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  • Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination
  • Rob Wilson
Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination. By Jeffrey Geiger. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 2007.

Jeffrey Geiger's Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination faces a range of postcolonial risks as theorized by Rod Edmond in Representing the South Pacific: Colonialist Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (1997), who had warned (while tracking earlier British white mythologies in this region) that "to concentrate on the conventions through which a culture [like indigenous Polynesia] was textualized [by the British] while ignoring the actuality of what was represented is to risk a second-order repetition of the images, typologies, and projections under scrutiny." (20) Concentrating on the slipperiness of race, as it turns from trope into type, and history as it hardens from observation and document into myth, Geiger is wary of these risks, projections, and geo-psychic limitations in mapping the U.S. white-settler's self-consolidating discursive archive, while fronting or "facing" (putting a racial face upon, as he shrewdly puns) the Pacific as a westward-facing region in the wake of literary-historical agents like David Porter, Herman Melville, Hubert Howe Bancroft et al. "He [Melville] saw a garden. We saw a wilderness," is how Jack London staged this all-too-pastoral downfall from Eden, as his yacht took anchor in the modern Marquesas and lamented generations of Euro-American disfigurement of which his writing was both symptom and critique.

If this U.S. vision of the American Pacific secured through commerce, missionary work, cultural power, and war, did not solidify into full global hegemony until after World War II, Geiger's focus upon what he calls the "long 1920s" of the "Polynesian vogue" does track a set of ideological and discursive slippages that reveal an abiding American ambivalence towards becoming an imperial power in a region viewed (as by London) both as site of regeneration and critique as well as an ethnoscape of ruination, displacement, and loss. "In the various writings of missionaries, beachcombers, and other resident aliens in Polynesia," (69) Geiger writes from within this white-colonial heart of darkness, "one can perceive the persistent echo of separation from and critical reflection on western cultures, often conjoined with idealistic desires to cross cultural lines and escape, efface, or renew western selfhood." (69)

Beyond so many situated readings of colonial mythic and anticolonial strands in our quasi-expansionist discourse, what Samoan novelist Albert Wendt has long lamented as papalagi [white] fantasies and hang-ups in such texts of "mythical reverie," the postcolonial theorist might well ask, what does this book add as a critical reading of the "US imperial imagination"? Or, more specifically, what does it add to our thick-descriptive understanding of what Paul Lyons has called "American Pacificism" in this region, that is, a discursive archive circulating and consolidating American power and hegemony across the twentieth century in the Pacific? Does what Geiger calls "the myth of [the South Pacific or Polynesia as] a primitive people frozen in time" (1) tell us much new about the region or the "imperial power networks in which their [modern American] works and lives were embedded"? (9)

Exposing the Pacific as what Bancroft in 1900 called "the arena of international power [into which the United States entered] as a colonizing force," (51) Geiger's well-researched study of U.S. Polynesian themed texts succeeds in outlining and critiquing specific racial and geopolitical entanglements, ambivalences, slippages, and blockages in a well articulated set of literary, filmic, and ethno-cultural documentary works. These texts from the "long 1920s" of the modernizing region interlock, build upon, and challenge one another in a kind of racial, transnational, and ethnographic colloquy. Working from the assumption of textual instability and contextual transaction, Geiger exposes a set of [End Page 181] self-consolidating formations by which cultural and racial otherness has been enlisted to serve fantasy and power in the American Pacific of the twenties and thirties, read as world heir to the "structures of European colonial power it both contested and inherited." (16)

Bracketing Hawai'i as a crucial component in the making of...

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