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  • Faith, Race and Nationalism
  • Dana Y. Takagi (bio)

History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism.

Frantz Fanon (1963) The Wretched of the Earth

When, for example, Aboriginal peoples strive for recognition, they are constrained to present their demands in the normative vocabulary available to them. That is, they seek recognition as 'peoples' and 'nations,' with 'sovereignty' or a 'right to 'self-determination,' even though these terms may distort or misdescribe the claim they would wish to make if it were expressed in their own languages.

James Tully (1995) Strange Multiplicity

Nationalism invokes tradition in order in order to assert the antagonism between irreconcilable social and cultural values.

Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (1997), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

Recently, I learned that a small piece of Captain Cook's ship, the Endeavor, was carried into outer space on a NASA space shuttle also bearing the name, Endeavor. NASA, in capitalizing on the legacy of Cook's spirit of exploration and scientific discovery, hoped to revitalize its space program after its premier shuttle, Challenger, exploded in 1987 shortly after take-off.2 NASA's invocation of Cook's eighteenth-century voyages across the Pacific symbolizes the potency of linking "science" with "exploration" in the late twentieth century.3 In this essay, I unhook this [End Page 271] coupling and call attention to the ways in which contemporary imagery about Cook's voyaging might also ask us to consider the very antithesis of Cook's legacy of "scientific exploration"—faith. Afterall, as is frequently noted, the rationality of the Enlightenment developed in antithesis to the authority of religious doctrine in all matters of self and public. Often, the topic of "scientific exploration" calls up the imagery of "discovery" (and its affective bravery) and as well of manifest destiny at the Pacific edges of the frontier of the New World. Indeed, in contemporary popular terms, this aspect of Cook's legacy thrives three hundred years after his last voyage. The imprints of Cook's voyages are evident in mass culture—from the long-running success of the TV series, Star Trek, to the recent New York Times Bestseller by Tony Horowitz, Blue Latitudes. Alternately, travel and voyaging in the Pacific by Westerners, particularly for the purpose of "scientific investigation," is in contemporary scholarship on the Pacific thought to be a historical beginning for the progressive chain of events resulting in the colonization and domination of the Pacific by the Britain, France, and the United States. While this latter reading of "science" and "exploration" is compelling on historical grounds, my point in this essay is to complement and enhance such a reading by asking what happens when we counterpose the "rationality" and "science" associated with eighteenth- or twentieth-century explorations with its opposite—faith, which is viewed as both "unrational" and "unscientific."

In my view, tucking a small piece of Cook's ship into a multi-billion dollar space shuttle was surprising. I have always thought of NASA as the quintessential institution of "science" and technological know-how in American society. The very idea of slipping a small token from a 200-year-old ship in a space in the space shuttle is a lot like carrying a rabbit's foot or some equivalent talisman. Were the engineers at NASA being superstitious or just wishing to layer icing called "luck" on science? And, since the act was in itself not a public act—that is, it was not known or publicized as part of NASA's recuperation after the Challenger disaster—the idea that this was for the show of it cannot be seriously entertained. So, I've had to rethink the polarity between rocket science on the one hand and faith on the other. Perhaps the difference between the purveyors of each is not so different. Lately, the prospect of "intelligent design" [End Page 272] hopefully strikes a compromise between evolutionary thought and god-based faith.

Is there a similar compromise to be struck about Cook, NASA, and Hawaii? How lucky is it that a piece of Cook's Endeavor is launched into space some...

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