American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (review)

R E V I E W PAUL LYONS American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Cloth $120. 271 pp. L et’s start with the subtitle. Paul Lyons’s argument about Oceania in the U.S. imagination is that it is, in essence, a “mirror,” an artificially framed, two-dimensional, representational space that has for the last two centuries drawn Americans into a “meditation on self.” What Oceania in the U.S. imagination should be, Lyons argues, is a “window into cultural exchange, and the bound-together entanglements of colonial relation” (208)— a framed space in which one sees neither the Self nor the Other but Self/Other, a history-haunted image of entities that are irreducibly different but caught up in a “bewildering intertanglement,” to borrow a phrase from Israel Potter (561). Another way of putting that is to say that Oceania in the U.S. imagination is “less a place than a topos,” that it tends to be not “lived in . . . as a roomy place full of possibility” but “grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified.” I take that language from a book that looms large behind Lyons’s: Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). Although Lyons’s topic and title distinguish the Pacific from the Orient and the U.S. from the Occident, he nevertheless stays quite close to the argument most often associated with Said’s groundbreaking work: that “in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence” (208). According to Lyons, when Americans represent Oceania, they tend to do so “without substantial interest in Oceanian history, political structures, or source materials” (5). They are all presence; Oceania is all absence—or, more exactly, all virtual presence, a seductively framed mirror on the wall. Anyone who has read a Hawaiian travel brochure or seen South Pacific knows what Lyons is talking about. One of the merits of Lyons’s book is that it pushes the argument far past such obvious examples. In the strongest sections of the book, Lyons turns the lens on nineteenth-century American representations of Oceania, arguing that the material and imaginative investment in the Pacific between 1815 and 1865 was much higher than most Americanist critics have C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 82 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W realized and that the “touristic” nature of contemporary American discourse on the Pacific has its origins in the era. “Pacificism” is Lyons’s word for that tradition of representation and behavior, a tradition that endlessly repackages images of sexually welcoming island women and cannibalistic island men, thereby “pacifying” any lurking imperial guilt: whatever we did, they either wanted it or deserved it. There are, of course, European Pacificisms that precede U.S. involvement in the region; what’s distinctive about the American form of Pacificism, Lyons argues, is the intensity of the commercial ambition and of the desire to be seen as innocent. When gazing into the mirror of American Pacificism, Americans see not a history of bewildering and morally dubious intertanglement but a mythic space that is neatly divided into regions of light and darkness, a space in which appetites of all kinds “may be fulfilled unselfconsciously” (46). The central question, for the purposes of this review, is whether Herman Melville should be counted in the ranks of American Pacificists. The answer depends on what one means by “Herman Melville.” Lyons, who teaches at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, has an acute sense of the difference between the understanding of Melville in the American academy and the understanding of Melville in Oceania, where, as he has written elsewhere, “insofar as Melville is discussed at all, it is less as an anti-racist defender of human rights than as an author whose terms of critique of colonialism reinscribe its assumptions ” (“Global Melville,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley [Oxford: Blackwell, 2006], 65). In American Pacificism, Lyons focuses largely on the latter Melville, a Melville who is, from an Oceanian...