Facing the Pacific

Introduction

1 Introduction Thus the old America passes away; behold a new America appears, and her face is toward the Pacific. —Hubert Howe Bancroft, The New Pacific I n the late 1990s, an advertisement for Fortunoff jewelers ran in upscale publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine: it depicted a windswept beach and the blue waters of the Pacific; a miniature rowboat and a string of black pearls rested on the sand. An eighteenth-century map of the Society Islands was featured in an upper corner of the page, where “Otaheite” could just be made out—a detail that immediately worked to blur one’s sense of present realities with past Pacific histories. At the bottom of the ad, two sentences similarly collapsed present and past, myth and history:“Our representative had to choose between a young Tahitian Princess and the cultured South Sea pearls. Fortunately, he was trained that duty comes first, giving you a much more agonizing choice: cash or charge.” On one level, the Fortunoff advertisement testifies to the persistent psychic hold that images of the South Pacific have on US audiences, a hold that still engenders popular fantasy from the film Castaway (1999) to the runaway TV hit Lost (2005), as well as reality programming such as Survivor 4: Pearl Islands (2003, shot on Nukuhiva) and Survivor 5: Vanuatu (2004). But the Fortunoff ad also suggests the more insidious and embedded stereotypes behind the Pacific island myth: the well-trained representative is obviously tempted, but too rational and civilized to accept the “savage” gift of the princess; he chooses money over sex, business over pleasure, sensible western enterprise over nonwestern self-indulgence. Behind the ad’s innocuous appearance lies the myth of a primitive people frozen in time, occupying a site still ripe for commercial exploitation and sexual fantasy. Simply put, the advertisement attests to the linked pleasures that South Pacific islands have, over centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west—connoting solitude, release from cares,and,more recently,renewal from urbanized modern life—while 2 Introduction promising economic rewards for those industrious enough to resist falling too deeply into reveries of Polynesian indulgence. The persistence of this static image of Polynesia is remarkable, especially when one considers that it was already a long-standing cliché seventy-five years earlier, when Frederick O’Brien released his travel account White Shadows in the South Seas and helped to ignite a US obsession for all things Polynesian.As early as 1921—only a little over a year after O’Brien’s debut—Publisher’s Weekly was complaining that “the offices of the editors . . . are threatened with an early avalanche of South Sea material which menaces the pre-eminence of copra as the principal article of export from the Port of Papeete.”1 This book outlines the contours of this Polynesian vogue, looking at the ways the South Pacific was envisioned by an interrelated group of travelers seeking inspiration, regeneration, or simply a means to escape on distant Pacific islands. These visitors to the Pacific together enacted a kind of collective cathexis on a dispersed geographical and cultural area and at the same time carried along a substantial proportion of the US population in their wake. Yet at the very moment that so many Americans were dreaming of isolated, unspoiled islands, Pacific nations were undergoing political and cultural upheavals : the culmination of well over 150 years of significant western political and commercial intervention in the region. The period during which these travels took place closely followed on the heels of the US appropriation of substantial portions of the Pacific—including the Philippines, the eastern islands of Samoa, Guam, and Hawai‘i—as the US strove to secure its regional, and ultimately global, economic and political influence. Hence the idyllic fantasies that these visitors carried with them into Polynesia came up against some unexpectedly harsh realities: the legacies of colonialism, the inequities of economic imperialism, and the instability of any preconceived notion of American exceptionalism itself. A Note on Terms I should start by underlining some of the issues and contingencies relating to the use of terms in this book—beginning with the title. As the epigraph above suggests , the phrase “facing the Pacific” partly mimics the westward-gazing imperialism of expansionist scholars such as Bancroft, who, shortly after the US annexations , envisioned the Pacific as the...