Abstract

The Marshall Islanders playfully dramatize their ambivalent history with America through a trickster narrative. By analogy the Americans, with their destructive-creative capacities, draw upon the cosmological power of the Marshallese trickster to become the most powerful and dangerous world chiefs. I present this tricky identification with America through narrative episodes that provide a seamless thread from primordial beginnings to an emergent episode about the trickster’s travels to America. I examine how a “prehistory of globalization” informs current events even as it dismantles the categories of the local and the global. Drawing upon two modernist tricksters, I explore how imagined transnational relations are formed out of the reification of being and an ideational fantasy which position the local at the center of the global. If, as some argue, the nation-state is the product of modernity, then globalization, for the Marshallese, is the pre-historical production of the present.

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