de-mer trade, many details of which were circulating during the 1820s and 1830s, see Ward (1972). 14 Paulding had a special interest in Poe, whom he considered “decidedly the best of all our going writers” (Paulding 1962: 171). In March of 1836, he acted as intermediary for Poe’s tales with the Harpers, and passed along through T. W. White the judgment of the Harpers’ reader that Poe’s parodies were too obscure. Paulding hoped Poe would “pardon” him “if the interest I feel in his success should prompt me to take this occasion to suggest to him to apply his fine humor . . . to more familiar subjects of satire; to the faults and foibles of our own people” (ibid.: 174, emphasis added). In a letter two weeks later Paulding further advised Poe “to undertake a Tale in a couple of Volumes.” A few months later, after Congress approved the Wilkes expedition, Poe began Pym, and chose for “parody” a genre, event, and theme about which, in words from his review of Reynolds’s Address, “the public mind” was “thoroughly alive.” In that same review Poe continued, “We look forward to this finale – to the published record of the expedition – with an intensity of eager expectation, which we cannot think we have ever experienced before” (Poe 1984: 1235, 1241). 15 Poe parodies as well the dynamic by which duty is allied to a writing that authenticates itself and excuses its contradictions by claiming absence of forethought. Morrell excuses culpable omissions in his “plain narrative of facts” as follows: Had I kept a journal with a view to publication, a thing I never contemplated until I returned from my last voyage, when my friends urged me to the measure, I could perhaps have produced a volume much more interesting and valuable than the present. As it is, I hope this humble attempt will be taken as an earnest example of my wish to be useful to my country. (B. Morrell 1970: 456) A few pages later, Morrell claims to suppress dates to protect a lucrative discovery. Like Morrell, Pym argues an external, nationalistic motivation: Upon my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentleman in Richmond, Virginia, who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public. (Poe 1978: 55, emphasis added) However, “having kept no journal during the greater portion of the time in which I was absent, I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess. (ibid.) 16 Subtler readings are certainly possible, such as Nelson’s argument that, “while on one level Pym is a racist text, on another the text provides a reading that counters racist colonial ideology and the racialist, scientific knowledge structure” (Nelson 1993: 92) and Sam Worley’s linking of pro-slavery arguments to issues of “linguistic authority” in order to suggest that, while implicated in pro-slavery representation, Poe’s text foregrounds “the instability of language and interpretive authority” in ways that allow “contradictions inherent in antebellum thought [to] emerge . . . We are left with a

Notes 211 work that both constructs and deconstructs social hierarchy along the axis of language” (Worley 1994: 242). 17 Cooper’s reputation as founder of the tradition of “sea fiction” rests on such novels as The Red Rovers, Afloat and Ashore, and The Sea Lions. He had a career-long involvement in American nautical affairs, always moving in the highest naval circles. Cooper voyaged before the mast in 1806–7, served for three years as a midshipman in the Mediterranean, and later wrote History of the Navy of the United States of America.

3 Lines of fright 1 In Typee, Melville recalls Porter’s massacre of Marquesans, and the violence of the Wilkes expedition, whose orders included punishing those responsible for the alleged massacre of the crew of the Charles Doggett: “[We] equip armed vessels to traverse thousands of miles of ocean in order to execute summary punishment upon the offenders. On arriving . . . they burn, slaughter, and destroy, according to the tenor of written instructions” (Melville 1968a: 27). In the “South Seas” lecture, Melville refers to ships opening “their batteries in indiscriminate massacre . . . splattering the torn bamboo huts with blood and brains of women and children” (Melville 1987: 415–16). Newspapers heard this as a reference to “the destruction of Malolo by the U.S. Squadron in 1840” and objected to Melville’s “placing it in the light of an atrocity rather than a punishment.” One paper reminded its readers that “murder after murder had been committed and passed unnoticed,” that “prevention of further evil was one avowed object of the Expedition,” and that “however severe the punishment might have been, the benefit is now being reaped” (Melville 1987: 768). 2 Sanborn emphasizes anxiety before the cannibal as the “trace of a secret lack” (Sanborn 1998: 17). See also McClintock’s discussion of the application of Kristeva’s formulation of abjection in colonial contexts (McClintock 1995: 123). On the debate over the materiality which a discourse of cannibalism refers to, see Lestringant, who contends that the denial of cannibalism robs natives of “their proud and cruel eloquence” (Lestringant 1997: 7) and Obeyesekere (2001a), who argues, not that there was no cannibalism, but that European descriptions of it are demonstrably fabrications, a position answered by Sahlins (2003). Obeyesekere (2005) is at great pains to delink recorded instances of cannibalism from ritualized practices, which could only be taken as psychopathic – the work of rage against which “practical reason” mitigates. 3 In a passage mocking the unreliability of oral accounts relating to cannibalism, Melville refers as well to the story that Vancouver received Captain Cook’s heart. The references seem to conflate and trope the account, first published in Sheldon Dibble, that “The heart, liver, & c., of Captain Cook were stolen and eaten by some hungry children, who mistoke them in the night for the inwards of a dog” (Dibble 1839: 31). Later, Laura Fish Judd (the culprit now singular and the animal involved changed) would claim to have met the man who ate [Cook’s] heart. He stole it from a tree, supposing it to be a swine’s heart hung there to dry, and was horrified when he discovered the truth. The Sandwich Islanders were never cannibals. This made him famous, and he is always spoken of as the man who ate Lono’s heart. ( Judd 1966: 64) 4 On the composition and reception of the Narrative see Stanton (1975: 305–15). Stanton notes that, given the degree to which he draws on the journals submitted by his officers, Wilkes might best be considered a compiler. In addition to Wilkes’s volumes, the expedition produced twenty-three volumes of “scientific” information, including volumes on philology and ethnology. As Nathaniel Philbrick notes, many of the maps the expedition produced were used during World War II. Philbrick’s Sea of

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Glory (2003) presents a novelistic portrait of Wilkes, suggesting that his problematic personality in part accounts for the gap between the scientific achievements of the expedition and Wilkes’s relative obscurity today. Several critics, including David Jaffé (1976), have argued that Melville modeled aspects of Captain Ahab on Wilkes. On Wilkes’s attitude toward natives, and sense of himself as watchdog, the following paragraph from his Autobiography seems particularly telling: He [Sydney] was the most intelligent and faithful dog I ever knew. The natives were very much afraid of him and a word from me would have caused him to seize any one of them. He was of extraordinary size and strength and would quickly have throttled any one if instigated. To all whites he was very friendly but seemed to have imbibed a peculiar antipathy to Blacks, or colored race. It may easily be conceived the attachment I had for him and his love for his master. Our knowledge of the Native character, a Short experience, had sufficed to know there was no trust to be put in them, and the force at my command was effective in controlling their wishes to possess themselves of our articles. (Wilkes 1978: 462) 5 Wilkes’s versions of the “Malolo affair” are recorded in his Autobiography, written when he was in his seventies, in which he recalls that “the whole had a very depressing influence on me and for a time I was scarcely able to attend to the duties which were pressing upon me” (Wilkes 1978: 469–72), and in the Narrative (Wilkes 1970: 3.265– 316). Several charges in the “Records of the Proceedings in the Case of Lt Chas Wilkes” (National Archives, Washington, D.C., rolls 26 and 27) involve cruelty to natives. The words “ruled out” are scrawled over these. Not only was Wilkes exonerated of wrongdoing against natives, but in a bizarre twist, he was charged with leaving the survivors in Malolo “exposed to the murderous hate and anthropophagian appetites of their cannibal enemies” (roll 26). A shipboard song about the massacre from Erskine’s Twenty Years Before the Mast celebrates a higher death toll: “We are the men our chieftain led / O’er dark Malolo’s plain; / Before us hosts of Indians fled, / And left two hundred slain” ( Joyce 2001: 87). Clearly, the Fijian side of the Malolo incident remains unexamined in the official U.S. accounts, as in Emerson’s account, which has two officers dying heroically in defense of their crew. One might at least consider the possibility that, since “The Expedition was indeed safe from molestation but only so long as it did not violate or impinge upon Fijian customs” (ibid.: 93), the “murderers,” insofar as those concerned acted with the authority of their chiefs, responded to offensive actions that went beyond the general refiguring of aspects of custom. Wilkes, for instance, describes how he “determined on my first arrival to assume the authority of a great chief over all those of the Island and at once ordered the taboo which then existed to be removed” (Wilkes 1978: 458). 6 Much of what is “known” about Oceanian cannibalism comes from missionary accounts; in Fiji especially, missionaries are the strongest proponents of the idea that islanders are cannibals (see Cargill 1977: 39; Ta‘unga 1974). Barry Joyce argues that many of the crew members of the expedition distrusted missionary accounts: “especially suspect were missionary accounts, likely of a secondhand nature, possibly drummed up to shock parishioners at home into keeping the financial pipelines primed and flowing” ( Joyce 2001: 103). 7 For a slightly reworked version of this statement see Pickering (1854: 166). Banks, whose narratives were in the expedition library, along with those of James Cook, William Bligh, Otto von Kotzebue, George Vancouver, and many others relating to Oceania, wrote: Though we had from the first of our arrival upon the coast constantly heard the Indians acknowledge the custom of eating their enemies we had never before had proof of it, but this amounted almost to demonstration: the bones were clearly

Notes 213 human, upon them were evident marks of their having been dressd on the fire, the meat was not intirely pickd off from them and on the grisly ends which were gnawed were evident marks of teeth. Banks concludes, For ourselves and myself in particular we were before too well convincd of the existence of such a custom to be surprizd, tho we were pleasd at having so strong a proof of a custom which human nature holds in too great abhorrence to give easy credit to. (quoted in Salmond 1991: 243) 8 David Malo described how ritual cannibalism involving the eating of an eye of a human sacrifice attended the Makahiki celebration for the god Lono (Malo 1951: 152, 174–5). As Mary Kawena Pukui describes, the purpose of this, “in a magical, symbolic way, the ali‘i who consumed the eye thereby absorbed the quality of the eye, the ‘ike (seeing, knowing)” (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee 1972: I, 151). See also Dening’s account of Pomare in Tahiti eating (or simulating the eating of) the left eye of a human sacrifice (1996: 41); Obeyesekere on how in Tahiti and Hawai‘i sacrifice is often associated with “a chief symbolically accepting the eye of the sacrificial victim” (Obeyesekere 1992b: 653); and the chapter “Killing the Cannibal King” in Kawaharada (1999). 9 Stanton quotes John W. W. Dyes’s entry for July 3, 1840, which concludes, “The smell the smell I never shall forget it it inough to make a man blood run cold to think of sutch cannibalism these people treated it as . . . if they had been eating pastrey” (Stanton 1975: 203). Stanton is not the target here, although he does assume avid cannibalism in Fiji, and often adopts the nervous jokey tone of the early explorers with asides such as “William Reynolds spoke better than he knew when after two weeks in the islands he remarked lightheartedly, ‘Well, we are among the Feejees, & I have not been Killed nor Eaten’ (ibid.: 190); rather, as William Arens puts it, if the idea of avid cannibalism is “commonly accepted without adequate documentation, then the reason for this state of affairs is an even more intriguing problem” (Arens 1979: 9). 10 The idea that packages conceal human remains is common to several narratives: for instance, the “only evidence” for cannibalism that comes under Edmund Fanning’s “immediate observation” in forty years of sailing begins with a native who has “something wrapped up in some palm leaves” that he does not offer for barter: “this was so unusual” that Fanning examines it and finds “the same to be a piece of human flesh, baked” (Fanning 1970: 212–13). Fanning echoes Cook, in a passage Obeyesekere discusses, in which a Hawaiian seems to be concealing “a very small parcel” that Cook thus becomes anxious to open and which proves to contain strips of human flesh (Obeyesekere 1992a: 62). 11 John Coulter, whose sensationalized text Dening questions on a variety of factual grounds (Dening 1980: 147), typifies what might be called the revulsed glimpse of cannibalism: “I must throw a veil over the feast of the following day, as I had only one look at the beginning of it, and left the arena sick to loathing: went off to the house, and did not leave it until this horrid scene was ended” (Coulter 1845: 232).

4 A poetics of relation 1 Kekela took on the name of his benefactor, James Hunewell, as was the Hawaiian custom (Morris 1987). Adopting a captain’s name might be seen not as the paternalistic replacement of an indigenous name but as a willing and appreciative placing of trust in the protection of an institutionally powerful benefactor that reprises the commoner’s relationship to ali‘i (chiefs). This is to say that Oceanian societies

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were not radically democratic, as many U.S. imaginative writers and literary critics imply, but deeply hierarchical. The confusion on this point comes from “defining political and economic power” in Euroamerican terms that fail to recognize forms of indigenous status and social control (Dening 1980: 20–1). This ignorance is certainly part of what is at work in comments such as Michener’s that Melanesians were “late in develoing any forms of self-government” (Michener 1992a: 35). 2 Lee Wallace argues that male homosexuality, such as we have come to understand it, was constituted in no small part through the European collision with Polynesian culture, whose systems and activities of sexual attraction and desire were so different, or different in such a way, as to throw the European observer into positions of reaction, denial, or injunction that helped reify modern categories of sexual identity. (Wallace 2003: 8) 3 In the Western tradition from Aristotle to meditations on modern liberalism in Locke and others, democracy as always a processual, deferred, and to-come set of relations is based on a schematics of egalitarian filiation. The possibility of relation between two citizens models the polis. In Oceanian societies, to the degree that they can be generalized, politics is structured around rank, and adoption or formal friendships are a means of establishing position in relation to authority. From Cook’s voyages on, bond-friendships are represented as a means of stabilizing and facilitating exchange in Islander–Euroamerican relations. When officers/chiefs and sailors/commoners have established individual bonds it clearly discourages collective aggression from the other side. This politics of friendship is carried to an extreme degree in an aboriginal practice where responsibility for land resides in members of a neighboring clan, and vice versa, which Bruce Chatwin compares to the Cold War U.S. and Russia agreeing to swap internal politics (Chatwin 1987: 98–9). 4 Versions of name exchange exist in many cultures, such as tacayo in Spanish (the sharer of my name). In his essay on “Friendship,” Emerson seems to be referring to name-exchange in remarking that “Men have sometimes exchanged names with the friend as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul” (Emerson 1979–83: 2.125). Conjugal access seems to have been involved with Tahitian bondfriendship as well as Marquesan (Oliver 1974: 3.846). Willowdean Handy notes: Formerly it was almost universal for a husband to consent to at least one other male with conjugal rights in his home. . . . There was never any concealment of such extramarital relations, which were always agreed upon by husband and wife. Hospitality was still considered niggardly if a husband did not offer his wife to a guest. Ralph [E. S. C. Handy] was considered strange because he did not accept a temporary wife. (Handy 1965: 31) 5 In the journal, Dana skips over the “two-year” period of his voyaging as a period already covered in the novel. However, as Dana’s editor R. F. Lucid writes, “Two Years was not a journal, kept at the time of the voyage, but a narrative (rolled out at a single draft in six months, while its author was settling into Law School) which artfully reconstructed the actually historical events” (Dana 1968: 1.xxxv). 6 Malo suggests that the term aika¯ ne underwent a shift after the introduction of Christianity: “The aikane meant primarily a male intimate of the most disreputable sort, but it came to mean also a male friend in a respectable sense” (Malo 1951: 201). Subsequently, Handy and Pukui claim that “the genuine aikane relationship is never homosexual”; “the relationship can exist, and is called by the same term, whether between man and man, or women and women; but not between man and woman”; “such behavior is said to have been known amongst some idle and debauched ali‘i, as it is found amongst similar unfortunates the world over” (Handy and Pukui 1998: 73).

Notes 215 Clearly, mid-twentienth-century attitudes toward homosexuality are mixed in with Handy and Pukui’s considerations of the “aika¯ne” relationship, as is clear as well in the allusion to homosexual acts as “bestial” in Na¯na¯ i ke Kumu (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee 1972). On bond-friendships among women see Gunson (1964), and Kamakau, who describes how Ka‘ahumanu would send for attractive commoners and “try to make friends (aikane) with them or take them on as favorites (punahele)” (Kamakau 1992: 314). 7 White characters in Two Years likewise receive partial portraiture. In this regard the question of why Queequeg drops out of Moby-Dick might be answered by reference to generic features of the vocational novel that Melville is troping throughout the book, which references vocational sea novels, such as Olmstead (1841) and Browne (1968). 8 Dana later wrote about the California/Hawai’i part of his life that he “had fallen into all the bad habits of sailors . . . not a man in my ship was more guilty in God’s sight than myself.” However, decades later he visited Hawai‘i and California, described in his Journal as “the dream of my youth”: “I sat on the beach, walked over the hills where we cut and dragged our wood,” he wrote his wife, and have hunted up the few bricks that indicate the place of the Kanaka’s Oven – all the hide-houses are gone . . . how inexpressibly strange it was to me, – as I walked over the ground where we cleaned hides, and where the vats stood, and where we worked and walked – all are gone, whites, Kanakas – all. This trip has been the great motive of my visit to California, and it has been all I hoped, and more – I cannot express it. (Dana 1968: 1.32) That Dana’s fiction never accorded with his life is suggested by his “double life, sexually speaking”: Lucid, his editor, writes, Dana would slip into a sailor’s disguise – varnished cap, loose trousers, and a peacoat – and “cruise,” as he put it, the brothels and dives of the town. Often the evening would conclude with him alone with a prostitute. But, according to the Journal – and the probability is that Dana is telling the truth – these encounters never resulted in sexual intercourse. On the contrary, just at the crucial moment Dana would reveal himself as a gentleman . . . and begin exhorting the girl to abandon her depraved ways. (ibid.: 1.xxxviii) 9 This sense of rebounding was suggested to me by Alex Calder, and the notion of Melville trying to form a Pacific friendship with Hawthorne was suggested to me by Dennis Berthold. 10 That tayo could involve men and women is suggested by Robarts in Tahiti: “A number of natives [came] on board both of men and the fair sex. Each of these picks out a friend among the ships crew” (Roberts 1974: 162). On the difficulty of knowing what tayo meant in pre-contact contexts, Oliver writes, In attempting to reconstruct the taio institution, we face the problem of deciding what aspects of it were pre-European. Most recorded instances of it had to do with pacts between native and European; and while much of the native institution probably carried over into the new manifestations, it may be assumed that some changes were thereby introduced – in motivation as well as in degree of commitment and pattern of interaction. (Oliver 1974: 844) 11 The editors of Adams’s letters write, “He regarded [the letters] as a travel diary, and he took with him for that purpose the folio-size sheets (twice the size of his regular stationery) which he had hitherto used for his private journal” (Adams 1982: 267).

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12 Edwards cites London to Cloudesley Johns: “All my life I had sought an ideal chum. . . . I never found the man in whom the elements were so mixed that he could satisfy, or come anywhere near satisfying my ideal” (Edwards 2001: 48), and cites London’s letter to his wife in which he describes a woman getting angry because, while they were making love, he told her about his dream “of a great Man Comrade” (quoted in ibid.: 50). On the London–Stoddard relationship see McBride (2004: 110). The nature of the London–Stoddard relationship seems to have involved a certain latitude: Stoddard called him “darling Wolf” (Austen 1991: xxvi), and London inscribed the copy of The Son of the Wolf that he gave Stoddard, O, you singer of the South Seas! How May I write ought else, Just now, to you Who knows? There is neither time nor space for love – yet I can only repeat, O You singer! Postscript: I have just finished your ‘Idyls’ and come down to earth. On London’s masculinity (his male/mail-calling) see Auerbach (1996). Among the few detailed “love affairs” in London is the pursuit of Joan Lackland in Adventure, who is repeatedly admired for her “boy’s point of view.” When the narrator courts her he says, “Remember, this is a man-talk. From the point of view of the talk, you are a man” (London 1911b: 290). 13 As Leslie Fiedler notes, the existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of American sentimental life (Fiedler 1948: 664). However, at least some readers must have gotten the thrust of passages such as, Again and again he would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was lying, and insist upon my gorging myself, when I had but barely recovered from a late orgie of fruit, flesh, or fowl. He would mesmerize me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing manipulation. (Stoddard 1905a: 32) For suggestive readings of Stoddard and homosocial friendship see Edwards (2001: 33-47), Davis (2002), Austen (1991), and McBride (2004). One reader who certainly recognized what he called Stoddard’s “adhesive nature” (as well as allusions to his diction such as “camerado” [Stoddard 1894]) was Walt Whitman, who wrote Stoddard, upon receiving his “beautiful & soothing South Sea Idylls,” that “Those tender & primitive personal relations away off there in the Pacific islands, as described by you, touched me deeply” (Whitman 1961: 97, 83). 14 Michener himself recalls of the war years that “In Tahiti one could be whatever one desired to be, and several times I saw someone who had been a man the day before suddenly appear as a woman, with the implied announcement that henceforth that was his gender, and she was accepted as such without further comment” (Michener 1992a: 56). 15 The point is illustrated in the sketch “Giving for Money,” in which a woman whose personality is reworked by commercial desires is upbraided, “O Friend O! The Gods! How can one give the names of the grandfathers away for money? O that woman Kaie! What a laugh” (Handy 1925: 18-19). In Handy’s novel about the Marquesas, the protagonist is taught the significance of name-exchange and its susceptibility to manipulation as a boy: Only a grasping beggar would take advantage of a name to claim its rights. No matter. A name given is a knot tied. And remember this: your names are proof of

Notes 217 your privileges and your property. Never forget this: to give your name to another is to give him everything you have – if he is rat enough to ask for it. (Handy 1973: 6) 16 Thunder from the Sea structurally resembles Chinau Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In both works the protagonists, unable to accept the arrival of colonial regimes, are executed. In Handy’s text, the protagonist, Pakoko, is based on a historical figure who defied the French colonists. For a contemporary Marquesan recounting of the death of Pakoko see Kawaharada (2004: 127). Handy attempts an interior description of Marquesan society before Euroamerican incursion, only in the later sections of the book turning to the impact of cultural exchange. She emphasizes cultural detail; thus her description of name-exchange, reconstructed from personal confidences with Islanders and archival sources, reads like a dramatic reconstruction of a ritual. Further, as Handy wrote, she attempts “to suggest the Marquesan mode of verbal expression”: “I have followed the native custom of using frequent exclamations and questions, for it seems to me reflective of their emotional intensity and fluidity” (Handy 1973: xvi).

5 From man-eaters to spam-eaters 1 Stevenson wrote that “There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard” (Stevenson 1971: 28) and described how in conversation with Stoddard he “first fell under the spell – of the islands.” After one meeting he “returned (a happy man) with Omoo under one arm, and my friend’s own adventures [Idyls] under the other” (quoted in Leyda 1951: 2.808). Stoddard likewise gave London copies of Typee and Omoo. 2 Stoddard’s A Trip to Hawaii (1885) was reissued by Oceanic Steamship in 1901 with a lengthy unsigned introduction that describes the illegal U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i as “events [that] have moved with American swiftness even in the langorous and lovely land” to give “power over into the hands of the white population.” Thus the islands will be “forever free from danger of revolution.” Stoddard’s text is straight tourist promotion, describing what passengers will see at the steamer’s ports of call. He describes “Hulu-Hula” as something that “may be obtained in quantities to suit within a stone’s throw of the Hotel.” Stoddard concludes that “the Hawaiian Group is destined to become one of the most popular resorts of the tourist” (Stoddard 1901: 31, 46). Oceanian tourism, running through Hawai‘i, began to see itself as an industry in the 1870s, as suggested in such titles as Tourist’s Guide for the Hawaiian Islands and Tourist’s Guide Through the Hawaiian Islands. For some, for example, Sanford Dole, homesteading and tourism were connected with recruiting “the immigration of desirable population” (quoted in Coffman 2003: 242). On the early development of the tourist industry in Hawai‘i see Kuykendall (1967: 110–15). 3 The letters are signed with inscriptions such as “Aloha wela wela!” (very warm, lively aloha). Between fear that the wrongs done to Hawaiians “will never be righted” because “the American people are so satisfied in their new acquisitions,” Lili‘uokalani expressed pleasure in Stoddard’s company. The most detailed account of Stoddard’s life remains Carl Stroven’s dissertation (1939), never published because, as Austen suggests, Stroven never figured out a “decorous” way to deal with Stoddard’s homosexuality. 4 For examples of such textured reading see Buck (1993) on hula; Lutz and Collins (1993) on National Geographic; Geiger (1997) on the 1920s formation of ethnographic cinema; Desmond (1999) on the display of bodies in Hawai‘i’s tourist industry; Klein (2003) on Asia in the middlebrow imagination; and Wood (1999) on the rhetorical displacement of Hawaiians in various media. 5 Contemporary packagings of books about Oceania continue to invite armchair tourists to envision paradise. As critical as McMurtry’s Paradise (2001) may be about

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the effects of capitalism/tourism on the islands, the flap copy of the book describes it as “a trip to the paradise of Tahiti and the South Seas Islands.” Likewise, the flap copy of Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles (1992) describes him as gliding through “time and space, discovering a world of islands, their remarkable people, and in turn, happiness.” 6 Thus one finds in Oliver’s The Pacific Islands, “According to his tastes, today’s visitor may squat down in a jungle hut, eat grubs, watch cannibals plan man hunts, or, a few miles away, he may dine elegantly and swap international gossip with urbane officials” (Oliver 1961: 245). From here it is not far to guide-book entries such as the following: A five-day trip to Nabatautau, where the cannibals of Fiji killed and ate their last missionary, takes you to Viti Levu’s exotic interior. When the Reverend [Baker] . . . was cooked, the cannibals assumed that his boots were part of him so they were put into the steaming oven to make them tender, too. After endless hours the boots stayed tough and indigestible. The truth came out and the villagers have been embarrassed ever since. . . . Tours can be arranged through the Fiji Tourist Bureau. (Smith and Rea 1966: 45) The repetition of this absurd account of a missionary whose boot is considered tough to the taste, described as “off-repeated” by Basil Thompson in 1908 (1968: 107–8), suggests that missionaries and tourists remain ready prey for Fijian Barnums. According to a recent BBC broadcast, one of the indigestible boots (apparently not affected by endless hours of steaming) is reputedly housed in the Fiji Musuem. 7 The phrase “desperately seeking Herman” is Lee Quinby’s, from her concluding remarks at the “Melville in the Marquesas Conference” (summer 2003). Conference participants visited the alleged site of Melville–Tommo’s pae pae and were introduced to a relative of Pe‘ue (Fayaway), several times removed, by archeologist Robert Suggs, who provided an alternative hypothetical route Melville might have taken to get to Typee that contested that argued for by Andre Revel. (On questions of whether Melville ever visited Taipivai, see Edwards 2003.) For Suggs’s account of handeddown memories of Melville among Marquesans that are impossible to verify and apparently went through a known practical-joker, see Suggs (1962: 193–203). The notion of a “cannibal tour” references Dennis O’Rourke’s documentary, Cannibal Tours (1987), which has been provocatively troubled by Lutkehaus (1989) and critiqued by Silverman (2004). 8 “Sympathetic” tourists in Oceania share ambivalences like Stevenson’s around cannibalism. In Noa Noa, on meeting Princess Vaitua, Gauguin, who sought “divinely animal” humans, admits: “I saw in her only the jaws of a cannibal, the teeth ready to rend” (Gauguin 1970: 34, 14). Watching Tei Tetua, “the former practicing cannibal” who assists them in their “return to nature” in Fatu-Hiva, Thor Heyerdahl’s companion Liv remarks that even when he eats sugar cane “it looks[s] as if he [is] gnawing a human leg bone.” When Tei seems “disgusted at [the] barbaric waste” of burying someone rather than eating them, and asks: “Did nobody come and dig it up again when it was matured?” Heyerdahl wonders: “Was Tei being sarcastic or did he mean it? He seemed entirely serious” (Heyerdahl 1975: 205, 206, 222). Heyerdahl and others, such as Charles Wilkes, seem to suggest that bodies in Oceania do not decompose after burial. 9 On Adams’s denial of colonial motives in The Education of Henry Adams see Rowe (2000a: 165–94). Behind his view that Governor Thurston of Fiji “has sound views on savages, and insists on their retaining all the savagery possible, consistent with a cuisine which excludes man-steaks from the menu,” Adams’s position on Oceanian islands reads as follows:

Notes 219 Of all the Pacific Groups, Fiji and Hawai‘i are alone worth owning, for any profit to be made out of them. After inspecting Fiji thoroughly, I am glad that England has taken the contract, and am bound to say that Governor Thurston is a long way the most of a man in the Pacific; but the job hardly pays as an investment. There is little money in it; – none at all, I believe. South Sea islands are made for bubbles. (Adams 1982: 489, 514) 10 White Shadows was on the bestseller list from April of 1920 to July of 1921, and Mystic Isles from May to August of 1921. An unsigned profile of “Fred O’Brien, Wanderer” that follows O’Brien’s touristic essay “The Lure of the South Seas” (1922) claims that “No wanderer from the South Seas has brought back a more vivid picture of that romantic region than Frederick O’Brien, whose books . . . have stirred the dreams of readers by the tens of thousands” (O’Brien 1922c: 33). While today O’Brien is a literary footnote, in U.S. literary histories of the 1950s he was credited with having helped stimulate the Melville revival (which is generally dated as beginning with the activities around the Melville Centenial in 1919), and with inspiring a generation of South Seas imitators to believe that writing about the islands could be profitable. 11 While comparisons of Oceanian islands to the “lotus-eating” island of the Odyssey are a staple of the Pacific archive, my use of “lotus-eaters” references Roulston (1965). The closest Hall gets to cannibal-tour disappointment is on a day-trip to Taipivai, recounted in “K.F.I – Los Angeles.” Hall begins by saying he knows Nuku Hiva “as well as one can know a place one has dreamed of a thousand times since boyhood” from reading Melville at age twelve. When he gets there he finds that “there were no Marquesans left, or almost none . . . as for Typee valley, I found a wretched little settlement near the sea, and that was all. An old native I met who spoke French, brokenly, told me there was twenty-five inhabitants” (Hall 1928: 69, 72). This does not cause bitter reflection on colonialism and disease. Rather, Hall wistfully reads passages from Typee. Back on the boat, the captain, uninterested in Melville, plays a radio station from Los Angeles (K.F.I.) on which a woman has just finished describing a recipe for sponge cake. 12 An example of Frisbie’s insight is his presentation of Puka-Pukan chants and dances as means of responding to day-to-day or more significant events: “On Puka-Puka,” Frisbie writes, “It is impossible to catch a fish, kiss a maiden, climb a coconut tree, or play marbles without a chant to describe the action. And . . . it is not only the ancient chants they sing, but others composed from day to day by people now living on the island” (Frisbie 1929: 292). That Frisbie begins every chapter with one of these chants suggests the vitality of oral record-keeping. Likewise, Frisbie mediates between anthropological description and conveyance of Puka-Pukan culture with his suggestion that “The atoll people are always praying. They never start fishing without offering a prayer: even a man spearing fish on the reef will invoke the divine blessing before he impales his breakfast shark” (Frisbie 1944: 116). Frisbie’s representations of indigenous cultures changed markedly. In later years he was “ashamed” of his early journalism and called it “amateurish and rotten” (Frisbie 1959: 21). Likewise, he told James Norman Hall, “When I read my work in print I blush to think that I could have foisted such tripe on the public” (Hall 1963: 228). 13 The Flap copy for The Island of Desire suggests the gendered dynamic of colonial fiction in general (“spread for male exploration,” as McClintock puts it [1995: 23]): “The charm of their lives is spread before the reader with all the color of a Gauguin painting.” The Frisbie family odyssey is twice-told by “Johnny” Frisbie, first in Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka: The Autobiography of a South Sea Trader’s Daughter (1948) and then in The Frisbies of the South Seas (1959). The earlier book, translated and edited by Robert Dean Frisbie, admits that “father polishes everything I write” (Frisbie 1948: 117). See DeLoughery (2002) for a discussion of the ways that Frisbie authorized his views through “Johnny” in the earlier text, and “Johnny” began to move toward a more

220

14

15

16

17

Notes

critical, Oceanian voice in the latter work; see also Sharrad (1994). A refrain of Euroamerican writing about Oceanian women is that they do “not know how to become involved and desperate. The act of love-making in Polynesia is much different from the elaborate love-making of Europe and America” (Burdick 1986: 293). For critiques of the eroticizing of Oceanian women from the early images of South Seas maidens through contemporary cinema and advertising see Sturma (2002), Jolly (1997a, 1997b), Teaiwa (1994, 1999), and Trask (1993). On the fetishizing of Polynesian nudes painted on velvet see Sima Urale’s mockumentary Velvet Dreams (1997), and see Figiel (1999: 143). This contrasts with Charles Lenox Sargent’s puritanical Americanization of the Bounty story in The Life of Alexander Smith (1819). In Nordhoff’s and Hall’s hands, the Bounty materials are an effusive, archivally backed promotion of Tahiti – full of what come to seem photocopied touristic landscape description – that emphasizes an island hospitality in which every man “had his Indian taio, and nearly every one his Indian lass.” While told as a historical novel, it often suggests a present-tense, Tahitiresiding point of view: “Seen for the first time . . . this coast is like nothing else on our workaday planet; a landscape, rather, of some fantastic dream” (Nordhoff and Hall 1933: 88–9, 67–8). A passage in a letter to Chilson H. Leonard suggests that both Nordhoff’s and Hall’s fascination with indigenous customs contested with their attentiveness to market forces: “The large deletions were made, as I remember it, by the publishers; as, for example, in the chapter called, ‘The Moon of Pipiri.’ The publisher thought that readers would be bored by accounts of native customs. We didn’t agree with them, but consented to the omissions” (Hall 1936: 1). Much of the literature discussed in this chapter suggests return to boyhood as a central component of Oceanian fantasy. The popular genre of boys’ novels in Oceania, such as those written by Charles Nordhoff and Jack London (London’s manly protagonists never pursue Island women), circumvent the question of adult heterosexual relations. Almost every male literary tourist to Oceania – and the vast majority of travel books about the region position the readership as male – describes it as the fulfilment of a boyhood dream and, in a sense, an attempt to recover the simplicity of boyhood, as in the love of fishing. The women that are a large part of this fantasy are generally girls, and the principal appeal of Island women is their (alleged) lack of complexity. The most famous of these “nature men,” forerunners of the modern “back to nature” movement, was the subject of a profile by Jack London, “Darling, the Nature Man.” London admired his carefree existence running a cooperative garden in Tahiti, “the garden spot of garden spots.” Darling, discussed at length as well in O’Brien’s Mystic Isles, was deported from Tahiti by French colonial authorities who saw his walking around naked on the roads as a bad influence on the Natives. Frisbie’s second child, William, was born during a visit to the nature colony on Bora-Bora. Pulitzer Prize-winner Dillard wrote her essay for Signature (an airline magazine), but it was given the lead position in the popular anthology The Lure of Tahiti (1986) by A. Grove Day, who considers “Sirens of the South Seas” to be a “travel essay” that conveys the “truth” that “one can still define and view a ‘typical’ Tahitian type – especially among the women of the island” (Day 1986: 3).

6 Redeeming Hawai‘i (and Oceania) in Cold War terms 1 Narrations of the Massie case, like interpretations of the “overthrow,” are touchstones for the cultural politics of Hawai‘i historians. W. Storrs Lee writes that Thalia Massie “was picked up in a car by five hoodlums, two Hawaiian, two Japanese, and a Chinese, badly beaten and raped by all five” (Lee 1966: 348). However, the allegations of rape were throughly contravened by the evidence. Subsequently, Joseph Kahahawai, one of the accused, was murdered by a group of Massie’s friends

Notes 221

2

3

4

5

6

7

and family, who were convicted and had their sentences commuted to an hour each. On the Massie case and the formation of “local” identity in Hawai‘i see Rosa (2000), and for the fullest analysis of the affair and its implications see Stannard (2005). For an example of the residual racism in evaluations of Hawai‘i’s “polyglot” society see Andrew Lind, who noted that, since Japanese tend not to intermarry and have a lower crime rate than Hawaiians, who do, intermarriage may be connected to criminality (Lind 1951: 77). This echoes earlier, post-annexationist views like those of William Armstrong, a source for Michener’s Hawaii (see note 11), who argues that, “of all the weak races which have come in contact in any land whatsoever with the stronger races, the Hawaiians have suffered the least from injustice and physical dominance” (Armstrong 1995: 190). This mystifying mode is pervasive, as in the gloss on the overthrow by Pacific historian Ernest Dodge: “In 1894 a Republic was set up in Hawaii after the collapse of the monarchy” (Dodge 1966: 50), he writes, as if the monarchy fell under its own weight. Alternatively, as in National Geographic, the overthrow is trivialized: “In a revolution of comic-opera proportions, the haole element led in over-throwing Queen Liliuokalani and establishing a provisional government” (Simpich 1954: 621). In April 1970, a youth congress with delegates “representing over thirty Hawaii high schools and colleges” voted to secede from the union (Gray 1973: 5–6). The U.S. apology bill in 1993 (Public Law 103–150), signed by Bill Clinton, acknowledges the illegality of the overthrow, while being clear that acknowledging wrongdoing carries with it no obligations for redress (the apology is reprinted in Scudder 1994). Several noteworthy books on the overthrow appeared in 1998, the centennial of the annexation: Coffman (1998) details the plotting of the small group of U.S. businessmen and politicians who directly engineered the overthrow; Osborne (1998) documents the substantial resistance to annexation in the U.S. government; see also Schweizer (2002), Young (1998), and Eperjesi (2005) on the Anti-Imperialist League. For the fullest account of the events leading up to the Bayonet Constitution (1887), which laid the groundwork for the later overthrow, see Osorio (2002). On resistance to formal annexation, including petitions signed by nearly every adult Hawaiian, see Silva (2004). While Twain’s Hawai‘i writings criticize “civilization,” his histouricist views about Hawai‘i are clear in his summary statement that the missionaries have given Hawaiians, who used to be “naked and howling savages . . . the right to enjoy whatever their hands and brains produce” (Twain 1872: 463). On Twain’s Hawai‘i writing see McBride (2004), Kaplan (1997), and Wilson (2000a, 2000b). Interestingly, Michener found Twain’s travel writing “despicable”: “The easy wisecracks, laughing at everything that was not Anglo-Saxon, playing the boob. I find it just repulsive” (in Grobel 1999: 135). Day’s first book was a collection of “Tommy Dane” stories. He later published three books “about a boy’s camp” under the pseudonym “Carl Saxon” (Day 1974: 18), and he published chapbooks under the imprimatur “White Knight Press” (ostensibly a reference to Alice in Wonderland). One might ask whether the conjunction of “Dane,” “Saxon,” and “White Knight” is a coincidence, or evidence of a sense of white mission. The publishers of Hawaii Pono sought to piggy-back on Hawaii’s success. The back cover included the pitch “Anyone who read Hawaii should read Hawaii Pono,” along with a blurb from Michener, who wrote, It would be an intellectual treat for anyone who has read Hawaii to follow it up with a careful reading of Hawaii Pono. He will then understand where I might have gone wrong in some of my interpretations and where I fell short of writing the detailed truth. Furthermore, he will have given himself a good time reading about the exciting state.

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Though Michener confesses that Hawaii Pono “might” constitute an entertaining corrective of his “facts,” Fuchs’s purpose from the outset – “to celebrate Hawaii” and in particular “democratic promise” – and his method of profiling racial ambition (haoles to rule, Hawaiians to regain the past, Japanese to be accepted, Chinese to be financially independent) are consonant with Michener’s. On Porteus’s racial views see Stannard (1999). 8 The power of the U.S. educational system to make citizens and interpellate them into state ideology is celebrated enthusiastically (Lee 1966; Fuchs 1961) and forcefully critiqued (Benham and Heck 1998; Meyer 2003). 9 A National Geographic article assured readers that Honolulu has “forests and valleys so little touched that it was possible to film, within an hour’s drive of City Hall, most of the movie Hawaii, which depicts life in the nineteenth century.” However, a page later the author admits that Ma¯kaha valley, where the film was shot, “has since succumbed to development,” and quotes Julie Andrews, “If we had made it on the same spot today, we’d have to contend with two 18–hole golf courses and a 200 room hotel that seem to have sprung up as soon as we left” (Becker 1969: 502, 504). 10 However, Hunter’s beliefs were consonant with Michener’s and Kuykendall’s, as evidenced in his contribution to the Hawai‘i issue of American Heritage, in which he misleadingly hinted that the suggestion made by Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III) of a “statehood treaty” with the U.S. in 1854 represented the political will of successive monarchs. Consciously or not, Hunter echoes President William McKinley’s imperialist rationale to Congress: Hawaii has shown her ability to enter into a conventional union with the United States of America, thus realizing a purpose held by the Hawaiian people and proclaimed by successive Hawaiian governments through seventy years of their virtual dependence upon the benevolent protection of the United States. Under such circumstances, annexation is not a change; it is a consummation. (quoted in Wright 1972: 20) (Harper’s Magazine ran a cartoon with Hawai‘i as a woman being led to the altar [Osorio 2002: 261 n. 1). Against this one might recall Alfred Judd’s statement in 1880 that: for the last twenty-five years no one has seriously desired annexation . . . every lover of the Hawaiian race must rejoice in the preservation of its autonomy for these many years past. It would be difficult to find a country where the sentiment of nationality is stronger than among the aboriginal Hawaiians. ( Judd 1966: 321 n. 227) 11 Historical sources for Hawaii were provided by research assistant Clarice Taylor, who at times objected to the uses made of them. Many of Michener’s errors seem attributable to his regurgitation of sources along predisposed lines. For example, Michener writes that “one of the kings took a grand tour around the world, stopping off in most of the major capitals” (Michener 1984a: 677), and then attributes buffoonish behavior to this king. Since only Kala¯kaua traveled around the world at this time, Michener is speaking about a specific historical figure, and his source for the king’s antics must be William Armstrong’s Around the World With a King. However, any unblinkered reader of the latter should note its condescending and resentful tone, and recognize that it is often the prim Armstrong who is the butt of Kala¯kaua’s humor. 12 Day’s anthologies, republished by Mutual Press of Honolulu as the “Tales of the Pacific” series, remain popular. Because for many years works by “local” and Hawaiian authors never appeared in these anthologies, Stephen Sumida, author of the most detailed study of the literatures of Hawai‘i, considers Day and Michener de facto suppressors of local and Hawaiian voices (Sumida 1991: 80–4, 87, 112). On Day’s problematic role as canonizer of Pacific literature see Subramani (1992: 80, 87), Wilson (1994; 2000a: 183–7), and Lyons (1997).

Notes 223 13 “The outlaw was dead,” Day writes of Ko‘olau, “but his legend had just begun, and will be perpetuated for a long time by chatty tour guides at Kokee” (Day 1987: 152). As part of his contribution to this, Day inaccurately takes as “fact” Ko‘olau’s leadership of a “defiant wandering band” (Day 1971: 80). The historical Ko‘olau, as Pi‘ilani’s text makes clear, was not willing to endanger friends who offered to shelter him, and traveled only with his wife and child, both of whom London eliminates from his version. Day has a personal as well as a political stake in his readings in London: “I have read him since childhood,” Day wrote in a letter to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “he’s one of the reasons I came to Hawaii, reading his stories” (quoted in Kawaharada 1999: 86). 14 In the most comprehensive assessment of an Oceanian writer to date, Sharrad presents Wendt as a paradigmatic postcolonial writer who “has first moved to an individualist position as a result of schooling and expatriation, and then has sought a way back into communal belonging that wouldn’t compromise his freedom to speak honestly nor deny his art.” At the same time, Pouliuli “speaks for the community and on its behalf from the darkness of the Void at the very edge of that community” (Sharrad 2003: 116–17).

Conclusion 1 Winduo’s essay exemplifies the spirit in which Oceanian writer-scholars activate Island stories in contemporary contexts, an important feature of Oceanian literature (Sinavaiana-Gabbard 2001; Teaiwa 1995a; Sullivan 2000). By Oceanian writers I refer exclusively to Islanders with a genealogical connection to the Islands that predates Euroamerican intrusion. This does not mean, in the terms of my analysis, that all writing produced by Oceanians is Oceanian writing. For instance, for the purposes of this discussion, John Kneubuhl’s plays, such as Mele Kanikau and Think of a Garden, are Oceanian literature, while teleplays he wrote for Bonanza and Mission Impossible are not. At the same time, settler or “local” literatures, particularly in Fiji, Aotearoa, and Hawai‘i might be considered literatures of Oceania rather than Oceanian literatures. 2 Wilson describes Oceanian literatures as emerging through a creative dialectic that involves both creation and decreation, a “critical negation” attached to an “affirmation, and cultural political-strengthening of the indigenous and local imaginations that are struggling to be heard and to link up inside the Pacific.” For these reasons, “one must read texts not just as ‘literary’ icons but as sites of social representation and historical struggle” (Wilson 1999: 1–2). Subramani has described something akin to antitourism under the heading of “negative influence” (Subramani 1992: 75–94). 3 Both the book and film versions of Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors perform a necessary reversal of tourist board presentations of New Zealand, as signaled in the opening shot of the film, in which the screen is filled by an idyllic landscape before panning back to show the image of a tourist billboard over a polluted Maori slum outside Auckland. However, many feel that they create or reinforce negative stereotypes about Maori in ways that confuse class and culture (Thompson 1999). Once Were Warriors, with its visceral violence, might be contrasted with Sima Urale’s powerful short film O Tamaiti, which looks at domestic violence without putting physical violence on the screen, instead emphasizing the perspectives of the children. 4 Another tactic of reversal works through comic mirroring: against the Pacificist discourse of cannibalism Hau‘ofa includes the following exchange: When he finally arrived home his aged aunt greeted him tearfully. “Ole, Ole, you’re safe. Thank God those heathens didn’t eat you. You look so thin; what did they do to you?” “Don’t worry, auntie,” Ole laughed. “Those people aren’t

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Notes heathens, they’re mainly Catholics, and they don’t eat people. They only shoot each other. (Hau’ofa 1993: 90)

See also Witi Ihimaera’s poems “Skulls & Cannibals” and “Dinner with the Cannibal” (in Ihimaera et al. 1996: 218–21). 5 On the complexities of loyalty to chiefs in Fiji, see Hereniko, who quotes Sitiveni Halapua on the double-bind of the common people between chiefs and government authorities (Hereniko 2003b: 86). The misuses to which elites put ideas about “custom” is decried in Grace Molisa’s “Neo-Colonialism” and “Custom” (which ends, “custom is / as custom does!”) (Molisa 1983: 37, 24–5). In this context, Hau‘ofa critiques “romantic neotraditionalists” who are “reaping the juiciest fruits that the world capitalist economy gives” for their complicity with the “Euro-American romanticists whom they forever denounce”, and in Tales of the Tikong satirizes aidseeking elites who collaborate with outsiders in establishing a bureau for the Preservation of Traditional Culture and Essential Indigenous Personality (Hau‘ofa 1983: 49). See also Duratalo (1992: 226–9) and Makuita Tongia’s “Beware of the Dog,” in which the speaker warns chiefs against a reckoning-to-come with “hungry dogs”/common people (in Wendt 1980: 16). 6 Similarities with Gilroy might be the rhizomatic and transnationalist circulations, while differences include the ongoing primacy of genealogy and commitment to tribal or hereditary systems within insurgent nation-state frameworks. For critiques of hybridity in postcolonial theory, and the ways that it can obscure Indigenous struggles in Oceania, see Franklin and Lyons (2005). 7 By this logic, opposed by antitourism, indigenous activism and ethnic tourism are opposite sides of one coin, according to which, Cultures of all types – ethnic, national, regional, and the like – that are able to translate their qualities into marketable commodities and spectacles find themselves maintained, experienced, and globalized. Cultures that cannot or do not (re)present themselves in terms of marketable qualities, simulated instances, experiences and products are finding themselves divested of members. (Firat 1995: 107) This latest discourse of inevitability can seem backed by the conjunctions of postcoloniality and the growth of tourism into the world’s largest industry, producing 10 percent of the world’s GNP and employing 10 percent of the world’s workforce. Percentages are higher where Islanders are drawn into complicity, and complicity is often narrated as a means of perpetuating culture. This cynicism spreads into cultural analyses, such as Andrew Ross’s assertion that, Third World peoples have learned that they stand a better chance of having their claims heard by environmental groups if they present themselves as Fourth Worlders, which is what the global tourist industry, for different reasons, encourages them to do . . . And, as for echt Fourth Worlders, increasingly under pressure to preserve their “authenticity,” the injunction, from concerned First Worlders, is often to shut out the modern world. (Ross 1994: 71; see also Root 1998: 78–81) 8 Figiel likewise writes, “Whenever I met strangers and I would tell them where I was from they would jokingly refer to sex . . . free love . . . Polynesian babes . . . and that I would pull out my hula skirt” (Figiel 1998: 100). Mead’s legacy is reviled in dozens of Oceanian works, such as Noumea Simi’s parody of the Mead–Freeman debate among “naive academics” that ends with the request: “Leave us alone palagi man / we will bare to the world / our dents and flats / our blues and blacks / when it comes

Notes 225 to us” (in Wendt 1995: 284). For critiques of Mead’s legacy see Foerstal and Gilliam (1992) and Wendt (1983). 9 As in Wendt’s “con-man paradise” of a market, in Hereniko’s and Teaiwa’s Last Virgin in Paradise: A Serious Comedy (1993) Islanders manipulate Euroamerican desires toward their own ends. The play centers around Hina (an Islander), who is about to marry Helmut (a tourist seeking “the last virgin”), Jean, a Mead-like anthropologist studying “Sexual Harrassment among the Marawan” (an imaginary Pacific island), and Temanu, a “part-Pacific” Islander who has studied abroad and returns to “find her roots.” Ultimately, Hina turns out to be not a virgin but an Islander who has used the Western fantasy of Island purity as a ticket off her small island: she knows her roots and wants “to find wings too!”; Jean, who turns out to be the only virgin in the play, gives up anthropology and decides to try and live in the village (befriending Temanu and in a sense trading places with Hina). The play’s reversals and disruptions of Western theatrical conventions – and its employment of aspects of ritual clowning – suggest a mode of parodic Oceanian antitourism that is largely pedagogic in complicating outsider/insider binaries. On the enduring importance of clowning in Oceania see Hereniko (1994a) and Sinavaiana (1992, 1999). 10 Among those in the 1970s who explored the problem of how to be Hawaiian, see John Kneubuhl, who pioneered an English-language theater thick with Oceanian languages. In Mele Kanikau (1975), for instance, two characters have the following exchange: CARL: People like me – we’re the real Hawaiians. We take the world as it is, we go out, we try. We don’t sit around, whining and bellyaching about some great past we’ve lost. We work. We cope. The best way we can. In the real world. And we make it . . . NOA: You don’t know what you’ve lost, Carl. And if you don’t know that, you’re not Hawaiian. (Kneubuhl 1997: 148) ¯ pu¯kaha‘ia’s story was widely circulated through Edwin Dwight’s Memoirs of Henry 11 ‘O Obookaih (1818), which was translated into Hawaiian in 1867. On the complexities of Frisbie’s voice see DeLoughery, who effectively argues for Johnny Frisbie’s later “validation of Pacific oral epistemologies, traditions, and subjectivities” in Miss Ulysses of Puka Puka, a work which parodies and mimics colonial education as well (Deloughery 2002: 179). 12 The displacement of Hawaiians from ancestral lands is a central theme of much “local” writing in Hawai‘i, creative and critical: see Pak (1992), Hamasaki (2000), Morales (2003), Kawaharada (1999), Fujikane and Okamura (2000). All of these authors have been committed to anti-development struggle and are critically influenced by Oceanian literatures. 13 See especially “Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture” (Trask 1993: 179–97). The pimp–prostitute metaphor is widespread in Oceania. Turo Raapoto, for instance, writes, Yesterday the [noble] savage, today Tahiti is first of all a nice butt, and if you are chaste, you’ll speak of the lovely smile of the toothless vahine. The product “Tahiti,” which the Bureau of Tourism sells to the world, isn’t it a place of prostitution where the women are easy and cost next to nothing? We cost nothing, we have no price, we hardly even exist. We have ceased being since we’ve been the object of others. (Raapoto 1980: 3, quoted in Nicole 2001a: 182)

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Watching Vanuatu develop tourism, Grace Molisa writes in ironic prayer, Lead our young men and women not into the temptation of prostituting their bodies for the tourist market particularly in the Hotel Industry as has inevitably happened in more developed countries. (Molisa 1983: 67) 14 While the play moves the audience into dilemmas faced by contemporary Hawaiians without pre-scribing how these will be answered – though perhaps implicitly suggesting that pono lies between extreme positions – Apio’s own political stance and sense of anger are clear in several hard-hitting articles in the Honolulu Advertiser. See in particular “A Thousand Cuts to Genocide,” in which Apio addresses the acrimonious lawsuits aimed at eliminating Hawaiian “entitlements” (or Hawaiians as a “people” rather than one of the U.S.’s many multicultures) as the latest form of a colonial process that does not lynch or enslave, but cuts little by little at Hawaiian self-esteem, identity, and cultural pride (Apio 2001). 15 As Osorio argues in “Protecting Our Thoughts,” Even as the industry has profited by the use of what they call the “aloha spirit,” they have also, paradoxically, cheapened that word beyond recognition for Hawaiians. The industry has demonstrated there are no depths to which they are unwilling to sink in their pursuit of visitors, as they prostitute erotic portrayals of beautiful Native women in grass skirts. The word Aloha has come to mean the submission of Natives to the invasion of their world. (Osorio 1993) 16 Meredith Desha’s introduction to the play discusses the difficulty that Apio and the cast had in arriving at this ending, which was worked out in production with director Harry Wong and the cast (Desha 2003: 13–15). 17 Alika’s views in Ka¯mau A‘e might be compared to those of George Kanahele, whose goals for restoring “Hawaiianness to Waiki¯ki¯” include establishing “an authentic Hawaiian village” (Kanahele 1993: 31). The essays in Picard and Wood (1997) attempt to complicate the relation between tourism and the maintainence or destruction of culture, in some cases asserting that tourism has been a significant force in preserving aspects of cultural identity. Picard argues that, “instead of asking whether or not Balinese culture has been able to withstand the impact of tourism, we should ask how tourism has contributed to the shaping of Balinese culture” (Picard 1997); see also Silverman (2004). For Island-centered viewpoints on tourism see the essays in Crocombe (1980), which suggest that distinctions need to be made here between small-scale, localized tourism and the massive dependency on tourism in Hawai‘i which has led to the widespread view that the tourist industry is a “new plantation” (Kent 1993; Trask 1993).

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Index

Note: page numbers followed by “n” and a number refer to the Notes, as, for example, in the entry: Arens, William 77, 213n9 Abba Thulle 101–2, 104, 114 accounts see eyewitness accounts; media; narrative Adams, Henry 46, 115–16, 124, 128–9, 130, 132, 162; Letters 114, 122; Tahiti: Memoirs of the Ariitaimai 20, 116, 130 Adams, John Quincy 30, 52 Address (Reynolds) 54 Adorno, Rolena 74–5 Afloat and Ashore (Cooper) 67 Africanism 16–17, 37–8, 45, 54, 58 Ahmad, A. 125 aika¯ne (Hawaiian friendship) 107–8, 214n6 ‘a¯ina 13, 164, 165 Alasia, Sam 12 Alcoff, Linda 9 Alika (fictional character) 193–5, 196, 197 allegories 8, 72, 108, 142, 162, 171; of black–white relations 54, 66; of U.S. imperialism 68–9; of U.S. model society 69–71 Alofa (fictional character) 187, 188, 189, 190 aloha 194, 195 America, “synonymous” with U.S. 4 “America” (Dwight) 25 American Geographics (Harvey) 35, 41 American Heritage (journal) 21, 125, 153, 170, 222n10 American Pacifism: meanings of 16, 27, 34–9, 177; scholarship of 5, 156–61; in the twentieth century 144–8; view on “civilization” of Hawai‘i 162 American studies 3–4, 5, 14–15, 37, 199;

and depictions of Islanders 37, 45, 47; and ignorance 8–9; Melville studies in 40–3 American Tradition in Literature (Perkins, G. and B.) 42 Americanization, of Hawai‘i 156–61 “Americans in the South Seas” (Frisbie) 138 “Amnesia” (Teaiwa) 24, 176 Ancient Hawaiian Civilization (Midkiff) 154 Anderson, Charles 111 anthologies 6, 7, 168–75, 222n12; Hawaiian Anthology, A ( Judd) 169, 170; Spell of the Pacific (Day) 170 anthropological writing 141–3, 184 anti-nuclear politics/poetics 177–8 antitourism 22, 177–83; and living histourism 191–7; and postcolonial de-tours 184–90 Anzaldúa, Gloria. 179 Apia (Western Samoa) 189 Apio, Alani: Ka¯mau 193–5; Ka¯mau Ae 195–7; political stance 226n14 Arac, Jonathan 160 archive, creation of an American Pacific archive 16, 48, 76 Arens, William 77, 213n9 Ariitaimai 20, 116 Armstrong, William 221n2, 222n11 artistic production 23, 182–3 Asad, Talal 15–16 Asia: tourists from 164; and U.S. colonialism 6, 28–9; and U.S race relations 163 Asia-Pacific constructions 6, 36–7, 201n1, 202n3

258

Index

Astoria (Irving) 61 Atlantic Monthly (journal) 32, 122, 135, 137, 138 Atolls of the Sun (O’Brien) 133, 134, 135 Austen, Roger 117, 122 authenticity 22, 33, 34, 102, 149–50, 182, 183, 186, 189, 199 authors see indigenous texts; names of writers, e.g. Melville Autobiography (Hall) 137 Autobiography (Wilkes) 77 Axelrad, Allan 67 Balaz, Joe, “Moe‘uhane” 197 Bali Ha‘i (fictional place) 29 barter 42, 60, 80–1, 206n17; see also commercial enterprise Baudrillard, Jean 147 Bayard Dominick expedition 119, 120 beach, as topos of intercultural relations 2, 11, 19, 23, 96, 100, 105–6, 201n2 “beachcomber” authors 88, 92, 138 beachcombers 95, 138 Beckwith, Martha 109, 173, 203n11 Behdad, Ali 16, 125, 205n10 Belcher, Sir Edward 85 belief: Hawaiian and Christian practices 113, 172, 173; Lono Worship 179 Beloved (Morrison) 37 Benito Cereno (Melville) 102 Benjamin, Walter 92 betel nuts 58 Between Worlds (Salmond) 5 Beverage, Albert J. 26 bikini 27 black–white relations 37–8; and difference 135, 160–1; Pym as allegory of 54; and racial harmony 163; and white supremacy 118 Bligh, Captain William 104 Blount Report 156 Body Trade (Creed and Hoorn) 5 bond-ceremony 102, 115–16 Book of Puka-Puka, The (Frisbie) 136, 138, 141, 219n12 Borofosky, Robert 8; Remembrance of Pacific Pasts 5 Bourdieu, Pierre 9 Briand, Paul 126 “Brown Pacific” 181 Bryant, John 42–3, 206n14 Burdick, Eugene 114, 201n2 Butler, Judith 17

Calabashes and Kings (Porteus) 152, 153, 168 Calder, Alex 91–2, 215n9; Voyages and Beaches (Calder, Lamb and Orr) 5 cannibal tourism 17, 20, 34, 128–35, 145–8, 154 Cannibal Tours (film) (O’Rourke) 34 cannibalism 17–18, 20, 207n18; as analogy for homosexuality 39; and “barbarianism” of Islanders 57; cannibal tourism 128–35, 145–8, 154; the “cite” of in Typee 89–96; exhibition of Fiji Cannibals 35, 50–1, 209n11; eye-witness accounts of 62, 77–8, 82–7, 94–5; Fijian “cannibalism” 7, 35, 36, 41, 42, 50, 80–7, 212n6; joke-work about 128, 146–7; parody of 206n17; perception and fear of 74, 75, 76–8; “seen” of cannibalism, evidence for 19, 75–8, 79–87, 207n18, 212n6; the “seen” of and Wilkes’ Narrative 19, 79, 81–7; and tourism 31–2, 33–4, 42, 45, 46–7 Cannibals, The (Woodworth) 63, 209–10n12 capitalism 147, 148; see also commercial enterprise Cargill, David 81–2, 85 ceremonies see rituals chants, Hawaiian 171, 173 Chappell, David A. 50, 201n2 Chase, Owen 208n2; Narrative of the Wreck of the Essex 50 Cheek, Pamela 17 Cheng, Anne Anlin 159 Cheyfitz, Eric, The Poetics of Imperialism 9 Chi, Robert 185 chiefs: Ariitaimai 116; Hawaiian royalty 165–6; see also Lili‘uokalani; sovereignty Christianity 172, 173; and friendship practices 113 Churchill, Ward 203n10 Clarel (Melville) 140 Cleveland, Grover 156, 166 Clinton, Bill 11, 221n4 Coetzee, J. M. 88 Cold War era 5, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 31, 47, 59, 143, 150–2, 192; anthologizing practices during 168–75; and Hawai‘i 150–68 Cole, Thomas, “The Course of Empire” (paintings) (Cole) 29, 67, 71

Index colonialism 25–7, 55, 68, 95–6; and decolonization 197–200; and Hawaiian identity 191, 192, 197; and Oceanic friendship practices 111, 114–15; postcolonial criticism 2–3; and postcolonial de-tours 184–90; and readings of Oceanic texts 171–2; settler discourse as 11, 28, 37, 154, 162; tourism as 193–7; see also colony; Hawai‘i; intercultural contexts Colonialism’s Cultures (Thomas) 5 colony: Cooper’s discussion of 67–71; Poe’s parodic topos of 66–7, 71; see also colonialism coming of age, in antitouristic literature 187, 188–9, 190 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead) 136, 141, 142–3, 183–4, 187, 224n8 commercial enterprise 18, 27–30, 209n10, 210n13; the commodification of values 194–7; commodity exchange systems 42, 60, 80–1, 206n17; and concepts of property 60; and Islanders treachery 63–4; in model society 69–71; and national expansion 50–3; and social and racial hierarchies 56, 57, 69–71; tourism and lifeways 180–1, 184–6, 189; trade in muskets 42, 206n17; trade in human relics 3, 42, 112–13, 206n17 Conduct of Life (Emerson) 35–6 Congress, approves exploring expedition 52 Conquest of America, The (Todorov) 8 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 45 Cooper, James Fenimore 49, 66–71, 211n17; Afloat and Ashore 67; Leatherstocking series 67, 69; Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater 18, 35, 67–71; Notions of Americans 68; The Sea Lions 117 Corbaley, Robert, Paradise of the Pacific 153–4 corporate tourism 14, 192–7, 226n17 Coulter, John 213n11 “Course of Empire, The” (paintings) (Cole) 29, 67, 71 Crain, Caleb 99, 100, 107 Crater (Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater) (Cooper) 18, 35, 67–71 Creed, Barbara and Jeanette Hoorn, Body Trade 5 Crocombe, Ron 7 Culler, Jonathan, “The Semiotics of Tourism” 33

259

cultural memory 154 culture: future of Hawaiian in “hospitality industry” 196–7; Hawaiian and Christian practices 113, 172, 173; Hawaiian, and histourism 191–7; Hawaiian, as process and as fixed entity 187–8, 189, 190, 197–200; and joke-work 127, 128, 146–7; knowledge of Oceanic 134, 164–5; non-indigenous re-presentations of Oceanic texts 168–75; Samoan, and pressure of tourist economy 186; U.S. “civilizing” influences 162; U.S. ignorance of Oceania 2–3, 50, 51–3, 60–1, 64; see also colony; intercultural contexts; rituals customs see rituals Dana, Richard Henry: journals 214n5; Two Years Before the Mast 35, 106–7, 108–9 Danielson, Bengt, Love in the South Seas 141 Darwin, Charles, Journal of the Beagle 24 Davenport, Kiana, Shark Dialogues 183 Davidson, J. W. 5 Davis, Angela 9, 199–200; “The Rope” 1–2 Day, A. Grove 21–2, 40, 145, 155, 156–61, 166, 221n6; and histouricist anthologies 170, 171, 172, 174–5; Hawaii: Fiftieth Star 170; Hawaii: A History (Day and Kuykendall) 149, 157, 159; Hawaii and Points South 156; Hawaiian Reader (Day and Stroven) 170, 171, 172, 174; Jack London in the South Seas 155; Mad About Islands 160, 174; Spell of the Pacific (anthology) 170; True Tales of Hawaii and the South Seas (Day and Stroven) 170 De Voto, Bernard 144 death: and friendship 108–9, 119; rituals of 90–1 decolonization 4, 5, 6, 8, 26, 197–200 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 74, 89, 91 Delano, Amasa 58, 101–2, 104 DeLoughery, Elizabeth 16, 225n11 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville) 48 Dening, Greg 2, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 95, 97, 103, 187–8, 201n2 Denoon, Donald 15, 50 Derrida, Jacques 11, 73 Desmond, Jane 194

260

Index

developmental narrative 4, 25–6, 34, 35, 43, 44, 47, 151, 157, 160, 181, 192, 193 diaries see journals diaspora, Oceanian 5, 144, 181, 199, 200 difference 135, 148, 189 Dillard: Annie 21; “Sirens of the South Seas” 144–5, 174 “Dinner with the Cannibal” (Ihimaera) 176, 224n4 disease 43, 47, 119, 123, 124, 136, 162; leprosy 171–3; venereal 108–9, 206n14 “Dispossessions of Empire” (Trask) 149 Dodge, Ernest 52, 221n3 Dole, Sanford B. 155, 166 Dorfman, Ariel, How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman and Mattelart) 48, 49, 58 Double Vision (Thomas and Losche) 5 Douglas, Stephen 36 Douglass, Frederick 38 “Dream, The” (Heywood) 98 Drinnon, Richard, Facing West 41, 209n9 Dudoit, M¯ahealani 198 Duff, Alan, Once Were Warriors 179, 223n3 Dufourmontelle, Anna, Of Hospitality 1 Durutalo, Simione 144 Dwight, Timothy, “America” 25 E inoa (Marquesan name exchange) 103 Edel, Leon 151 Edmond, Rod 47, 100, 171–2, 205n12; Islands in History and Representation (Edmond and Smith) 5; Representing the South Pacific 38 edutainment 32–3, 152–3 Edwards, Justin 117, 216n12 Elbert, Samuel H. 99, 191, 203n10, n11 Ellis, William, Polynesian Researches 101 Ellison, Ralph 127–8, 186 “embalmed heads” see skulls Emerson, Ralph Waldo 26, 53, 87; Conduct of Life 35–6; Journals 35, 72 Emmons, George Foster 83, 86 emotions, and friendship 103, 105, 106–7, 118–19, 120–1 empire (concept of) 17, 21, 25, 29, 38, 48, 49, 58, 68, 69, 124, 150, 160, 164; see also imperialism English (language), and Pacific languages 180 Entangled Objects (Thomas) 5 Eperjesi, John R. 172, 203n9, 205n10

eroticism: and friendship 99, 104–5, 107–8, 113–14, 117–18; and literary tourism 123; in lotus-eater literature 139–43; see also friendship; homosexuality; sexuality “Errand Bearers, The” (Whitman) 25 Essex (ship), wreck of 50 European Pacifisms 4, 38–9 European Vision and the South Pacific (Smith, B.) 4, 38 “Evening on a Coral Island” (Hall) 137 exchange see commodity exchange systems; name-exchange exhibitions: of Fiji Cannibals 35, 50–1, 209n11; of skulls 86–7 expeditions: campaigns for 48–53; see also Bayard Dominick expedition; “Great Expedition” Exploration and Exchange (Lamb, Smith and Thomas) 5 Exploring Expedition see “Great Expedition”; Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition; Wilkes, Charles eyeballs 86, 87 eyewitness accounts: of “cannibalism” 62, 77–8, 82–7, 94–5; and fear and perception 75, 84; of native friendship/treachery 61 Facing West (Drinnon) 41, 209n9 factual knowledges 59–61, 76–7, 79–87, 165–6; and front/back paradigm of tourism 150 Faery Lands of the South Seas (Nordhoff and Hall) 136, 138 family (‘ohana) 108, 194, 196, 197 Family System in Ka‘u¯ (Handy and Pukui) 101, 108 Fanning, Edmund 29, 52, 61, 209n10, 213n10 Fanon, Frantz 118, 154, 180–1, 192 Fa‘otusia, Taueva 199 Farber, Tom 146, 147 Fayaway (fictional character) 46, 105, 129, 139–40, 206n14 fear/friendship fantasies 20, 39, 61, 97–8; and perception 18–19, 72–8, 84, 92–3, 94 Fiedler, Leslie 31, 38, 49, 99, 139, 216n13 Figiel, Sia 180; “A Word to the Tourist Who Wears Gauganic Glasses” 176; Where We Once Belonged 186–90; “WOW! In Many Parts . . .” 183

Index Fiji/Fijians 51–2, 53, 54, 132–3; “cannibalism” of 7, 35, 36, 41, 42, 50, 80–7, 212n6 films 34, 44–5; antitouristic 182; of lotuseater school 21, 139, 140, 141–2, 143; promoting histourism 164 Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville, The (Stern) 44 Fisher, Philip 169 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 124 Fogarty, Lionel 178 Fong, Randie 98, 203n8 Ford, Alexander Hume 20 Forever the Land of Men (Handy, W.) 120, 121 Forgotten One, The (Hall) 138 Fournander, Abraham 19, 99 Franklin, Benjamin 208n1 Franklin, Wayne 67 Freeman, Derek 136 Freud, Sigmund 34, 75, 107, 162; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious 127 friendship: aika¯ne (Hawaiian) 107–8, 214n6; and cannibalism 131–2; and colonialism 111, 114–15; crosscultural 19–20, 214n3; as discourse 97–101; in fear/friendship fantasies 20, 39, 61, 73, 97–8; loss and mourning 106–7, 108–9; and moments of exchange 106–9; and name-exchange practices 115–21; narrative performance of 101–5; and partings 104–5, 106, 119; tayo (Tahitian) 102–3, 104, 111, 215n10; and war 103–4; see also hospitality/ hostility; name-exchange; relationships Frisbie, Johnny ( Johnny “Florence” Frisbie Hebenstreit) 139, 174, 192 Frisbie, Robert Dean 32, 117–18, 125, 126, 135, 137, 138–9, 141; “Americans in the South Seas” 138; The Book of Puka-Puka 136, 138, 141, 219n12; Island of Desire 139, 219n12; “South Seas Authors” 138 front/back paradigm, and tourism 149–50, 159 frontiers, maritime 29–31, 48, 50; see also Western frontier Fuchs, Lawrence 163, 221n7; Hawaii Pono 14, 154 Fuller, Margaret 46 Fussell, Edwin 55 Fussell, Paul 31

261

Galeano, Eduardo 4, 16; The Open Veins of Latin America 191 Gaugin, Paul 148, 206n14 gaze: touristic 124–5, 184; in U.S. literature 139 Geertz, Clifford 15 Geiger, Jeffrey 133 gender see masculinity; women George, William 27 gift-exchange 120–1 Gilroy, Paul 181, 224n6 Glissant, Eduoard 14 globalism 4, 8, 11, 21, 29, 36, 42, 48, 56, 59, 144, 148, 198–9; “stepping stones narrative” 17, 24, 39, 181, 305n13 “Golden Man” (concept of) 168 government: and antitourism 181; early presence of U.S. in Oceania 49–50, 52–3; and friendship 100; and Hawaii sovereignty 152–3, 155–6, 165–6, 167; Hawaiian loss of 11 Grace, Patricia, Potiki 178 “Great Expedition, The” (Exploring Expedition or Wilkes expedition) 18–19, 49, 52–3, 59–60, 72, 77; official journals of 79–84 Greenblatt, Stephen 82, 201n2 Grobel, Lawrence 28, 159, 163, 165 guest–host relationship 12–13, 97–8, 115–16, 120; see also friendship; hospitality Hale, Horatio 76, 77 Hale’ole, S. N., La¯ ‘ieikawai 173 Hall, James Norman 126, 137, 140; Autobiography 137; “Evening on a Coral Island” 137; Faery Lands of the South Seas (Nordhoff and Hall) 136, 138; The Forgotten One 138; “Tour de l’ile” 137; “Why I Live in Tahiti” 136 Hamasaki, Richard 23 Hammatt, Charles H. 51 Handy, E. S. C. 154; Family System in Ka‘u¯ (Handy and Pukui) 101, 108 Handy, Willowdean 119–21, 216n15; Forever the Land of Men 120, 121; “Kaoha!” 119–20; Thunder From the Sea 121, 217n16 haole (Euroamerican) 14, 99, 108 Happy Isles of Oceania, The (Theroux) 20, 41, 144, 145–8 Hardt, Michael 29 Harper’s (magazine) 137–8, 222n10 Hart, Joseph, Miriam Coffin 53

262

Index

Harvey, Bruce, American Geographics 34–5, 41 Hau‘ofa, Epeli 7, 13, 36–7, 178, 180, 181, 182, 185, 198, 199, 201n1, 224n5 Hawai‘i: Americanization of 6–7, 11, 156–61; annexation as U.S. state 28, 122, 150, 155–6, 158, 163, 165–7, 193; in antitourist texts 191–7; in Cooper’s The Crater 68; cultural forms and terms 12–13, 14, 51, 99, 104, 107–8, 164, 165, 171, 173–4, 186, 191, 194, 195, 198, 203n9, 214n6; exclusion of indigenous texts 6, 7, 170–1, 174–5; friendship in 106–7; Hawaiian language 157–8, 198; Hawaiian terms 51, 107–8, 214n6; histourism in 151–6; Michener’s Hawaii 161–8; post-colonial culture of 197–200; the Republic of Hawai‘i 155; sovereignty of 152–3, 155–6, 165–6; in Stoddard’s writings 122–3; in Theroux’s writing 144, 145–8 Hawaii (Michener) 21, 28, 161–8, 183 Hawaii: Fiftieth Star (Day) 170 Hawaii: A History (Day and Kuykendall) 149, 157, 159 Hawaii: A Literary Chronicle (Lee) 168, 169 Hawaii and Points South (Day) 156 Hawaii Pono (Fuchs) 14, 154 Hawaiian (language) 157–8, 198 Hawaiian Anthology, A (Judd) 169, 170 Hawaiian Reader, A (Day and Stroven) 170, 171, 172, 174 Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Lili‘uokalani) 171 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 46, 49 Hay, John 203n3 Hayes, John 163–4 heads see skulls Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 45 Heath Anthology of American Literature 6, 202n5 “Heathen, The” (London) 117, 118–19 Hebenstreit, Johnny “Florence” Frisbie 139, 174, 192 Heffernan, Thomas 208n3 Herbert, Walter 42, 43, 64, 93; Marquesan Encounters 44 Hereniko, Vilsoni 22, 224n5; “Indigenous Knowledge” 14–15; Inside Out (Hereniko and Wilson) 5; Last Virgin in Paradise (with Teaiwa) 225n9

Heyerdahl, Thor 128, 141, 218n8 Heywood, Peter, “The Dream” 98 Hiroa, Te Rangi 170 History of the American Whale Fishery (Starbuck) 51 history-making: anthologies of historical narratives 169–70; and fear 74; and official journals 79–80; of U.S. in Oceania 8 histourism 21–2, 151–6; and anthologizing practices 168–75; and antitourism 191–7; and Day’s scholarship 156–61; in Michener’s Hawai‘i 161–8 hoaxing, of Europeans 22, 42, 95, 109, 126, 142–3, 185–6, 223–4n4, 225n9 Hoffman, Charles Fenno 46 Hoffman, Daniel 54 Holland, Patrick 125 Holmes, Silas 83 Holt, John Dominis: “On Being Hawaiian” 191; Waimea Summer 191 homosexuality 216n13; cannibalism as analogy for 39; and friendship 99, 108–9, 117, 131; and literary tourism 123; see also eroticism; friendship; marriage; sexuality Honolulu 30 Honolulu Star-Bulletin 162, 170 ho‘okipa (hospitality) 13, 98, 196; see also hospitality Ho‘omanawanui, Ku‘ualoha 172 Hoorn, Jeanette and Barbara Creed, Body Trade 5 Hope (fictional character) 107, 108–9 hospitality 10–13, 98, 203n8; and friendship 114–15; Hawaiian 153–4; inverted as “hospitality industry” 11, 192–7; tourism and friendship 111 hospitality/hostility 11–13, 31–2, 50, 51; in commercial exchanges 63–4; guest–host relationship 12–13, 97–8, 115–16, 120 How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman and Mattelart) 48, 49, 58 Howe, K. R. 34 Howells, William Dean 122 Huggan, Graham 125 human relics: trade in 3, 42, 112–13, 206n17; see also skulls Hunter, Charles 164, 222n10 Hurricane, The (Nordhoff) 139

Index identity: and cannibalism 78; and colonialism 191, 192, 197; and land 178 ignorances 7–10; U.S. of Oceania 2–3, 14–15, 50, 51–3, 60–1, 64 Ihimaera, Witi 176, 199; “Dinner with the Cannibal” 176, 224n4 images: photographic 198; popular representations of Islanders 35, 36, 125–6, 200 Imaging the Pacific (Smith, B.) 4 imperialism 25–7, 59–60; allegories of U.S. imperialism 68–9; antiimperialist writing 134; concept of empire 17; cultural 124–5, 170–5; U.S. in Hawai‘i 151–6 imprisonment 178–9 In the American Grain (Williams, W. C.) 54 In Oceania (Thomas) 114 incarceration 178–9 Incidents in a Whaling Voyage (Olmstead) 111 “Indigenous Knowledge” (Hereniko) 14–15 indigenous texts: antitouristic 22–3, 177–83; antitouristic, on living histourism 191–7; antitouristic, on postcolonial de-tours 184–90; contemporary continuities 197–200; earliest 139; inclusion/exclusion in anthologies 6, 7, 170–1, 174–5; and technology 181–2 inevitability, discourse of 21, 30, 34, 47, 106, 108–9, 123, 152, 224n7 Inouye, Daniel K. 161, 164 Inside Out (Hereniko and Wilson) 5 intercultural contexts: cross-cultural representation 15–16; EuroAmerican cultural links 159; future of in “hospitality industry” 196–7; Oceania as opposite of civilized culture 67–9; Oceania as site of model society 69–71; relationships in 2–3, 4–7, 11–13, 54, 60, 82–3, 114; translation in 9, 101, 102; and social hierarchy 55–6, 58–9, 69–71; translation in 101, 102; of Typee 92; see also friendship; name-exchange Irving, Washington, Astoria 61 Ishmael (fictional character) 109–10, 112–13, 119, 132 Island of Desire (Frisbie) 139, 219n12 Islanders: antitourism re-represents 179, 180, 184–90; cannibal tourist

263

representations of 130–5, 144–8; as cannibals 76–8, 128–35; concepts of friendship 101, 111, 112; early colonialist representations of 33, 35–6, 40–7, 50–2; emigrants to U.S. 5, 144, 199; girls and women 139–43, 187–90; histouricist descriptions of 167–8, 172–3; hostile/friendly depictions of 31–2, 57–8, 63; as ‘intellectually unconscious’ 43–4; inter-tribal relations 96; Islandcentered views of tourism 226n17; literary touristic representations of 123, 126–8; mimicry and hoaxing of Europeans 22, 42, 95, 109, 126, 142–3, 185–6, 223–4n4, 225n9; as narrators 133–4; Native American comparisons 13, 16–17, 18, 24, 25, 30, 37, 47, 61, 67, 105, 135, 148; as opposite of civilized culture 67–9; Orientalist representations of 36; popular representations of 35, 36, 125–6, 200; in social and cultural hierarchy 55–6, 58–9, 69–71; struggle with colonialism 95–6; traditional friendships 102–3; U.S. relations with 60, 82–3; and white supremacy 118, 172; see also cannibalism; friendship; Oceania; rituals Islands, The (Lee) 169–70 Islands in History and Representation (Edmond and Smith) 5 Jack London in the South Seas (Day) 155 Jaffé, David 212n4 James, C. L. R. 37 Jarves, James 3 Johnson, Barbara 10 joke-work 127, 128, 146–7; Islander parody of Euroamericans 22–3; punning in Typee 93; the trickster novelist 185–6; see also hoaxing; parody Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud) 127 Journal of the Beagle (Darwin) 24 “Journal on Board U.S.S. ‘Vincennes’” (Stearns) 82, 86 Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific (Porter) 62, 64, 78, 90 journals (magazines): Hawai‘i promoted in 153; and publication of lotus-eater literature 137–8; see also media; names of journals and magazines, e.g. Atlantic Monthly

264

Index

journals (personal diaries): of Dana 214n5; on friendships 104; of Wilkes’ “Great Expedition” 79–84 Journals (Emerson) 35, 72 Joyce, Barry 82, 87 Judd, Gerrit P. 166; A Hawaiian Anthology 169, 170 Judd, Laura Fish 171, 211n3 juvenile literature 49, 220n15 Kalahele, Imaikalani 1, 12, 191; “Ode to Fort Street” 191 kama‘a¯ ina 12–13, 14, 203n9 Kamakak¯uokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies 7 Kamakau, Samuel M. 5, 11, 19, 30, 98, 167; Ruling Chiefs of Hawai‘i 109 Ka¯mau (Apio) 193–5 Ka¯mau A‘e (Apio) 195–7 Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikal¯a, Native Land and Foreign Desires 108 Kamehameha III 11, 30, 76; meeting with Vancouver 100, 104 “kannakas” 35, 67, 69–71; friendship customs of 98 “Kaoha!” (Handy, W.) 119–20 Kaplan, Amy 99 Kaplan, Stanley 54 Karcher, Carolyn, Slavery Over the Promised Land 38 Kauanui, J. Ke¯haulani 28 Kauikeaouli see Kamehameha III Kawaharada, Dennis 172 Kawaipono (Michael Kawaipono Mahekona) (fictional character) 195–7 Kazin, Alfred 43 Kekela, James Hunewell 98, 213n1 Kennedy, John F. 26, 27, 31, 151 “King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands” (popular song) 35, 74 Kjellgren, Eric 205n9 Klein, Cristina 29, 151 Kneubuhl, John 223n1, 225n10 Kneubuhl, Vicky, Ola Na¯ Iwi (“Let These Bones Live”) 192 knowledges: challenged in Typee 88–9; factual 59–61, 76–7, 79–87, 165–6; and fiction 61–6, 164–5; and ignorances 10; Western, and modernization 186; see also narrative ko¯lea 99 Ko‘olau 172–3, 223n13 “Koolau the Leper” (London) 171–3

Kory-Kory (fictional character) 90, 95, 105, 129, 206n15 Krauss, Bob 206n14 Kristeva, Julia 75 Kumulipo (Hawaiian creation chant) 171 Kuykendall, Ralph 153; Hawaii: A History (Day and Kuykendall) 149, 157, 159 La Farge, John 25, 115, 129 La¯‘ieikawai (Hale‘ole) 173 Lali 7 Lamb, Jonathan 20; Exploration and Exchange (Lamb, Smith and Thomas) 5; Preserving the Self in the South Seas 9; Voyages and Beaches (Calder, Lamb and Orr) 5 land: and identity 178; indigenous place names 9, 198; tribal 60 Landgraf, Kapulani 198 Langakali (Thaman) 180 language: English and Pacific 180; Hawaiian 157–8, 198; and “hostage-taking” 12; translation of terminology 9 Last Virgin in Paradise (Hereniko and Teaiwa) 225n9 Lauter, Paul 40, 41 Lawrence, D. H. 26, 45, 46; Studies in Classic American Literature 40, 43–4 Leatherstocking series 67, 69 Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Wendt) 184, 191 Ledyard, John 27 Lee, W. Storrs 162, 171, 220n1; Hawaii: A Literary Chronicle 168, 169; The Islands 169–70 Lee, William Little 11 Legacy of Conquest, The (Limerick) 66 legends see myths leprosy 171–3 Letters from Hawai‘i (Twain) 3 Levin, Harry 54 libraries, of literary tourists 125, 148 Lila (Mishra) 180 Lili‘uokalani, Queen of Hawai‘i 30, 155, 165, 166, 171, 195, 203n9; Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen 171 Limerick, Patricia, The Legacy of Conquest 66 Lind, Andrew 154, 221n1 Linton, Ralph 207n18 literacy rates (Hawaiian) 167 Literary Culture (Rowe) 41 Literary Culture and the Pacific (Smith, V.) 4

Index literary tourism 20–1, 123–8; and antitourism 183; and cannibal tours 130–1; of Polynesia 123, 134, 161 Lloyd, David 151 “local”, and globalism 199 Log of the Snark, The (London, C.) 128 London, Charmian, The Log of the Snark 128 London, Jack 20, 26, 116–19, 124, 129; histouricist readings of 158, 159–60, 160–1; “Koolau the Leper” 171–3; “relation” to Stoddard 216n12; “The Heathen” 117, 118–19 Lono Worship 179 Losche, Diane, Double Vision (Thomas and Losche) 5 loss, and mourning 106–7, 108–9 lotus-eater school 135, 136–43, 154 Love in the South Seas (Danielson) 141 Luetze, Emanuel Gottlieb, “Westward Course of Empire Takes its Way” (painting) 29 Lynn Record (newspaper) 50–1 McBride, Chris 216n12 MacCannell, Dean 34, 149 McClintock, Anne 25, 211n2 Machine in the Garden, The (Marx) 41 McKinley, William 222n10 McMurtry, Larry 21, 125; Paradise 148, 218n5 Mad About Islands ( Day) 160, 174 magazines see journals; media; names of journals and magazines, e.g. National Geographic Maine Woods, The (Thoreau) 30 Malcomson, Scott, Tuturani 148 male see masculinity Malifa, Sano 180 malihini 12–13, 14 Malo, Davida 171, 213n8, 214n6 Malolo massacre 81, 82, 211n1, 212n5 mana 104, 186, 198 Maori literature 175, 179–80, 183 maritime literature 48–54 market see commercial enterprise Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater (Cooper) 18, 35, 67–71 Marquesan Encounters (Herbert) 44 Marquesas/Marquesans 43, 103, 105, 119–21, 129, 133–5 marriage: Christian 172, 173; Islander friendships as 102, 110, 112–13 Martin, Robert 57, 110, 111

265

Marx, Leo 44; The Machine in the Garden 41 masculinity 17, 25, 33, 49, 77, 100, 130, 168, 216n12; in lotus-eater literature 139, 140; male friendships 105, 109–11, 117 Massie case 150, 220–1n1 Massumi, Brian 72, 88 Mathiessen, F. O. 160 Mattelart, Armand, How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman and Mattelart) 48, 49, 58 “‘Me Adam’” (Wendt) 40 Mead, Margaret 136, 183; Coming of Age in Samoa 136, 141, 142–3, 183–4, 187, 224n8 media: campaigns and early U.S. expansion 51–2, 72; Hawaiian histourism promotion in 152, 164; popular images of Oceania in 8, 35, 36, 125–6, 200; presents state of knowledge accounts 76; reportage and commercial investment 62; see also journals meetings, and friendship 104–5 Melville, Elizabeth 89 Melville, Herman 1–2, 18, 19, 30, 31, 37, 53, 72, 166; as anti-conquest writer 126, 128, 158, 162; and “cannibal tours” 128–32; on cannibalism 42, 77; on discourse of cannibalism 88–96; histouricist readings of 158, 160; Melville Studies as agents of Pacificist writing and its critique 40–7, 207–8n20; as model for Oceanic writing and criticism 40–3, 45–6, 47; on Owen Chase 208n2; “To Ned” 128, see also Benito Cereno; Clarel; Moby-Dick; Omoo; Typee Melville: A Biography (Miller) 42 memory, cultural 154 men see masculinity Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 74 Meyer, Manulani 12, 181, 197 Michener, James 21, 25, 28–9, 58, 138, 151, 159, 170, 174, 222n11; “Golden Man” (concept of) 168; Hawaii 21, 28, 161–8, 183; Return to Paradise 28; South Pacific (film and book) 21, 29 Midkiff, Frank, Ancient Hawaiian Civilization 154 military operations: the Malolo massacre 81; war and friendship 103–4 militourism 26–7, 177

266

Index

Miller, Edwin Haviland, Melville: A Biography 42 Miriam Coffin (Hart) 53 Mishra, Sudesh, Lila 180 missionaries 22, 76, 81, 103, 107, 160; accounts of cannibalism 81, 85, 95, 212n6; cultural role of 162; tourism developers as 184–5 Moana of the South Seas (film) 141, 143 Moby-Dick (Melville) 1, 30, 37, 48, 50, 75, 76, 109–10, 112–13; see also Ishmael; Queequeg “Moe‘uhane” (Balaz) 197 Molisa, Grace 224n, 226n13 Monroe Doctrine 30 Morrell, Abby 62 Morrell, Benjamin 210n15; A Narrative of Four Voyages 54, 58, 61–3, 66 Morrison, Toni 3, 37, 54, 64–5, 202n7; Beloved 37; Playing in the Dark 37 Mottram, Eric 54 mourning, and loss 106–7, 108–9 Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill) 137 movies see films Mudrooroo 180 “multicultural tourism” 182–3 Mumford, Lewis 45, 46 Mutiny on the Bounty (film) 140, 141 Mykkänen, Juri 22 myths: of Oceanic primitivism 21, 26, 34, 140–1, 147–8; Samoan, and cultural process 190; traditional stories 173–4, 178, 185 Nakuina, Moses, Wind Gourd of La‘amaomao 173–4 name-exchange 19, 68, 102, 103, 110–11, 115–21, 214n4 names (of places) 9, 198 narrative: of Americanization of Hawai‘i 156–61; of factual knowledges 59–61, 76–7, 79–87, 165–6; of friendships 104–5; of histourism in Hawai‘i 153–6; Islanders as narrators 133–4; of national expansion 3, 49–53; reality/fantasy in 3, 56–7, 61–3, 127–8, 184–5; of South Seas 54 Narrative (Turnbull) 111 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe) 18, 37, 38, 54–8, 58–9, 63–6, 71, 210n15 Narrative of Four Voyages, A (Morrell) 54, 58, 62, 66

Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (Wilkes) 18–19, 65; compared with Typee 73, 88; and fear of cannibalism 75, 76, 77, 96; on Islanders’ emotions 103; and the “seen” of cannibalism 19, 79, 81–7, see also Wilkes, Charles Narrative of the Wreck of the Essex (Chase) 50 National Geographic (magazine) 119, 125, 135, 142, 153, 221n3, 222n9 Native American studies 13, 16–17, 30, 61, 67, 105 Native Land and Foreign Desires (Kame‘eleihiwa) 108 “natural”, the 44–5 nautical literature, in campaign for Oceanic expeditions 48–53 Negri, Antonio 29 Nelson, Dana 54, 58 New Americanist scholarship 3, 41, 44 New Zealand see Maori literature Nietzsche, Friedrich 9–10, 108 Nogelmeier, Puakea 10, 203n8 Nordhoff, Charles 126, 137, 140, 141; Faery Lands of the South Seas (Nordhoff and Hall) 136, 138; The Hurricane 139 nostalgia 114–15, 123–4, 125, 154 Notions of the Americans (Cooper) 68 Nuanua 7 Oahu Gold (tourist brochure) 155 Obeyesekere, Gananath 3, 74, 85, 206n17, 211n2, 213n8 O’Brien, Frederick 125, 126, 130, 133–5, 219n10; Atolls of the Sun 133, 134, 135; “Some Famous Vagabonds” 136; White Shadows in the South Seas 32, 133, 135, 140–1 O’Carroll, John 194 Oceania: idealized representations of 136–43, 152, 154; ‘intellectual unconsciousness’ in 43–4; in Melville studies 40–3; as regional community 181; as site of allegorical model society 69–71; U.S. conceptions of and attitudes to 24–34, 49–53, 123; see also Islanders Oceanic texts see indigenous texts “Ode to Fort Street” (Kalahele) 191 Of Hospitality (Derrida) 11 Of Hospitality (Dufourmontelle) 1 ‘ohana (family) 108, 194, 196, 197 ‘Oiwi ( journal) 197–8

Index Ola Na¯ Iwi (“Let These Bones Live”) (Kneubuhl) 192 Oielo No‘eau (Hawaiian poetic proverb) 12, 13, 99 Oliver, Douglas 30, 215n10 Olmstead, Francis, Incidents in a Whaling Voyage 111 Olson, Charles 31, 42 Omoo (Melville) 40, 45, 46, 162; friendship narratives in 98, 111–13 “On Being Hawaiian” (Holt) 191 Once Were Warriors (Duff) 179, 223n3 O’Neill, Eugene, Mourning Becomes Electra 137 Open Veins of Latin America, The (Galeano) 191 ‘Op¯ukaha‘ia, Henry 171, 225n11 Ori 115–16 orientalism 2, 11, 12, 16, 33, 36, 37, 205n10–12 O’Rourke, Dennis, Cannibal Tours (film) 34 Orr, Bridget, Voyages and Beaches (Calder, Lamb and Orr) 5 Orwell, George 38 Osorio, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole 22, 198, 221n4, 226n15 Othello (Shakespeare) 86 Otoo (fictional character) 118–19 “Our Sea of Islands” (Hau‘ofa) 7, 181 Owens, Louis 20, 182–3 Pacific and Indian Oceans (Reynolds) 52 Pacific studies 5–6, 201n1, 202n3 paintings 29, 67, 71 paradise: Hawai‘i as 152, 154, 167; Oceania as 136–7, 144–5 Paradise (McMurtry) 148, 218n5 Paradise of the Pacific (Corbaley) 153–4 parody: in antitourist writing 185–6; Islander parody of Euroamericans 22–3, 206n17; Pym as 56–7, 65–6, 71, 210n15; Typee as 89–90, 92–4, 110, 211n3; see also hoaxing; joke-work; trickster novelist partings, and friendship 104–5, 106, 119 Paulding, Hiram 96, 108, 206n15, 209n9 Paulding, James Kirke 59, 60, 61, 62, 209n9, 210n14; Slavery in the United States 59 Paulet affair 68, 162, 191 “Pearl Hunting in Paumotus” (Stoddard) 119 Pease, Donald 4

267

Pepesa (fictional character) 184–5, 186 perception: and fear 18–19, 72–8, 84, 92–3, 94; and preconception 80 Perkins, George and Perkins, Barbara, American Tradition in Literature 42 Perry, Matthew 27, 203n2 Petaia, Ruperake 12 Philbrick, Nathaniel 211n4 Philbrick, Thomas 48 Pickering, Charles 49, 51–2, 82–3, 84–5 Pi‘ilani, “The True Story of Kaluaikoolau” 172, 173 place names 9, 198 Playing in the Dark (Morrison) 37 Poe, Edgar Allan: influences on 53; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 18, 37, 38, 54–8, 58–9, 63–6, 71, 210n15 Poetics of Imperialism, The (Cheyfitz) 9 poetry, Hawaiian 171, 173–4 Polynesia, literary tourism of 123, 134, 161 Polynesian Researches (Ellis) 101 pono 191, 195 popular: images of Oceania 8, 35, 36, 125–6, 200; songs 35, 44, 74 Porter, David, Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific 62, 64, 78, 90 Porteus, Stanley 163, 170, 222n7; Calabashes and Kings 152, 153, 168 postcolonial: criticism 2–3, 8, 13, 33, 87, 89, 91, 105, 173, 200; de-tours 184–90; decolonization 197–200 Potiki (Grace) 178 Pouliuli (Wendt) 174 Pratt, Mary Louise 20–1, 60, 106, 146 preconception, and perception 80 Preserving the Self in the South Seas (Lamb) 9 primitivist myth 21, 26, 34, 140–1, 147–8 property, concepts of 60 Puka-Puka 138–9 Pukui, Mary Kawena 13, 99, 171, 191, 213n8; Family System in Ka‘u¯ (Handy and Pukui) 101, 108 Pule, John 177, 199; Shark that Ate the Sun 180 Pym see Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Queequeg (fictional character) 37, 41, 42, 46, 78, 206n15; and Ishmael 109–10, 112–13, 119 Quinby, Lee 218n7 racial discourses 16–17, 45, 55–6, 58–9, 123, 124; in histourism 151, 154, 157,

268

Index

160–1, 163; racial identity and cannibalism 78 Rampersad, Arnold 37 Reader’s Digest (magazine) 21, 125, 163, 165 reality/fantasy: of cannibalism 129–30; and front/back paradigm of tourism 149–50, 159; in Oceanic narrative 3, 56–7, 61–3, 127–8, 184–5; and the “seen”, of cannibalism 75–8, 82–7; twentieth century writing 144–8 Regeneration Through Violence (Slotkin) 41 regional community 181; “regionals” 169 Reimagining the American Pacific (Wilson) 6, 39 relationships: between Islanders 101; exploitation of 99; inter-tribal 96; intercultural 2–3, 4–7, 11–14, 54, 60, 82–3, 114; white supremacy in 118; see also friendship religious customs see belief; rituals Remembrance of Pacific Pasts (Borofosky) 5 Representing the South Pacific (Edmond) 38 Republic of Hawai‘i 155; see also Hawai‘i Resaldo, Renato 25 Return to Paradise (Michener) 28 Reynolds, Jeremiah N. 50, 51, 52, 59, 209n8, 209n9; Address 54; Pacific and Indian Oceans 52; presentation before Congress 52, 56, 76; Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac 52 rituals: of death 90–1; of friendship 19, 98–9, 102–3, 104–5, 109–11, 113; of Hawaiian and Christian belief 172, 173; of Lono Worship 179; of Tahitians 116 Robarts, Edward 97, 103, 104, 105, 106 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 74, 89, 91 Rogin, M. P. 60 rookery, as parodic topos for colony 66, 71 Root, Deborah 17 “Rope, The” (Davis) 1 “rope” metaphor 1, 9, 199–200 Rosenzweig, Roy 152 Ross, Andrew 224n7 Roughing It (Twain) 36, 160 Rowe, John Carlos 132, 205n13; Literary Culture 41 royalty, Hawaiian 165–6; Kamehameha III 11, 30, 76, 100, 104; Lili‘uokalani 30, 155, 165, 166, 171, 195; see also sovereignty

Ruling Chiefs of Hawai‘i (Kamakau) 109 Rusk, Dean 26 Said, Edward 33, 36, 73, 205n11, 205n12; critiques of 205n10 Sailing Alone Around the World (Slocum) 128 Salmond, Anne: Between Worlds 5; Two Worlds 5 Samoa/Samoan culture 136, 142–3, 174, 184–90 San Juan, Eve 8 Sanborn, Geoffrey 86, 89, 211n2 Sargeant, Charles Lenox 208n3, 220n14 Sarti, Antonella 183 “Savage Can’t Live in America, A” (poem) (Westlake) 34 Sawyer, Fred 116 Schueller, Malini Johar 25 Sea Lions, The (Cooper) 117 Sedgwick, Eve 10, 117 Sedgwick, William Ellery 32, 44 “Semiotics of Tourism, The” (Culler) 33 settler-writers (lotus-eaters) 135, 136–43, 154 sexuality: and antitourism 188–9; see also eroticism; homosexuality; marriage Sexual Encounters (Wallace) 99 Shakespeare, William, Othello 86 Shankar, S. 17 Shark Dialogues (Davenport) 183 Shark that Ate the Sun (Pule) 180 Sharp, Ronald 102 Sharrad, Paul 36, 185, 203n1, 223n14 Silva, Noenoe 22, 166, 221n4 Silverman, Kaja 197 Simi, Noumea 224n Sinavaiana, Caroline 22, 185 Siniva (fictional character) 186–7, 190 “Sirens of the South Seas” (Dillard) 144–5, 174 skulls: and cannibalism 85–6; exhibits of 86–7; ritual preservation of 90–1; trade in 3, 42, 112–13 Slavery Over the Promised Land (Karcher) 38 Slavery in the United States (Paulding, J. K.) 59 Slocum, Joshua 172; Sailing Alone Around the World 128 Slotkin, Richard 47, 50, 207n19; Regeneration Through Violence 41 Smith, Bernard 200; European Vision and the South Pacific 4, 38; Imaging the Pacific 4 Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land 41

Index Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 8, 182 Smith, Vanessa 4; Exploration and Exchange (Lamb, Smith and Thomas) 5; Islands in History and Representation (Edmond and Smith) 5 Smithsonian Institution 53, 86 social hierarchy 55–6, 58–9, 69–71; and friendship 99–100; see also friendship; hospitality; intercultural contexts “Some Famous Vagabonds” (O’Brien) 136 “Song of Rahero, The” (Stevenson) 115 songs: Hawaiian creation chant 171; popular 35, 44, 74 Sons for the Return Home (Wendt) 173 Souter, Kathy 49 South Pacific (film and book) (Michener) 21, 29 South-Sea Idyls (Stoddard) 117, 122, 132 “South Seas Authors” (Frisbie) 138 sovereignty, Hawaiian 152–3, 155–6, 165–6, 191 spaces see beach; land Spell of the Pacific (anthology) (Day) 170 Spivak, Gayatri 1–2, 12, 97 Stanton, William 87, 211n4 Star Waka (Sullivan) 179–80 Starbuck, Alexander, History of the American Whale Fishery 51 Stead, C. K. 175 Stearns, Simeon, “Journal on Board U.S.S. ‘Vicennes’” 82, 86 “stepping stones narrative” 17, 24, 39, 181, 305n13 Stern, Milton, Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville, The 44 Stevenson, Robert Louis 130–1; “The Song of Rahero” 115 Stewart, Charles 78, 90 Stimson, Benjamin G. 107 Stoddard, Charles Warren 99, 110, 117, 122–3, 131–2, 217n2; “Pearl Hunting in Paumotus” 119; “relation” to London 216n12; South-Sea Idyls 117, 122, 132 stories, traditional 173–4, 178 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 36 Stroven, Carl 170, 171, 172, 173 Stuart, Fred 76–7 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence) 40, 43–4 Sturma, Michael 139 Subramani 205n9, 223n2

269

Suggs, Robert 105, 218n7 Sullivan, Robert: Star Waka 179–80; Whetu Moana (Wendt, Whaitiri and Sullivan) 184, 192 Sumida, Stephen 158, 162–3, 167, 222n12 Tabu (film) 141–2 Tahiti: Memoirs of the Ariitaimai (Adams) 20, 116, 130 Tahiti/Tahitians 47, 98, 111, 115–16, 124, 137, 144–5, 162 taio see tayo Taipi/Taipivai 20, 42–3, 88–9, 90–1, 92–4, 114, 129 tapu 103 tattoos 121 Ta‘unga 95 Taussig, Michael 73, 90, 92, 96, 186 tayo (or taio) (Tahitian friendship) 102–3, 104, 111, 215n10 Teaiwa, Teresia K. 22, 26, 177, 206n17; “Amnesia” 24, 176; Last Virgin in Paradise (with Hereniko) 225n9 technology 181–2 “textual attitude” 73 Thaman, Konai H. 177; Langakali 180 Theroux, Paul 218n5; The Happy Isles of Oceania 20, 41, 144, 145–8 Thomas, Nicholas 2, 33, 80; Colonialism’s Cultures 5; Double Vision (Thomas and Losche) 5; Entangled Objects 5; Exploration and Exchange (Lamb, Smith and Thomas) 5; In Oceania 114 Thoreau, Henry David 100, 106; The Maine Woods 30; Walden 72 “Three Faces of Samoa” (Wendt) 136 Thunder From the Sea (Handy) 121, 217n16 “To Ned” (Melville) 128 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America 48 Todorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest of America 8 Tommo (fictional character) 88–9, 90–1, 92–3, 94, 95, 96, 105; and Toby 110–11 “Tour de l’ile” (Hall) 137 tour guides, Islanders as 194–5 tourism 20–1; and antitourism 22, 177–83; and cannibal tourism 128–35, 145–8, 154; and cannibalism 31–2, 33–4, 42, 45, 46–7; corporate tourism 14, 192–7, 226n17; de-tours behind tourist fronts 184–90;

270

Index

friendship and hospitality 111; front/ back paradigm of 149–50, 159; Island-centered views of 226n17; lifeways and commercial enterprise 180–1, 184–6, 189; and militourism 26–7, 177; “multicultural tourism” 182–3; the touristic gaze 124–5, 184; see also antitourism; histourism; literary tourism trade see commercial enterprise traditional customs see authenticity; rituals traditional stories 173–4, 178 Trask, Haunani-Kay 14, 21, 27, 179, 192–3, 198, 200; “Dispossessions of Empire” 149 treachery: fear of 51–2, 53, 60–1; as Islanders’ characteristic 63–4; and violence 64–5 trickster novelist 185–6; see also hoaxing; joke-work; parody “True Story of Kaluaikoolau, The” (Pi‘ilani) 172, 173 True Tales of Hawaii and the South Seas (Day and Stroven) 170 trust/mistrust 77 Tsalalians (fictional tribe) 55–6, 58, 64–5 Turnbull, John, Narrative 111 Tuturani (Malcomson) 148 Tuwhare, Hone 175 Twain, Mark 20, 27, 72, 140–1, 221n5; histouricist readings of 158, 159, 160, 166; Letters from Hawai‘i 3; Roughing It 36, 160 Two Worlds (Salmond) 5 Two Years Before the Mast (Dana) 35, 106–7, 108–9 Typee (Melville) 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 76, 91–2, 126, 128–9; cannibalism in 19, 75, 77–8, 89–96; on civilization and government 162; fear in 73, 77; friendship narratives in 98, 106, 110–11, 112, 114 uku (Hawaiian, revenge/payment) 51 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 36 United States Exploring Expedition see “Great Expedition”; “Great Expedition, The”; Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition; Wilkes, Charles Urale, Sima 220n13, 223n3 Urry, John 124, 152–3 utu (Maori, revenge/payment) 51

vahine (Tahitian women) 136, 139, 145 values: cultural 13, 196–7; see also friendship; hospitality Vancouver, George 100, 104 venereal disease 108–9, 206n14 violence: in antitourist literature 189; and friendship 103; the Malolo massacre 81; and perceptions of cannibalism 96; and treachery 64–5 Virgin Land (Smith, H. N.) 41 Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac (Reynolds) 52 Voyages and Beaches (Calder, Lamb and Orr) 5 Waimea Summer (Holt) 191 Walden (Thoreau) 72 Wallace, Lee 214n2; Sexual Encounters 99 war see military operations Ward, R. Gerard 51 Wendt, Albert 16, 40, 174–5, 201n1; and antitourism 176, 179, 181, 182, 183–6; Leaves of the Banyan Tree 184, 191; “‘Me Adam’” 40; Pouliuli 174; Sons for the Return Home 173; “Three Faces of Samoa” 136; Whetu Moana (Wendt, Whaitiri and Sullivan) 184, 192 Wesley-Smith, Terrance 202n3 West, U.S. settlement of, compared with Oceanic settlement 30–1 Western frontier: compared with Oceanic frontier 30–1; Islanders comparable to Native Americans 13, 16–17, 30, 61, 67, 105 Westlake, Wayne Kaumualii 7; “A Savage Can’t Live in America” (poem) 34 “Westward Course of Empire Takes its Way” (painting) (Luetze) 29 Whaitiri, Reina 179; Whetu Moana (Wendt, Whaitiri and Sullivan) 184, 192 whalemen/whalers 31 Where We Once Belonged (Figiel) 186–90 Whetu Moana (Wendt, Whaitiri and Sullivan) 184, 192 Whipple, A. B. C., Yankee Whalers in the South Seas 31, 206n17 white: readings of indigenous histories and texts 157, 170–1, 173–4; supremacy 4, 118; see also black–white relations

Index White Shadows in the South Seas (O’Brien) 32, 133, 135, 140–1 Whitman, Walt 26, 46, 216n; “The Errand Bearers” 25 “Why I Live in Tahiti” (Hall) 136 Wilkes, Charles 18–19, 49, 72–3, 80; Autobiography, (Wilkes) 77; see also “Great Expedition”; Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition “Wilkes letter” (Paulding) 59–60, 61, 64, 65 Williams, Thomas 85 Williams, William Appleman 21 Williams, William Carlos 54; In the American Grain 54 Wilson, Rob 28, 36, 39, 163, 202n4, 232n2; Inside Out (Hereniko and Wilson) 5; Reimagining the American Pacific 6, 39

271

Wind Gourd of La‘amaomao (Nakuina) 173–4 Winduo, Steven 10, 176–7 women: exoticizing of 220n13; in lotuseater literature 139–43; Samoan, in antitourist literature 187–90; Tahitian vahine 136, 139, 145 Woodworth, Samuel, The Cannibals 63, 209–10n12 “Word to the Tourist Who Wears Gauganic Glasses, A” (Figiel) 176 “WOW! In Many Parts . . .” (Figiel) 183 Wright, Natalia 42–3 writers see indigenous texts; names of writers, e.g. Melville Yankee Whalers in the South Seas (Whipple) 31 Žižek, Slavoj 64, 79, 93

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