Tag: Indo-Pacific

Hawai’i on Ice

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A review of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Duke University Press, 2022.

Cooling the tropicsMany public events in the United States and in Canada begin by paying respects to the traditional custodians of the land, acknowledging that the gathering takes place on their traditional territory, and noting that they called the land home before the arrival of settlers and in many cases still do call it home. Cooling the Tropics does not open with such a Land Acknowledgement, but Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (thereafter: Hi′ilei Hobart) claims Hawai’i as her piko (umbilicus) and pays tribute to the kūpuna (noble elders) and the lāhui (lay people) who “defended the sovereignty of [her] homeland with tender and fierce love.” She describes her identity as “anchored in a childhood in Hawai’i, with a Kānaka Maoli mother who epitomized Hawaiian grace and a second-generation Irish father who expressed his devotion to her by researching and writing our family histories.” She expresses her support for decolonial struggles and Indigenous rights, and participated in protests claiming territorial sovereignty for Hawai’i’s Native population. How can one decolonize Hawai’i? How can Hawaiian sovereignty discourse articulate a claim to land restitution and self-determination that is not a return to a mythic past? What about racial mixing, once regarded with anxiety and now touted as a symbol of Hawai’i’s success as a multicultural US state? What happens to settler colonialism and white privilege when the local economy and the political arena are dominated by populations originating from East Asia and persons of mixed descent? Is economic self-reliance a feasible option considering the imbrication of Hawai’i’s economy into the US mainland’s market? Can the rights of the Indigenous population be better defended in a sovereign Hawai’i? What is the meaning of supporting decolonial futures that include “deoccupation, demilitarization, and the dismantling of the settler state”? Can decolonization be achieved by nonviolent means, or do sovereignty’s activists have to resort to rebellion and armed struggle? What would be the future of a decolonized Hawai’i in a region fraught with military tensions and geopolitical rivalries? What can a decolonial perspective bring to the analysis of Hawai’i’s colonial past and possible futures? And why is academic research on Hawai’i’s history and society so often aligned with the decolonization agenda, to the point that decolonial approaches are almost synonymous with Hawaiian studies in the United States? More to the point: how can a PhD student majoring in food studies and chronicling the introduction of ice water, ice-making machines, ice cream, and shave ice in Hawai’i address issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, Native rights to self-determination, and decolonial futures?

Decolonize Hawai’i

Unbeknownst to most Americans, and to all non-US citizen but a few exceptions, there is a thriving independence movement taking place in the Hawaiian Islands today. It was borne out of an unlawful US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, it survived Hawai’i’s accession to statehood in 1959, and it is currently in opposition to the territorial encroachment by military infrastructure and other state interests over confiscated land and sacred sites. The Hawaiian soveignty movement doesn’t advocate a return to a mythic past. Simply put, Native communities demand respect for their traditional cultures, consideration for their role as stewards of the land, and empowerment to take part in all decisions that affect them. Since 2014, local activists have opposed the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a scientific endeavor with governmental support from Canada, France, Japan, China, and India. Slated to become the most powerful telescope on the planet, the stadium-sized facility threatens to desecrate one of the most sacred sites for Kānaka Maoli. Construction was temporarily halted due to a blockade of the roadway leading to the site, and further protests as well as legal battles prevented construction of the telescope to resume. Hi′ilei Hobart took part in the protests, helping to keep the basecamp of picketers provisioned with food and beverages. Participating in local struggles fed into her dissertation in more than one way. Firstly, it underscored the obvious: ice and snow are native to Hawai’i; they are not an imported commodity brought by Anglo-American settlers along with “civilization”. Those who tell the story of how ice first came to Hawai’i get it wrong: ice and snow have been there since time immemorial. During winter, snow frequently falls on the ice-capped summits of the island chain’s tallest mountains. But even confronted with this evidence, popular discourse continues to construe ice and snow as alien to Hawai’i, and to frame Maunakea―the site of the TMT―as a terra nullius unoccupied by the Native population and thus open for grabs and available for construction in the name of science and progress. Discursive logics have combined to produce Maunakea as “not-for-Hawaiians” (Kānaka Maoli were supposed to steer away from altitude, and the first individuals on record to climb the mountaintops were Westerners), as “not-Hawai’i” (outsiders picture Hawai’i as a tropical paradise of lush valleys and beaches), and as “not-Earth” (NASA used the desolate volcanic site for outerspace simulations of spacewalks on Mars and the moon). Cumulative efforts to frame Maunakea as empty and alien have resulted in disregard for Natives’ rights and belief systems.

The second lesson Hi′ilei Hobart could draw from her roadblock picketing is a better sense of the local cosmogonies that tie humans with nature and the elements in Hawai’i. For Kanaka Maoli, Maunakea’s snow, mist, and rain are not just atmospheric phenomena: they signal the lingering presence of gods (akua) and ancestors’ spirits who have been occupying the place even in the absence of humans. Local tales or mo’olelo kept by way of oral transmission carry foundation myths of the islands and mountains and attest to Maunakea’s central role in Indigenous place and thought, while animating the elements and other life forces with their own spirit and consciousness. Likewise, for the anthropologist, commodities are animated with a life of their own. According to Marx, a wooden table “does not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” Ice and refreshments in the tropics are imbued with values, desires, longings, and social hierarchies. They have a history that intersects with the history of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the militaro-touristic complex in Hawai’i. Discourses about ice encapsulate ideas about race, modernity, gender, and the affective sensorium. They help rationalize Indigenous dispossession and contribute to the legitimization of imperialism. As historian Eric Jennings has demonstrated, the concepts of freshness and refreshment marked colonial relationships in the tropics. The hill stations and colonial spas built by the French and the British in their colonial outposts were predicated on the idea that fragile European bodies could not endure tropical heat and had to periodically regain some of their vigor in high-altitude places where conditions of life in the homeland were reproduced. The same logic explains how ice and frozen refreshments were progressively naturalized in Hawai’i’s foodscape. First to penetrate the Hawaiian market in the nineteenth century, ice cubes were associated with masculinity, alcohol consumption, saloon culture, plantation ownership, and white privilege. By contrast, the more feminine ice water came to be seen as a means to achieve temperance, mitigating the warm climate, and cooling after effort. Ice cream was a symbol of whiteness, sugary sweetness, purity, leasure, and innocent childhood; for young women, who could frequent the ice cream parlor without being chaperoned, the fast-melting delicacy was also synonymous with freedom and romantic encounters. Born on the plantations, shave ice is associated with brown labor, rural life, Asian migrants, mom-and-pop stores, and nostalgia for simpler times.

Infrastructures of the cold

As a third lesson of the author’s fieldwork as an activist came the realization that American society depends on thermal infrastructures, from the cold chain to keep perishable foodstuff to air conditioning and big houses protected from outside temperature. Freezers and refrigerators are essential to modern survival. These infrastructures have become so embedded in everyday life that they fade into the background, and their very invisibility guarantees that structures of dispossession and extraction go unnoticed. This is what the author labels “thermal colonialism”, defined as the modes by which temperature was managed and organized to favor settlers’ interests and reproduce racial hierarchies. Americans have become quite literally “conditioned” to experience coolness or frozen taste in hot weather, to the point that they consider the “right to chill” as constitutionally guaranteed. But desire for freshness and refreshment has a history: it is not biologically determined. We realize the importance of infrastructures of the cold when they fail us: the fragility of the cold chain in Hawai’i reveals itself after a hurricane, when lines of supply are disrupted, or each time the islands brace for an emergency. When things fall apart, networks of care and resilience take precedence over market relations and commercial interests. This is what Hi′ilei Hobart realized in the encampment at Mount Maunakea as she filled coolers with ice and drained their brown water to keep foodstuff fresh and edible. Managing community food resource pooling made her aware of food insecurity and thermal dependence in a state that heavily relies on imported goods and processed food. As her food studies turned to food work, she realized that “all that is frozen melts into water” (to paraphase Marx’s famous quote) and wondered whether Hawai’i had a future beyond the ice age: “what place does refrigeration have within Indigenous futures that move beyond settler capitalism, when coldness has played such an intimate role in these systems of oppression?” Draining water from coolers also drew her attention to melt as a condition of our current times marked by climate change and the images of fast-disappearing glaciers. She also discovered the materiality of freshness and frozenness, which pointed to a different kind of political economy as the one she had envisaged as a graduate student: an economy that is not based on commodity fetishism and labor exploitation, but on user value and short “farm-to-fork” circuits of exchange. Commodity trade, Marx argues, historically begins at the boundaries of separate economic communities based otherwise on a non-commercial form of production. As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Hi′ilei Hobart’s history of how artificial ice came to Hawai’i is heavily dependent on her sources. Scarce at the beginning, with a few advertisements and newspaper clippings (including publications in the local language, ‘ōlelo Hawai’i), they include a wider array of testimonies, photographs, business records, cookbooks, consumer goods, and personal memories as we move closer to the present. She first chronicles the great American ice trade, in which big blocks of ice harvested from lakes in the Northeast or in Alaska circulated the globe from 1840 to 1870, the year the first ice-making machines were introduced. The ice that went to the tropics was a luxury product, used in cocktails, to chill wines, and for service at fine hotels where American planters, Western missionaries, European tourists, and Hawaiian elites mingled. The ice importing business never really took off in Hawai’i: even though entrepreneurs petitioned the local rulers for monopoly rights and invested in storage facilities, the venture remained unprofitable and was interrupted in 1860 after two decades of sporadic shipments. King Kamehameha III had mixed feelings about alcoholic beverages and iced punches: ruling over a “semi-European” polity that was modernizing fast, he also leaned to the robust temperance movement championed by Western missionaries and patronage ladies. He eventually died in 1854 after drinking from a poisoned punch-bowl of iced champagne. Under the reign of the last Hawaiian monarch, King Kalākaua, Honolulu was a fast-growing city with all the trappings of a Western metropole. ‘Iolani Palace, the royal residence, had electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones even before Buckingham Palace or the White House. Among these technologies, ice machines and ice factories came into operation in the 1870s, transforming a once-foreign commodity into a local product.

Entering the Ice Age

Hawai’i entered the ice age at about the same period as the United States: when home refrigeration, cold chains for perishable goods, ice cream parlors, and soda fountains connected Honolulu’s domestic life to global standards of modernity. But unlike in the mainland, the use of freezing technologies were subject to colonialist frames of interpretation and local resistance. Settler reports of Kānaka aversion to ice stood as indictment of their slow pace to civility. Native people’s first contact with ice cream, taken as extremely hot instead of freezing cold, was derided as a sign of inferior civilizational status. Hawaiian-language newspapers, however, refuted implications that Kānaka Maoli were confused about or afraid of ice, and advertised the lavish cosmopolitan banquets including icy desserts served at the ‘Iolani Palace. But haole (foreigners), ali’i (elite Hawaiians), and maka’āinana (local commoners) reacted differently to frozen tastes, reflecting hierarchies of class, gender, and racialized proximity to whiteness. The racist and classist distinctions manifested themselves after US annexation during the pure food battles of the 1910s. The newly appointed food commissioner decided to apply US legislation strictly to ban poi, a local dish alternatively described as a truly delicious paste with yeasty flavor or “a native concoction that tastes like billboard paste,” and to increase the butterfat content of ice cream to mainland levels, contradicting local tastes and recipes developed by Japanese and Chinese ice cream vendors.

Shave ice and its “rainbow” of flavors is now offered as a metaphor for the “rainbow state” and its multiethnic, postracial population. As a symbol of Hawai’is racial landscape, the rainbow offers an important vehicle for the affective, and often tense, sentiments of identity and belonging. How did a food practice brought by Japanese migrants come to epitomize a US state, and how did a sugar plantation economy built along racial lines produce a racially harmonious society in the only US state with a nonwhite majority population? Shave ice offers an alternative narrative to forms of refreshment oriented toward white leasure, like the ice creams or tiki cocktails fetishized by the touristic gaze. Historians trace the origin of shave ice to Japanese agricultural workers and plantation store owners who brought the food tradition of kakigōri from Japan. Born in rural spaces where non-Hawaiians put down deep community roots, shave ice offers an alternative story about race and refreshment, one that is not tethered to whiteness and the leisure class. Asian immigrant populations in Hawai’i, once systematically marginalized, have become a “model majority” characterized by upward class mobility and adherence to nationalist values. They dominate the local economy, to the point scholars have forged the category “Asian settler colonialism” to describe the ascendancy of working-class communities of color. Hawai’i is now considered as a laboratory for multiethnic harmony as well as a harbinger of what the whole United States could become: a postracial nation, turning its back on its history of Native Indian extermination and Black enslavement. These fictions mask ongoing structural racism against Native Hawaiians and other ethnic minorities (Samoans, Filipino-Americans…) The shave ice success story glosses over such divisions and obscures Kānaka Maoli claims for Indigenous sovereignty. For present-day Hawaiians, it also brings back shared memories of childhood and nostalgia for “simpler times” characterized by community resilience, rural life, and low economic wealth. Again, this nationalist narrative envisioning an ahistorical and uncomplicated past erases a history of racial discrimination and labor exploitation, and produces “Hawaiians” as an always already multiethnic category that excludes indigeneity or Kānaka Maoli claims to place.

Hawaiian futures

I don’t see much potential in an independent, sovereign, or post-statehood Hawai’i that would grant Indigenous people rights of self-determination and privileges of territorial ownership. There are other ways to tackle the deep structural inequalities and discrimination that affect the Native population. As the French have experienced in French Polynesia, recognizing Indigenous rights is not synonymous with granting full independence or a right to secession. Politics of atonement and official apologies may be aligned with the Anglo-saxon protestant mindset, but they have their limits: short of reparations and restitution, they leave intact the structures of power that have led to Native dispossession and do not advance the living conditions of Indigenous populations. Economic needs must also be addressed, and the responsibility of all leaders, oriented toward independence or otherwise, is to chart a course that guarantees economic growth and sustainable development. I see tourism as a chance for Hawai’i, and militarization as a necessity borne out of historical and geopolitical concerns. Americans will always remember Pearl Harbor. Hawai’i is America’s first line of defense and its most strategic outpost in the Pacific. The security of the continent hinges on the continued presence of military forces which, along with tourism, form the twin pillars of the economy. Envisaging a decolonial future for Hawai’i seems to me more dystopian than real. And yet, with all these caveats in mind, I still find potential for decolonial approaches in modern scholarship about Hawai’i or other territories in the Pacific. Other Pacific islands have acceeded to independence and have demonstrated the viability, resilience, and vitality of Indigenous sovereign states. In the case of Hawai’i, but also the other US territories in the Pacific (Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa), solutions might exist toward or beyond US statehood without resorting to full independence. Besides, scholarship and politics are distinct endeavors. The challenge that decolonial studies must address is the decolonization of the mind. I see must potential in a decolonial perspective to the history of Hawai’i and other once occupied nations, and I learned much from reading Cooling the Tropics as much as I enjoyed reviewing it. One can quote Marx without being a Marxist; one can use decolonial scholarship without believing in a decolonial future for Hawai’i.

The Echoes of Nuclear Explosions in the Pacific

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A review of Radiation Sounds. Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences, Jessica A. Schwartz, Duke University Press, 2021.

Radiation SoundsSound studies can take you to faraway places. Ethnomusicology, the study of music in its social and cultural contexts, has taught us to lend an ear to songs and musical genres performed by people distant from Western cultures and mainstream musical practices. In Radiation Sounds, Jessica Schwartz takes her readers to the Marshall Islands, an independent microstate in the Pacific, to listen to the distant echoes and silences brought forth by the nuclear testings that took place at the onset of the Cold War. From 1946 through 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests on islands and atolls now composing the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI). Symbolized by the strong visual of the mushroom cloud, these nuclear detonations included the 15-megaton Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on March 1, 1954, which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll. The United States organized forcible relocations from the atolls made uninhabitable by the nuclear fallout, kept a moratorium on all information pertaining to the nuclear arms race, and submitted exposed populations without their consent to medical examination on the effects of radiations in a program code-named Project 4.1. Marshallese music and voices still carry the echoes of these nuclear explosions as they radiate through local politics, radio broadcasts, musical performances, folk songs, contaminated soils, and ailing bodies. Radiation Sounds gives equal importance to sounds and to silence, to music and to noise, to songs and to oral testimonies. It considers not only soundwaves, but also radio waves, oceanic waves, and nuclear radiations made sensible through the audible clicks of Geiger counters and the crackled voices of remembrance songs. It addresses the full spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths while staying attuned to their sociopolitical dimension. A nuclear blast is not only a visual flash: its delayed sound effect and ionizing radiations produce more lasting consequences, including for the voices that it smothers and the silence that is forced onto all parties.

Resonances of the atomic age

Jessica Schwartz’s scholarship focuses on how different communities throughout the Marshall Islands were diversely affected by the nuclear tests. She doesn’t give full detail on the conditions and methodology of her ethnography. As a doctoral student in musicology at New York University, she conducted fieldwork in the Marshall Islands for close to two years. She stayed in Majuro, the capital city with a population of 28,000, and also visited other atolls such as Kwajalein or Kili Island where population evacuated from Bikini and neighboring islands have resettled. She mentions at some point that she was teaching at a local school, and she refers on several occasions to her contacts with local politicians, women’s groups, the local radio station, musicians, singers, and antinuclear activists. She learned the local language, and gives transcripts of some of the songs she collected in Marshallese and in English. She quotes several anthropologists who have studied the Marshall islands and Oceanian cultures, some of whom have played a role in shaping local politics and cultural policies. Hers is not a classical ethnography with neatly composed chapters documenting all aspects of a local society. She writes in an impressionistic style that is sometimes difficult to follow. She introduces concepts such as radioactive citizenship, nuclear silences, and the Marshallese notion of the “throat,” but she makes no effort at rigorous theorizing, and uses theory literature in a sparse way. Unlike classical anthropologists, she is not interested in traditional music per se, or in local traditions in general. In her account, baseball and country music are as much part of the local culture as braiding wreaths for funerals or playing the aje drum. The Marshallese popular music repertoire includes modern rock or folk songs which sometimes refer to political issues (so-called remembrance songs, protest songs, and petition songs), as well as more traditional genres such as roro, songs based on ancient legends and originally performed to give guidance during navigation or strength for mothers in labor. But there is no strict division between past genres and present repertoire, as modern bands are blending the unique songs of each island with modern influences, such as rock, country, or hip-hop. There is even a Marshallese nursery rhyme called Kōṃṃan baaṃ (“Making Bombs”) that dates back from the nuclear testing period and that is apparently set to the tune of a Filipino planting rice song. Another song, Ioon, ioon miadi kan (“Upon, Upon Those Watchtowers”) was composed in 1944 and refers to the Japanese military occupation.

When Jessica Schwartz arrived on the Marshall Islands to do fieldwork in 2008, the debates and protests that had accompanied the 2004 renewal of the Compact of Free Association (COFA) between the US and the RMI were still a vivid memory. Through the COFA initially signed in 1986, the United States has maintained military presence in the Marshall Islands while recognizing the sovereignty of an archipelago they had administered as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) since 1947. Local politics at the time of independence was dominated by local chieftains or iroij. Article III of the 1979 Constitution recognizes the title and creates a Council of Iroij chosen from holders of the chieftainship among the several constituent islands. It was not until 1999, following political corruption allegations, that the iroij-dominated government was overthrown, with Kessai Note, a commoner of Japanese-Marshallese descent, elected by the Nitijeļā (Parliament) as president. He was defeated in his bid for re-election in 2007. Jessica Schwartz points out the role of the radio as the “voice of the nation” expressing “radioactive citizenship”: “radiation and the radio have been crucial components of sense making in the period of nation building”. Installed by the US after a report by Harvard economist Anthony Solomon had recommended nation-building efforts in 1963, radio was at the center of the independence movement or “break away,” followed by COFA negotiations and the debate over monetary compensation from US nuclear militarism. In Majuro, two radio stations, divided along political lines, competed for the Marshallese audience. American Forces Radio and Television also provides broadcasting services to Kwajalein Atoll, the site of the US military base. The COFA enables Marshallese citizens to live, work, and travel freely between the RMI and the United States in exchange for the US military’s lease of large parts of Kwajalein Atoll, including Kwajalein Island. Approximately 4,300 Marshall Islands natives have relocated to Springdale, Arkansas in the United States; this figure represents the largest population concentration of Marshall Islands natives outside their island home. The threads that connect these diaspora communities are mostly oral and give more importance to songs and speeches than to the written text. Like the vocal cords in the throat that vibrate to create the sound of the voice or the umbilical cord that connects the baby to the mother’s placenta, islands are said to be connected by invisible threads that weave a network of togetherness across the atollscape.

Vocal cords and umbilical cords

The Rongelapese were the population most severely affected by the US nuclear testing program, as they were exposed to the radiations from the fallout of the Bravo explosion and had to be moved to another atoll. In 1957, three years later their first relocation, the United States government declared the area “clean and safe” and allowed the islanders to return. Evidence of continued contamination mounted, however, as many residents developed thyroid tumors and, for pregnant women, birth miscarriages. In 1985, they were evacuated to Ebeye island in Kwajalein Atoll in an operation conducted by the international NGO Greenpeace. Together with other displaced persons from Enewetak, Utrik, and Bikini, the Rongelapese formed the ERUB organization and petitioned the US government for nuclear test compensations under section 177 of the COFA agreement. A first resettlement agreement was signed in 1986, but in 2000 the Marshall Islands government submitted a Change of Circumstances Petition asking for significantly more compensation than the $US 150 million initially awarded. As a result of the radiation poisoning, many Rongelapese people developed thyroid gland disorders or cancer and required thyroid surgery–a source of particular trauma because, for the Rongelapese, the throat (“bōrō”) is the seat of the soul, comparable to the Western concept of the heart. Jessica Schwartz sees Rongelapese women as victims of US “male vococentrism”: not only were they displaced, subjected to medical testings without their informed consent, and had to undergo thyroid surgery, but they were also marginalized and stigmatized as a result of their injuries and reproductive problems. Literally and figuratively, they didn’t have a voice in the decisions and processes that affected them. As the author notes, “the Geiger counter had a political voice that is more highly valued than the women with respect to their appeal for evacuation.” The exodus of the Rongelapese community is memorialized through songs that are performed at funerals and other ceremonies: “We sing on the anniversary of Bravo, at parties, at church, and especially when visitors come.” Some of the songs are intended as musical petitions addressed to the US government. In the song performances that the ethnomusicologist attended, elderly women affected by the radiation fallout struggled to harmonize and sang in a coarse voice. And when they were unable to hit the right notes as they sang, some would gesture to their throats and blame their damaged thyroids. Schwartz sees their musical performances as “an invitation to hear radiation sounding… where precarious voices sound strength.”

Turning to the diaspora from the Bikini Atoll, the anthropologist recalls a scene, recorded on film and distributed through newsreels in 1946, in which the US military governor of the Marshall Islands asked the Bikinian leader “King Juda” for his support in evacuating the Atoll before the nuclear experiments. The American couched his request in religious terms, asking the Bikinians to give up their islands “for the good of mankind” and promising to lead them to a land of salvation, “much as God had for the Jews.” But the only answer he could get from the Bikini leader was that “everything is in God’s hands.” The sentence, Men Otemjej Rej Ilo Bein Anij, abbreviated by the Bikinians as MORIBA, has become the motto of the islands. Today the descendants of those who were moved in 1946  live on Kili Island, on Ejit Island, Majuro, other parts of the Marshall Islands, in the United States, and a few in other countries.  They have been called “nuclear nomads” or “nuclear refugees.” They cannot go home because the United States has not kept its promise to return the islands to their pristine condition. The Bikinian nation formed in the mid-1980s in self-determination to protest the COFA. It is now complete with a flag, a national day (March 7, day of removal), a motto and an anthem as well as offices in Majuro and Springdale, Arkansas. Native communities claiming origin in Bikini now number 2,800 dispersed individuals out of an initial population of 167. For Schwartz, the injustices wrought by radioactive colonization account to a kind of “dissonance” in the global harmony that the Cold War was supposed to produce. Having been deprived a voice, local populations can only express their claims ventriloquially (through the voice of God) or metaphorically, through songs and musical performances. Singing is one way to create community and mobilize solidarity in the creation of new political subjectivities and communities of belonging. Songs express feelings of displacement and exile that have an unmistakable biblical tone. The Marshallese are a very religious people, and persons without religious affiliation account for a very small percentage of the population. Especially for Bikinese, church activities, both in church and in preparation, structure much of the community’s time. Hymns and religious songs therefore had a strong influence on the musical repertoire. Another strong influence is country music, heard on the military base of Kwajalein, which is appreciated as being from the heart (throat) and having to do with loss of land and/or love.

Kūrijmōj season 

The anthropologist spent Christmas Eve of 2009 on Kili Island, attending church service and recording Kūrijmōj (Christmas) songs in Marshallese. 1,2000 exiled Bikinians live on this tiny island and receive support from the US government that sometimes makes other islanders envious. For Schwartz, “spirited noise” or uwaañaañ, which applies to religious songs but also to traditional navigation and to ritualized ceremonies, is a way to reclaim the sovereignty that has been denied to them. According to Schwartz, drawing on Jacques Attali’s essay first published in 1977, “Noise can be read as a blockage in the system, a coded form of communication, or something that impedes understanding and needs to be resolved.” Noisiness is usually attributed to men: through vocal performances, war chants, and spiritual hymns, Bikinese men express their diasporic masculinity and spirit of self-determination. But these voices have not been heard by Americans, who made the land of their ancestors uninhabitable, and by other Marshallese, who reject Bikini’s aspiration to sovereignty. Masculinity is displayed in lagoon parades by “Gospel warriors” clad in grass skirts and holding paddles and sticks. This Gospel Day of parades and celebrations is a national holiday that commemorates the coming of the Gospel to Ebon Atoll in 1857. For the author, Americans strategically used Christian culture to dispossess the Marshallese of their properties, but it is worth noting that Marshallese also use Christian words and religious repertoire as a strategy to relate to Americans and extract compensations. The spirit of MORIBA works both ways. Navigational chants and stick charts are two traditional techniques of “wave piloting” through which islanders could find their ways across the atollscape. Indigenous knowledge systems have been eroded and fractured by a century of marginalization and silencing, but efforts are made to reintroduce them in the education system. Marshallese culture evolves around three institutions: government, church, and custom, and music is part of all of them. Songfest competitions are also part of the Kūrijmōj season. When Christmas is still a few months away,  islanders divide themselves into jeptas, which may be thought of as teams. These teams begin practicing the new songs and dances that will be performed from memory on Christmas Day. Each group may perform as many as fifteen to twenty songs. Before Christmas Day, the jeptas visit one another, engaging in competitive songfests in order to show off their skills and assess the competition. Songfests present an original mix of traditional customs and cultural practices, including “war-training exercises, church singing, line dancing, and the energetic moments of roro.”

Jessica Schwartz sees a dialectic between masculinist language expressed in Gospel Day parades or Kūrijmōj ceremonies and the matrilineal past that continues to shape the present. Anthropologists have described the Marshallese culture as a matrilineal society revolving around a complex system of clans and lineages tied to land ownership. In traditional culture, women protected the lands and lineage through songs through which the woman came to voice the end of war and direct peace among warring parties. “When a woman speaks, the man must give way”: women were seen as making decisions behind the scenes and as exerting the final say on matters of war and territory. Land was passed down from generation to generation through the mother, and land ownership tied families together into clans. Territorial appropriation and nuclear militarism have displaced women’s authority and power that was tied to the land. Majuro and Kwajalein have become highly masculinized spaces, and the ultimate authority of the feminine voice only remains in the echoes carried by songs and participation in customary practices. The author notes that domestic violence has now become a problem in the Marshall Islands, and that feminine voices have been silenced in a society that increasingly denies their rights and participation. She mentions the role of the women’s rights group WUTMI (Women United Together Marshall Islands) in supporting services for survivors of domestic violence, raising awareness about legal rights for victims of abuse, and underscoring the importance of women’s roles in climate conservation. One of the first songs she recorded was “Ioon, ioon miadi kan” (“Upon, Upon those Watchtowers”) that documents the indigenous population’s experiences of the Japanese and American military battles during World War II that resonates through the present. Composed in 1944 by the Marshallese female chief (leroij) Laabo, who was displaced from her land and forcibly assigned to a leper colony, the song is an embodied performance of disability, gender oppression, and voicelessness.

Pacific islands in the global imagination

Pacific islands, and Bikini Atoll in particular, continue to be present in the global imagination. Although Bikini is currently uninhabited with the exception of a few caretakers, it is recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site due to its role at the dawn of the Nuclear Age and is open to visitors aboard vessels that are completely self-sufficient if they obtain prior approval. Bikini lagoon diving is limited to fewer than a dozen experienced divers a week, costs more than US$5,000, and includes detailed histories of the nuclear tests. In what may now be perceived as a blatant case of cultural misappropriation and disrespect for local populations, the “bikini” swimsuit has become a worldwide fashion commodity. The French, who invented the design and the term in 1946, also speak of “monokini” for topless beachwear and “burkini” (a portmanteau word for burqa and bikini) for an Islamic attire that covers the whole body. French nuclear tests in the Pacific, which were conducted from the 1960s to 1995 in the Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia, led to the same controversies regarding the health, wellbeing, and environment of the people living in the region. Pacific islands now stand at the frontline in the battle against climate change, with rising sea levels threatening local livelihoods and the very existence of islanders’ communities. Despite having low emissions, the countries in the region have developed ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement to be fully renewable in terms of energy by 2030. Elected in January 2020, the current president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, David Kabua, has declared that combating climate change, negotiating with the US regarding the extension of the COFA that expires in 2023, and addressing the issue of the Runit Dome stocking radioactive debris as the top priorities of his presidency. Meanwhile, China has become an important and welcome source of loans, infrastructure and aid for the sovereign states in the region, triggering a commitment by the US and its allies to devote more resources and diplomatic engagement to Pacific island countries. While it doesn’t address these pressing geopolitical issues, Radiation Sounds documents the struggle of Marshallese men and women to keep their memories of ancestral homelands and cultural values alive, voicing their sense of identity amid the deafening silence that follows nuclear explosions.

Making the World Safe for Tourism in Asia-Pacific

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Duke University Press, 2013.

Securing ParadiseWhen she was a little girl growing up in the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez considered American tourists and soldiers that she encountered or heard about as a benevolent presence. They were there to protect the land and to share their riches with a people in need of security and prosperity. This positive image was reinforced by the missionary schools founded by Americans, the remittances sent from abroad by relatives, the proceeds from commerce and military bases, and the endless stream of American movies and serials flowing from television. Later on, when her family emigrated to the United States, she would accompany her father to the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, and share the gratitude held by many Filipinos for the general who liberated their country from Japanese occupation. For her, America was still the land of the free, a beacon of hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life beyond their own shores. But then she went to study at UC Berkeley and her worldview changed. She learned about the history of American imperialism, the gruesome stories of the Philippines-American war, the propaganda machine of Cold War politics, the complicity with authoritarian regimes, the destruction of the planet by the forces of neoliberalism, and the cynicism of exploitative raw power. Her homeland, the Philippines, became associated with the image of a puppet regime led by a dictator clinging to power with the backing of the US military. She applied the same critical lenses to the state of Hawaii and its populations after the was nominated as Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. For her, the Hawaiian archipelago was forced into the American fold at the end of the nineteenth century by a coalition of military imperialists, colonial planters, and migrant laborers who relegated the natives to subordinary status and even to cultural extinction. Being herself a nonnative in an adopted homeland, Vernadette Gonzalez purports to speak on behalf of the Native Hawaiians who should, however implausible it may sound, reclaim their sovereignty.

In the introduction, the author asks: “What alchemy transforms the terror of imperial violence and American postwar occupation to deeply felt understandings of American rescue, liberation, and benevolence?” One could raise the opposite question: how did a young girl raised in the spirit of America’s gentle embrace turn against a familiar presence and came to see it as a force of evil? How to explain this complete reversal, and what turned her from a believer of American kind-heartedness into a staunch critic of US malignity? Was it her studies in social sciences at UC Berkeley? And why did she choose to study at this university in the first place? Although she doesn’t give any biographical clues, I see three general reasons for this conversion: history, ideology, affect. These factors work both ways: the same historical, ideological and affective formations that explain Filipinos’ conversion to a myth of American compassionate guardianship also explain the anger, resentment, and challenge to the United States’ past and present imperial role. In a reversion of values, the soldier and the tourist can be seen alternatively as the Good American or the Ugly Yankee. Like a Janus-faced figure, the two characters are one and the same. He can be invited by his hosts to come home as a guest or, in the same movement, told to go home and depart. Thinking about tourism and militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines allows Vernadette Gonzalez to vent her anger against US imperialism past and present, and also to disavow the young girl who held hands with her father in American Pacific War memorials. In Securing Paradise, she applies critical lenses to analyze the history, ideology and affects sustaining the “military-tourism security complex” in the Philippines and in Hawaii.

Tourists and soldiers

In a way, the tourism industry is the opposite of militarization. Tourism is a peaceful activity, and tourists don’t go to war zones or to places exposed to the risk of insecurity. Unlike the soldier, the tourist doesn’t engage in violent or threatening behavior. He brings with him a camera, not a gun, and leaves behind dollars and trinkets, not bullets and explosives. The tourist is more often a ‘she’ than a ‘he’: a softer, warmer version of America’s presence in the tropics that stands in stark contrast to the masculine figure of oppression and threat. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the desires and economies of modern tourism are central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific. Tourism and militarism are mutually constitutive: both are part of am American project of domination and imperial outreach, and Hawaii and the Philippines form the first line of this concentric projection of power and sentiments. The roots and routes of the US military in these sites are foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations. Tourism normalizes the presence of the military, prioritizes its needs, and disseminates a racialized and gendered idea of security. Both militarism and tourism rely on sedimented notions of colonized land and people (especially women) as waiting idly for their arrival, passively there for the taking. In many places, tourism has its roots in the militarized “rest and recreation” industry that thrived in the periphery of war theaters. The security that military bases provide is a fiction that starkly contrasts the reality of sexual exploitation and social insecurity that develops in the vicinity of army camps. The male tourist and the soldier both harbor voyeuristic and violent fantasies and usually turn their gaze against the bodies of women. For the author, many modern tourist sites are tainted by the illicit sexual economies and violence produced in rest and recreation sites of military occupation.

“Militourism” is designed as the activity fusing the two activities of militarism and tourism: making historic battlefields fit for tourism, creating memorials and museums to commemorate past military engagements, displaying military presence as a guarantee of security for foreign holidaymakers, or attracting active military personnel and retired soldiers to beach resorts and scenic sites. It also involves transforming former military bases into vacation sites and other sources of economic revenue, or building dual-use facilities and infrastructures such as scenic highways or helicopter landing platforms. In Asia and the Pacific, these “militourisms” take place on terrains that have long felt the impact of being objects of imperial desire. The first touristic explorations and adventures in the Pacific also doubled as military reconnaissance and imperial prospection. The image of the tropics as paradise was instrumental in justifying a policy of land grabbing and imperial expansion; it also served to lure young soldiers enrolling in overseas tours of duty. The world of the soldier and that of the tourist are often one and the same. The business of tourism benefits from the high drama of war: places like Pearl Harbor remain popular because war is at the core of America’s past and present identity. Likewise, the US military benefits from the glorification of American cultures of war that occurs in sites memorializing past military engagements. Gonzalez describes the activities of “remembering Pearl Harbor” at the USS Arizona Memorial or “playing soldier” on former US training grounds in  Subic Bay as emotional labor: the labor that it takes to shape a national myth that is instrumental to Hawaiian dispossession and to the Philippines’s subordination.

History, ideology, affect

History is at the heart of people’s ambivalent attitudes towards the United States. The history of Hawaii and of the Philippines can be told in two very different ways: one eliciting sympathy and hope, the other criticism and grief. One reason for the adherence to the myth of American benevolence in the Pacific is that its believers are served with a rosy picture of history. And one reason for their conversion to the message of “Yankee Go Home” is that they come into contact with a very different story. It is this black book of misery and sorrow that Gonzalez presents to her readers. As she notes, Hawaii before the annexation by the United States was a sovereign kingdom that was undergoing struggles for internal unification and also fighting off external attempts on its autonomy. Massive population decline following the arrival of European explorers and sailors had produced conditions for exploitation, dispossession, and cultural ethnocide. A coalition formed by white plantation owners, missionary elites, and the US Navy collaborated to roll back native sovereignty with the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and the annexation of the islands in 1898, creating America’s first foothold in the Pacific. This history is paralleled by America’s expansion westwards and its collusion with the Spanish empire in the Philippines. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was soon followed by the Philippine-American War, a nasty and brutish conflict in which torture was used against the native insurgents. This brought the Philippines into the American fold, and allowed the US Navy to strengthen its presence in the Pacific. Indeed, Hawaii and the Philippines would share linked fates as part of the American chain of garrison islands.

American tourists and soldiers are served a version of history that stands in stark contrast with the unofficial narrative told in Securing Paradise. They visit landmark sites and museums that present a sanitized version of the United States’ imperial expansion in the Pacific. America’s presence in the Philippines is retold as a story of rescue, liberation, and sharing of riches. The US administration of the Philippines, from 1898 to 1946, and the period following the annexation when Hawaii became a US Territory, from 1989 to 1959, are characterized as a progressive era during which the United States implemented a benign and modern form of stewardship. The authorities undertook a slate of reforms, hygiene, education, and economic projects that uplifted the population and created sympathy even among former insurgents. For example, in the Philippines, the military took on projects such as road building and land clearing to rehabilitate its public relations, substituting promises of constructive colonialism and economic development to its recent history of brutality and oppression. But it is the Pacific War that sealed the fate of these two territories and anchored them in the grand narrative of the United States’ national history. For the American public, Hawaii and the Philippines remain forever associated with Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, and the Bataan Death March. The enduring narratives of masculine sacrifice and heroism in World War II constitute the framing through which the two archipelagos are imagined and understood. This history is made visible and concrete through memorial sites and scenic circuits that have become a magnet for tourists. In these sites, visitors pay their respects to the dead, take part in rituals of remembering, and celebrate a bond of brotherhood with American soldiers, sealed with blood and anchored in Cold War rhetoric. Pilgrimage to historical military sites is not the preserve of American tourists or local visitors: even Japanese tourists are invited to “Remember Pearl Harbor” or to discover Corregidor as the “Island of Valor, Peace, and International Understanding.” For the author, the fetishization of December 7 overwrites January 17, 1893—the day the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown and its native population dispossessed.

Neoliberalism and neoliberation

The second factor that has the strength to induce positive or negative attitudes towards the United States is ideology. For Gonzalez, militarism and tourism in Asia-Pacific embody the ideologies of neoliberalism and what she calls neoliberation. Since the departure of the US military from the Philippines, Subic Bay and Clark Base have been transformed into special economic zones under public-private partnerships and now operate as commercial and tourist hubs integrated into global circuits of capital, labor, and commerce. The “post-base” era has not put an end to military cooperation between the US and the Philippines: on the contrary, US forces benefit from an advantageous Visiting Forces Agreement, they participate in joint training operation with their Filipino counterparts, and they are at the vanguard of the fight against Muslim extremist groups the southern region of Mindanao. The US Army left the Philippines through the door and came back through the window of opportunity provided by the fight against terror. Just as the war theaters of the Pacific War were transformed into symbols of liberation from Japanese occupation and fraternal collaboration between Filipino and American soldiers, the discourse of neoliberation transforms the exploitative economies of predatory capital and imperial outreach into narratives of security and shared prosperity. American military occupation and economic hegemony are cast in the same heroic light that fuses the twin ideologies of neoliberalism and neoliberation. The “return” of the base properties to the Philippines are presented as evidence of American generosity; meanwhile, the American military continues to occupy and tour the Philippines, and foreign capital, bolstered by the structural adjustment policies dictated by the Bretton Woods institutions, benefit from zero taxation and rampant violation of basic labor rights in the Special Economic Zones.

Or at least this is how Vernadette Gonzalez presents it, based on her own biased ideology and slanted perspective in which the United States is cast as the villain and its policies as conspirational schemes to maintain neocolonial influence over its dominion. This is, in a way, a missed opportunity: because beyond the Pavlovian denunciation of neoliberalism as evil, Securing Paradise raises many important economic issues. There is indeed an economic case to be made about the links between militarism and tourism. Both activities stem from certain comparative advantages and resource endowments, like having a long and accessible coastal line to build bases and resorts. Both generate rents and drive domestic prices up, giving rise to a particular version of the Dutch disease. Both military bases and tourism resorts may be the only viable economic sectors in territories that are otherwise too far away from centers of capitalistic concentration. There are complementarities between the two activities, as when the soldier goes on vacation as a tourist or when tourism is made safe by the presence of soldiers. But there are also contradictions, especially when the local population becomes more educated and more prosperous than the soldiers posted in their midst. Beyond a certain threshold, tourism development holds more promises than military build-up. When they are consulted about their own destiny, local populations will aspire to transform their territories into islands of peace, as opposed to hosting bases of discontent. But these issues of territorial specialization and economic reasoning are not raised in this book. Instead, the author adheres to a primitive notion of economics-as-witchcraft, with neoliberalism as dark magic and the Bretton Woods institutions as wicked witches. I don’t know where Vernadette Gonzalez got her economics, but it’s certainly not from UC Berkeley’s economic faculty. Even the variant known as international political economy, taught in political science departments and exerting some influence on literary scholars, has more consideration for basic facts and logical explanations than her casual treatment of economic factors.

Combat boots clamping and digital cameras clicking in Asia-Pacific

A conversion is always an affective turn: from love and attachment to abhorrence and alienation, from warm feelings of joy and happiness to dark motives of grievance and hate. Sometimes this reversal of sentiments can be triggered by a traumatic experience or a dreadful event: as when a story of rape and sexual aggression by soldiers or tourists turn the local population against any foreign presence. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the defining moment may have been provided by the image of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda leaving the Malacañan Palace and fleeing the country in US army aircrafts after having been ousted by the people. She also describes a traumatic scene that happened to her shortly after September 11, when she was faced with the barrel of a gun for having committed a small breach of security protocol in a tourist resort. For her, tourism and violence are intimately intertwined. In the eyes of local authorities and American strategists, tourists’ safety and comfort take precedence over the needs and aspirations of the local population. The US military wants to make the world safe for tourism. It prioritizes certain forms of mobility and border-crossing at the detriment of others. As a result it makes the world more insecure, not less, and exposes local populations to new risks and insecurities. Although Vernadette Gonzalez doesn’t explicitly formulate policy recommendations, the solutions that can be inferred from the author’s presentation should be resolutely de-colonial: let the US forces go home for good this time, severe the ties of dependance and domination that bind local populations and indigenous peoples in exploitative conditions, reclaim the sovereignty of native right-holders and democratic representatives, protect the environment from the encroachment of army bases and tourist resorts, and bring an end to the tourism industry’s deleterious influence on the social fabric of host nations.

One may or may not agree with these solutions; but they appear to me as severely out of sync with the present geopolitical situation in Asia-Pacific. As the author herself acknowledges, the region is increasingly becoming more insecure; and the blame cannot be put solely on the presence of US forces, less even so on the continuous flow of American tourists. Any person who has travelled in the region can attest that the majority of tourists are no longer Americans or Europeans. These new tourists, who may be followed by soldiers as in the previous historical sequences described for Hawaii and for the Philippines, bring with them different dreams and aspirations, and interact with local populations and the environment in different forms and modalities. They too are looking for a paradise to cherish and to hold, but their version of heaven is based on different cultural and political assumptions. (For a local version of the mix between militarism, exoticism and affect, I recommend the 2016 Korean drama series Descendants of the Sun and its local adaptations by Vietnamese and by Chinese television.) One should lend an ear to the growing sounds of army boots and tourist crowds in Asia and the Pacific: are they harbingers of a new era when the digital camera will prevail over the machine gun, or will they repeat past experiences on a larger and more devastating scale? This is why I find books such as Securing Paradise useful: they allow readers who come to them with an unjaundiced eye to enter the fabrique of sentiments, and they enable us to envision a future that may not be determined solely by militarized tourism and the touring of armies on and off duty.