Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production 9780822396116

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© 1995 by Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Except for essays by William A. Callahan and Steve Olive, "Chemical Weapons Discourse in the 'South Pacific,''' Chris Bongie, "The Last Frontier: Memories of the Postcolonial Future in Keri Hulme's the bone people," Katharyne Mitchell, "The Hong Kong Immigrant and the Urban Landscape: Shaping the Transnational Cosmopolitan in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital," Epeli Hau'ofa, "Our Sea of Islands," and Haunani-Kay Trask, "Hawai'i," the text of this book was originally published as volume 21, number 1 and volume 22, number 1 of boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. "Memory" and "Turning It Over" by Lawson Fusao Inada, "From the Politics of Identity to an Alternative Cultural Politics: On Taiwan Primordial Inhabitants' A-systemic Movement" by Chiu Yen liang (Fred), "Hawai'i" by Haunani-Kay Trask, and "Da Mainland to Me" by Joseph P. Balaz are reprinted with permission of the authors and publishers. library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Asia/Pacific as space of cultural production / coedited by Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik. p. cm. "A Boundary 2 book." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8223-1643-9 (pbk.) ISBN 0-8223-1629-3 1. Asia-Civilization. 2. Pacific Area-Civilization. 3. Multiculturalism-Asia. 4. Multiculturalism-Pacific Area. 5. Asia-literatures-History and criticism. 6. Pacific Area-literatures-History and criticism. 7. Asia-Foreign public opinion. 8. Pacific Area-Foreign public opinion. I. Wilson, Rob, 1947II. Dirlik, Arif. DS12.A69 1995 950-dc20 95-4775 CIP

[ontents

Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik / Introduction: Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production / 1

Mappings M. Consuelo Leon W. / Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific / 17 Christopher L. Connery / Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years / 30 William A. Callahan and Steve Olive / Chemical Weapons Discourse in the "South Pacific" / 57 Lawson Fusao Inada / Shrinking the Pacific / 80 Lawson Fusao Inada / Memory / 82 Lawson Fusao Inada / Turning It Over / 84 Epeli Hau'ofa / Our Sea of Islands / 86

Movements John Fielder / Sacred Sites and the City: Urban Aboriginality, Ambivalence, and Modernity / 101 Chiu Yen Liang (Fred) / From the Politics of Identity to an Alternative Cultural Politics: On Taiwan Primordial Inhabitants' A-systemic Movement / 120

Pasts and Futures Jeffrey Tobin / Cultural Construction and Native Nationalism: Report from the Hawaiian Front / 147 Haunani-Kay Trask / Hawai'i / 170 Joseph P. Balaz / Da Mainland to Me / 175 Subramani / Childhood as a Fiction / 177 Albert Wendt / Three Poems for Kenzaburo Oe / 204 Miriam Fuchs / Reading toward the Indigenous Pacific: Patricia Grace's Potiki, ~ Case Study / 206 Chris Bongie / The Last Frontier: Memories of the Postcolonial Future in Keri Hulme's the bone people / 226 Terese Svoboda / The 747 Poem / 250 Terese Svoboda / The Little Grass Shack / 251

Flows Tsushima Yuko / The Possibility of Imagination in These Islands / Geraldine Harcourt, trans. / Introduction by Masao Miyoshi / 255 Leo Ching / Imaginings in the Empires of the Sun: Japanese Mass Culture in Asia / 262 Katharyne Mitchell / The Hong Kong Immigrant and the Urban Landscape: Shaping the Transnational Cosmopolitan in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital / 284 Thomas Carmichael / Postmodernism and American Cultural Difference: Dispatches, Mystery Train, and The Art of Japanese Management / 311 Peter Schwenger and John Whittier Treat / America's Hiroshima, Hiroshima's America / 324 Theophil Saret Reuney, trans. / The Pulling of Olap's Canoe / 345 Contributors / 351 Index / 355

Introdu[tion: Rsia~Pal:ifi[ as Spa[e of [ultural Produ[tion

Rob illilson and Rrif Dirlik You know, if we had more poeple like you around, the Pacific would develop so rapidly you wouldn't see it. -Epeli Hau'ofa, "The Glorious Pacific Way"

Isn't there in the East, notably in Oceania, a kind of rhizomatic model that contrasts in every respect with the Western model of the tree? -Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "Rhizome"

While some historians have compared "the Asia-Pacific region" to the hegemonic construction of a Pascalian sublime whose "circumference is everywhere and center nowhere," others no less enchanted by the deterritorializing power of oceanic vastness have projected the hypothesis as a contemporary displacement of Voltaire's God: If such a region did not exist, it would have to be invented by policy planners and social scientists along the East-West axis to figure forth an integrated source of boundless markets, wondrous raw materials, and ever-expanding investments. However inchoate this cognitive mapping of political location and cultural identity, the Asia-Pacific region comprises, at this point of hyper-capitalist

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Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production

fluidity, a terra incognita of staggering complexity, discrepant hybridity, and nomadic flux that fascinates and, more strategically, undoes arboreal formations of the post-Cold War geopolitical imaginary: whose "Asia-Pacific" are we talking about, whose interests are being served, and when and how did this discourse of knowledge and power historically emerge? The conjunctions of local culture and global economy spreading across this region both as subcontracted networking and as micropolitical identity have given the "space of cultural production" new palpability as location of postmodern resistances. As we enter a space-time reconfiguration that Newsweek consecrated in February of 1988 and that PBS tele-documented in 1992 as "the Pacific Century," and as we concede with former Ambassador to Japan, Michael Mansfield, that since the late 1970s, U.S. trade across the Pacific has surpassed that with Europe and superintends the teleology of any American future,l it has been convincingly argued that the invention, circulation, and maintenance of this geographically vast and culturally heteroglossic region-what can be traced as "the Asia-Pacific idea"-was dominantly a Euro-American formation. 2 From the era of Captain Cook and Melville, if not earlier through Magellan and Rousseau, Western centers of global power and the dynamics of the world market from Canton to London to Madrid have shaped and integrated the peripheries and multiple cultures and polities of the region to serve Euro-American interests in the name of God, imperial glory, catapulting profit, and national (ltransnational) management. Yet, this global hegemony and plot of economic integration, we want to substantiate, has been breaking down from multiple directions even 1. See Michael Mansfield, "Prospects for a Pacific Community," in Building a Pacific Community: The Addresses and Papers ofthe Pacific Community Lecture Series, Paul F. Hooper, ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press/East-West Center, 1982), 86. This "Pacific CenturY" construction of rising co-prosperity across the region and into the next centurY is challenged as an ideological structure of late-capitalist teleology in R. A. Palat, "The Making and Unmaking of Pacific-Asia," in Pacific-Asia and the Future of the WorldSystem, R. A. Palat, ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993),3-20. 2. "Entering the Pacific from the west or the east, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Russians, and the English, as well as their colonists in the Americas, all contributed in tum to the creation of a regional structure, in which Asian and Pacific societies provided the building blocks and the globalized interests of Euro-American powers furnished the prinCiples of organization" (see the analysis of this contradictorY structure in Arif Dirlik, "The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure," Journal of World History 3 [1992]: 66).

Wilson and Dirlik / Introduction

3

as the transnational rhetoric of Ronald Reagan would prophesy, in the latecapitalist market euphoria of 1984, that "the Pacific is where the future of the world lies."3 No longer can such a teleology of Euro-American progress/modernity drone on, at least not with the same theoretical arrogance, anthropological innocence, or economic presumption. The rise of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore as resurgent powers on the Pacific Rim, as well as the breakdown of the Cold War master narrative of bipolar superpowers that once legitimated the American military presence across the Pacific, has resulted in an ongoing de-centering of power beyond the hegemonic control and cartographic sublimations of the U.S. State Department and the military sway of the U.S. Pacific Command (CINCPAC). Given the post-communist reconfigurations of the European Economic Community (EEC), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the instability of any geopolitical imaginary at this time, it remains incumbent upon postmodern knowledge-workers to trace the dynamics of the contemporary Asia/Pacific region as the force, flux, and possibility of a transcultural future. The local Pacific as space of cultural production is more than a vacant cipher or exprimitive dumping ground to be Simulated, militarized, and customized into transnational cyberspace. Transnational corporations are already tracing these global-local interfaces, to be sure. When Toyota Motor Corporation president, Tatsuro Toyoda, recently theorized the downturn of automobile sales in the Japanese domestic market, he looked forward to expanding overseas markets, especially throughout the expanding co-prosperity reaches of the AsiaPacific. Toyoda envisaged a future in which production facilities would be located "at the center of large overseas markets, such as North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Oceania," with new automobiles of local customization (such as recreational vehicles and compact trucks) being ex3. President Reagan's vision of a transnationally integrated Asia-Pacific region in which "the vast Pacific has become smaller, but the future of those who live around it is larger than ever before" is quoted in Simon Winchester, Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991),24. The rapacity of global capitalism to incorporate and dis-authenticate Pacific cultures and identities, via soft-sell dynamics of transnational tourism, is tracked in Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), see especially "Cannibalism Today," 17-73.

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Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production

ported to developing markets in neighboring countries as well as back across Oceania to Japan.4 In other words, the disparate cultures and nonsynchronous polities of Oceania, the ASEAN countries, and the Pacific Rim continent of North America would comprise the bulk of this transnational New World Order, if not service this so-called border/ess region, in which offshore transnational corporations flexibly scan the Asia-Pacific horizon for the lowest wages (as does Nike footwear from its design headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon) from South Korea to Taiwan, from China to Indonesia and Thailand. Still, the Pacific Rim powers' very promotion and circulation of such an Asia-Pacific community as an integrated economic region from China to Alaska and from Chile to New Zealand has meant that the so-called Pacific Basin countries contained in the region are habitually excluded from mapping and contesting these megatrend visions of "economic cooperation" and "cultural exchange" that bear down upon their heteroglossic well-being and threaten their local survival as distinct cultures and alternative histories. Ratu Kamisese K. T. Mara, confronting sublimated plans for "Building a Pacific Community" on some idealized basis of economic cooperation and cultural exchange that had been going on in economic think tanks since the mid-1960s, uncannily disrupted the Pacific Rim pipe dreams emanating from Tokyo and Washington, if not Canberra and Sydney, by suggesting, in 1980, that there is a Pacific community already, and that it has already been there-or should I say "here"?-for at least two and a half thousand years. Not only was it a community, but it was an organized and specialized community. There were specialists (I hesitate to brand them as experts) in religion, housebuilding, agriculture, navigation, the arts, etc.s As the prime minister of Fiji recognizes with local awe and global terror, there soon becomes here given the instantaneous telecommunication of place into space, capital flight, tourist simulations of Pacific ex-primitive au4. Takeshi Sato, "Toyota Looking to Overseas Markets," The Hawaii Hochi 81 (30 Oct. 1992): 1. Also see the Far Eastern Economic Review, "Nike Roars: All American, Made in Asia," 5 Nov. 1992, on the "economic Darwinism" adopted by Nike across Asia; and Walden Bello, People and Power in the Pacific: The Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order (London: Pluto Press, 1992),37-49, on local resistance to hegemonic mappings. 5. Ratu Kamisese K. T. Mara, "Building a Pacific Community," in Building a Pacific Community, 41.

Wilson and Dirlik / Introduction 5

thenticity at hyperspaces such as the Polynesian Cultural Center on Oahu, and the consequent dislocations of local knowledge and ethnic community in this New World Disorder. As the Fijian prime minister warns, given these contexts of internal struggle and the global marketing of place and culture, the promise is always there for a new, soft, more supple form of Orientalist knowledge and transnational control rephrased as a postmodern co-prosperity sphere. Although the Cold War has surely ended and American hegemony over the Pacific lake is threatened on all sides, the Pacific Islanders, whose home has been the site of the destructive U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands and the French struggle for technological grandeur in Polynesia, now fear they will become hosts for the dismantling of these same Cold War nuclear weapons. The potential for catastrophic accident and environmental contamination across Oceania remains great and demands coalitional resistance on diverse fronts. At state-funded sites of Western knowledge/power such as the EastWest Center in Honolulu, Pacific Community Seminars at Canberra, and the Pacific Rim Studies institutes that have sprung up across the state of California in the boom phase of the 1980s, the move toward mapping "megatrends in the Asia-Pacific" as a locus of economic surge and trans-Pacific promise often entails ignoring the cultural micropolitics of the region as a source of dynamic opposition and local difference worthy of international recognition. It becomes possible for John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene to prophesy "The Rise of the Pacific Rim" in Megatrends 200 as the pivotal site for the furious globalization of informations, cultures, and technologies on the model of a transnational, Japan-oriented America ("The Pacific Rim is emerging like a dynamic young America but on a much grander scale," to recall Naisbitt's hegemonizing trope of transnational Americanization) without once factoring in even one Pacific Basin country or island culture as a political-economic player or, for that matter, without even mentioning the state of Hawaii as a space caught between the Pacific Rim geo-imaginary hallucinations of Los Angeles and Tokyo.6 The futurology of Pacific Rim Discourse that would take semiotic and 6. John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s (New York: Avon, 1990), 184-227. In the Adamically transnationalized gaze of President Clinton, the Asia-Pacific region still beckons as American challenge and transnational promise: "Our [American] trade relations with the Pacific Rim are critically important to the United States, our Asian partners, and the global economy" (quoted in Don Oberdorfer, Clinton and Asia: Issues for the New Administration [New York: The Asia Society, 1993],3).

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Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production

conceptual possession of the entire region depends upon repressing those Pacific Basin others who have not yet subscribed to the- "world economy" as a post-zero-sum game. Ideology and opposition at the level of everyday culture still matter. In Pacific Rim visions of Asia-Pacific integration, as in the articulation of Confucian spirituality to microchip technologies, the motions of Asian and Pacific peoples that have produced networks endowing the region with social reality and cultural texture are downplayed in favor of solidifying capital and commodity flows and military-political relationships that would restructure the Asia-Pacific into a coherent region of economic exchange. A cyborg capable of Buddha-nature can better serve as icon of this economistic "Pacific Rising," as the oceanic sublime of Moby-Dick implodes into the dematerialized matrix of cyberspace spanning from Los Angeles to Tokyo to Mars. Whatever the heteroglossic reach and hypertext-thick sway of postmodern theorizing, these cultures and politics of difference within the Asia/ Pacific region are all but equally ignored as sources of innovation and production. Uncanny knowledges of culture, politics, and economics are kept segregated and isolated across the Asia/Pacific region even as a complex new micropolitics of location and memory begins to flourish and interact. "Let resistance write its own geography," Chris Connery trenchantly warns in his analysis of Pacific Rim Discourse as a transnational American construct emanating from the boom-cycle geopolitics of the 1980s as well as from a residual Cold War imaginary. The Trukese poet-scholar Theophil Saret Reuney offers one such counter-mapping of the Pacific sublime with his culture's key navigational poem, "The Pulling of Olap's Canoe," the first time such an indigenous mapping of Truk has been translated and explained in hegemonic English. The global situation is now one in which we must begin to historicize, question, and undo those conceptual categories, maps, imaginary geographies, master narratives, self-evident discourses, and configurations of Western knowledge/power that threaten even the most counter-hegemonic and oppositional projects of national identity and cultural location in Taiwan, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Truk, and South Korea. To stake our discursive claim: The all-but-reified "Asia-Pacific" formulated by market planners and military strategists is inadequate to describe or explain the fluid and multiple "Asia/Pacific" of social migration and transcultural innovation. The slash would signify linkage yet difference. This counter-hegemonic "space of cultural production" shall be exemplified and

Wilson and Dirlik I Introduction

7

affirmed throughout this Asia/Pacific collection within geopolitical contexts of transnational capital and localizations that form our shared horizon .

.... The title of this collection of works in theory and cultural production remains ambiguous, at the outset, and would point to two perspectives around which it is organized: First, these essays and cultural works begin to draw forth and illuminate the hegemonic Euro-American production of "the Asia-Pacific." By this we mean not just the construction of the Pacific as libidinous fantasy ("Blue Hawaii" as site of erotic excess and tourist rejuvenation for advance-industrialized California, or "Japan" as locus of the Zen zaibatsu) but the invention and mapping of the Asia/Pacific as a geographic, economic, political, and military entity threatened by outside domination and semiotic control. The fantasy invention in other modes of Western knowledge/power are not unrelated to earlier mappings and journeys across "the Happy Isles of Oceania," as shall be seen. Tropologies of the Pacific have not only dynamized Euro-American activity since the time of Cook and Melville, as M. Consuelo Leon W. traces, but have also served to disguise, distance, and distort the concrete realities of the region, still, as a non-Western black hole capable of being ignored, mall-ified, or used as a nuclear dumping site as at Johnston Atoll (Hawaiians still call it Kalama Island) even now. The reduction of the historical Pacific to a fantasmatic "South Pacific" backdrop for military purposes has proved helpful to the pacific instrumentalization of the Pacific by the United States, France, Canada, and other Western powers as military testing sites. Pacific anthropology, as Jeff Tobin argues, can uncritically play a part in ratifying the knowledges of the liberal state and in destabilizing the claims of interior Pacific cultures to articulate themselves as political agents forging a sovereign state and alternative cultural/national identity in Hawaii, as in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Second, this gathering of essays should also help to circulate, within theories of transcultural flux, transnational ethnicity and postmodern borderthinking, emerging counter-hegemonic practices and flows that would remain staunchly "local" in orientation and resistant in political design. Complexly articulated to the dynamics of modernity, as John Fielder shows in his trenchant study of urban Aboriginality in Australia, culture can serve as one of the primary means of identification through which diverse inhabitants (largely Asian and Pacific in makeup) of this multiplex region have sought

8 Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production

to resist ingestion into a global fantasy by an assertion of historical experiences and local enclaves of resistance, survival, and colonial critique. To describe myriad practices of the Asia/Pacific as "local," within contexts of transnational capital that would bypass, warp, or integrate them, is not to trivialize or parochialize them but to underscore their historicity and their strategic necessity at this time. Heteroglossic spatiality, as in Hawaii, can threaten the hegemonic modernity of the nation-state. It is by means of such concrete cultural practices and intermediate perceptions of what "the Pacific" has been, is, or still could be that a landscape and language of postcolonial survival can be measured against the homogenization of that same region into an economic zone worthy of transnational manipulation. This semiotic and economic redemption takes place in "centers," as the urban geographers Edward Soja and David Harvey contend, or as transnational spectacles such as Neuromancer furiously enact, located in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and postnational regions of financial cyberspace that remain, like any transnational sublime, "located everywhere and regulated nowhere" (as was said of the deregulated hyper-capital circulating at the now defunct Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI). If this global/local interface comprises a complex and hybrid twoway dialectic, the global deforms and molests the local in ways that need to be accounted for and challenged west of Los Angeles and east of Tokyo in unmapped, ignored, forgotten, or hyper-toured pockets of transnational capital. The "space of cultural production" we posit, therefore, refers at once to regional enclaves and to local spaces as contradictory locations inserted, and insurgent, within the world-system as cultural formations of the Asia/ Pacific. The multicultural and indigenous literatures of Bamboo Ridge that have emerged since 1975 in Hawaii, for example, can be seen, in theory and as practice, to propose a regionally and ethnically inflected ground, however illusory, for claims of cultural resistance. These Pacific dynamics need to be linked not only to gaining canonical space in the Heath Anthology of American Uterature, as it were, but also to articulating dynamics of decolonization; linguistic and cultural survival, as in the urgent struggle for Hawaiian nationalism ("Ea") conducted via diet, hula, poems, songs, chants, lawsuits, outraged polemics, ecology, and an antinuclear politics and place-bound identity rooted relentlessly in body, place, and the spiritual polity of culture? Given the late capitalist hegemony over space-time 7. See Rob Wilson, "Blue Hawaii: Bamboo Ridge as 'Critical Regionalism,' " in Arif Dirlik, ed., What Is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boulder, Colo.:

Wilson and Dirlik / Introduction

9

by globally flexible post-Fordist modes and the often merciless re-creation and destruction of landscape, community, and culture by simulacrous technologies, the aesthetics of place and reassert ion of local culture are very much back on the postmodern agenda.B "Local" links to the Asia/Pacific decolonization literatures of Albert Wendt, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Subramani, Tsushima Yuko, Joseph Balaz, Haunani-Kay Trask, Kenzaburo Oe, and Michael Ondaatje have worked to help imagine community and to coalesce regional resistance. These projects still need to be circulated within the circles of postmodern theory that boundary 2 represents and helps, actively through special issues such as this, to link up, interact with, and to inform. While certain tropes and master narratives of Asia-Pacific discourse may be viewed as strictly Euro-American inventions, it is also clear that rapid shifts in the reconfiguration of the late-capitalist world-system have qualified the power of the original (or emergent) forces of difference within the region. Power relations of the Pacific are no longer just products of Euro-American/ Asian confrontation, to be sure, but involve social relations of an intra-Asia/Pacific nature. Japan's relationship to the North Pacific is the most immediate instance and the most polemicized in Hawaii, for example, with the "takeover of Waikiki" by Japanese and other transnational interests. Western tropicality dissolves in the waters and rooted peoples of Oceania. Some fifty years after Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima deformed the indigenous Pacific into a technoscape on the nuclear grid of the Cold War binary-machine and the transnational security-state, we still need to question whether these relationships are simply a further expression of the original "invention" of Asia-Pacific by Tokyo/Washington, D.C. (perpetuated through the spectacular image media of the capitalist world-system as in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner or Black Rain), or whether they are expressive, against all odds, of emerging departures in which local conWestview, 1993); Stephen H. Sumida, "Sense of Place, History, and the Concept of the 'Local' in Hawaii's Asian/Pacific Literatures," in Reading the Uteratures of Asian America, Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 215-37; Haunani-Kay Trask, "Kupa'a 'Aina: Native Nationalism in Hawai