Presenting Paradise

Myles Breen

School of Communication
Charles Stuart University
Bathurst, Australia
mbreen@csu.edu.au

 

Buck, Elizabeth. Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

 

Here is a book which commands attention from many audiences. It addresses that most important question facing postmodern cultural studies: the question of the survival of minority cultures and of the individuals who reside within these cultures.

 

We are accustomed today to thinking of “minorities” as groups that have been divided off and dominated along lines of race, gender, age, or sexuality. Other “minorities,” united by a language, a system of exchange, or an investment in particular cultural practices or rituals, are often overlooked. The archetypal struggle of the Hawaiian people, whose identity is, among other things, closely bound up with dance, and whose hegemonic antagonist is nothing less than American culture as a whole, is thus potentially a very instructive one.

 

In Paradise Remade, Elizabeth Buck sets out to relate the recent cultural history of Hawai’i in a new way. Though grounded in Marxist theory, her overview draws upon many other paradigms, and seeks to adopt at least in part the point of view of the indigenous population itself rather than that of the colonizers.

 

Not surprisingly, imperialist and neo-imperialist ideologies are at the center of Buck’s argument. She takes apart the dominant myths of corporate tourism (Hawai’i as “paradise”), showing how this paradisal discourse came into being and what its social effects have been. But Buck is also concerned to examine the relatively recent counter-colonization effort by Hawaiians to recapture their history and culture. She describes the religious, political, and economic relationships which were integral to the practice of the sacred chants and the Hula, providing a case study comparable to those available for other indigenous peoples from the Canadian Inuit to the Australian Kooris.

 

This book, then, is not only a theoretically grounded historical description, but also a valuable contribution to postcolonial studies, and perhaps, most importantly, a manual for change for anyone who cares about the rights and values of indigenous cultures. It is a case study in power and domination for which the Hawaiian islands serve as a “location”–just as they have for many a Hollywood film. The book uses a reproduction of a production still from the Betty Grable vehicle Song of the Islands (1942) as a (literally) graphic illustration of this trend. Together with photographs of tourist brochures and sheet music (Rudy Vallee’s 1934 hit, “I found a little grass skirt, for my little grass shack in Hawaii”) to illustrate these aspects of popular culture, the etchings and photographs of historical and contemporary Hawaiian life complement the text. Because so much of this material is still readily available worldwide, the book can offer a more concrete case study than has been possible for scholars of other groups such as the Australian aborigines or the native inhabitants of the Amazon.

 

In her introduction, Buck makes the point that the practices of historiography are never innocent. Following Fernand Braudel of the Annales School, she distinguishes between the traditional kind of history “where great men appear as organizing things,” the history of conjuncture that examines major social and material expansions and contractions, and structural histories. She points out that traditional history, as dominant paradigm, privileges observational facts and data and the reliability of sources at the expense of theory and philosophy, and fails to recognize that the data of history is inscribed by ideology.

 

Starting with a description of the Kodak Hula Show which has been entertaining tourists and selling Hawaiian culture for over fifty years, the author proceeds to investigate one of the functions of myth. Her description of how the tourists are provided with “photo opportunities” in a regimented way is not without a gentle humor, yet the lesson that this procedure is the prototype for today’s worldwide tourist industry goes unspoken. She does not spell out the salient fact that tourists in Alice Springs in Australia’s heartland, or in Venice in the center of European history and culture, are today mimicking this Hawaiian model. Interested readers, will, no doubt, be able to make parallel observations to suit their own contexts. The ideological work of any dominant myth, she claims, is to make itself look neutral and innocent and, in the process, to naturalize human relationships of power and domination. She spells out the connection between this observable practice of the Kodak Hula Show and the scholarly theory of myth.

 

The seven chapters follow a clear organizational pattern. Chapter One deals with the competing myths of Hawai’i. Chapter Two gives the Marxist and poststructuralist perspectives on structural change, language and power. Chapter Three is a descriptive account of the Hawaiian social structure, the ideology, and the culture before contact with the West. Already in this chapter the hula is seen as a marker or a tracer of change as well as the dominant artefact.

 

The penetration of capitalism, with an emphasis on the political-economy of sugar, is the subject of Chapter Four. The next chapter details the changes arising from the interaction with the invading culture. The movement from orality to literacy and the displacement of Hawaiian by English with again the focus on the hula provide the subject of Chapter Six. Chapter Seven brings us up to date with a description of the current political economy of Hawai’i, the Hawaiian music industry, and the politics of culture.

 

While much of the immediate appeal of this book is in the written description of the islands together with the historical drawings and photographs, this attraction is really a distraction from the critical purpose of the work. In this respect, the book is much like its subject; it can seduce us into an uncritical acceptance. Yet a more coldly pedagogical presentation could not do the subject as much justice as Buck does. For then we would be less able to appreciate the curious veiling that the islands effect through their alluring attractiveness, through those images of pleasure that cover the darker side of human activity.

 

The book describes the competing myths (tourist paradise versus site of colonial oppression) of Hawai’i. Although the description of the colonial history does not demand the most finely-tuned sensibilities for the reader to be appalled, the book does not descend to the polemical. Although the material is at times sensational and appalling, the mode of discourse is always measured and scholarly. Though she begins by highlighting the games of power that go on beneath the scholar’s stance of neutral observation, Buck resists the temptation to adopt an angry or patronizing tone or to simply denounce tourists and the tourism industry. She writes, for example,

 

The dominant myth is evident in the ways that the forms of Hawaiian music, particularly chant and hula, are used as representations of Hawai’i as a paradise for tourists, something to be seen and enjoyed without wondering about the past or its meanings to Hawaiian performers—those who appear to have created their dances with a view to exotic festivities for foreign consumption. (4)

 

The practices that govern performance and the codes of audience etiquette demonstrate the impact of ideology on the cultural pecking order in Hawaii. European ballet, the author notes, is allocated to concert halls and elite audiences and is received in respectful silence. The hula is allocated to hotels where tourists feast, as Buck recounts, on “salmon, poi, pork, Mai Tais, Blue Hawaiis, Chi Chis–all of them—food, drink, dance, and music—served up as signifiers of paradise” (5).

 

But not all hula is performed for tourists. Serious practitioners of the chant and hula have attracted their audiences for major events since the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. This Renaissance has increased the interest in learning more modern styles of hula along with the ancient, and offered a way for Hawaiians to appreciate the complexity and beauty of their language and cultural heritage.

 

The halau, or schools for cultural formation, have played an important part in the politicization of culture in Hawai’i by giving place, structure, and meaning to a group looking for all these things. They have provided a focus and a locus for ethnopolitics in Hawaii.

 

The author details these cultural movements from a Hawaiian perspective, but does not make comparisons with other earlier nation-building returns to a “dead” language such as the Irish adoption of the Gaelic or the Israeli adoption of Hebrew. Nor does she make the connections with current consciousness-raising attempts in South-East Asia or Oceania, in nations as heterogeneous as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, New Guinea, or Fiji. The book stays within a United States-centered framework, and concerns itself more with the legacy of the explorer Captain Cook, the missionaries, and the corporations than with the histories of emerging nations or indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world.

 

Buck does, however, define the struggle well. In this paragraph in the Introduction, she nicely encapsulates the Hawaiian problem:

 

Much of the struggle over power in Hawai’i has taken place in the area of culture. The politics of culture certainly did not start with Western contact, but the rules of discourse and the players in the contest were radically altered from that time on. Two hundred years after Captain James Cook’s arrival, one hundred years after the American overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and three decades after statehood, Hawaiians are still struggling over issues of land, sovereignty, and their identity as Hawaiians. These struggles are played out in various arenas—the courts, the legislative bodies of Congress and the state, the newspapers and broadcast media—and in front of the bulldozers. In recent years, however, the politics of culture also have been waged in academic settings and journals. (10)

 

Buck’s ironic style enlivens the description of these various arenas of cultural struggle. She illustrates the “allochronic” discourses, the positioning of other cultures into a static ethnocentric present, with a continuing battery of examples as the book progresses. For example, she does not let the traditional narrative histories get away with the term “precontact” Hawai’i (to refer to the Islands as they were before Captain Cook) without mentioning the value-laden representations inherent in the term.

 

For the PMC reader who delights in the instantaneous nature of this journal, yet is separated from the library resources most North American subscribers take for granted, Paradise Remade can serve as a handbook on how to integrate current cultural studies theory into a specific indigenous case study. And the very eclecticism of method that Buck brings to bear on her materials can be of particular value to those who, dwelling on the geographical periphery, are unfamiliar with some of the practices and practitioners of North American scholarship. From the literary critic Kenneth Burke, for example, who is not much studied in Commonwealth countries, Buck borrows the concept of “syllogistic progression,” applying it usefully to the relation between the two great myths of colonial oppression: tragic myth of romanticized Hawaiians exploited by demonized whites, and the comedic myth of crude savages redeemed by civilized culture and economic progress.

 

Buck carefully situates herself among a wide variety of theories and schools, ranging from structural anthropology to dependency theory. She also provides a valuable overview of other current approaches to cultural study, and sketches out the kinds of alternative histories of Hawai’i these approaches can yield. For an Althusserian Marxist-informed history, the focus would be on transformations in Hawai’i’s structural formations and the accompanying changes in the political, ideological, and economic elements that make up the social structure. For a poststructuralist Foucaultian-informed history of Hawai’i, the emphasis would be on the power of the dominant discourses, as Western definitions of reality and knowledge displaced the accepted Hawaiian versions. Buck reviews the recent scholarship and comments on several studies in detail, noting in particular the contribution being made by scholars who are able to read nineteenth-century materials written in Hawaiian and who are thereby able to redress some dominant biases that have survived other forms of revisionist intervention. This emphasis puts the book within the framework of many of the current debates which are influencing curriculum developments in universities worldwide.

 

The author’s daring eclecticism and theoretical reach, which transcend the Hawaiin locale, might tempt one to tout Paradise Remade as a model for studies of imperialism and tourism at every peripheral site from Alice Springs to Zaire. But this would be misleading. The book is essentially about Hawai’i, and never allows itself to drift too far from its central theme of the hula. The jacket photograph of three males, one in a Western suit, performing a modern variant of the dance, is cited as “a rare example of advertising which does not trivialize Hawaiian culture”–and this determination to do justice to the hula anchors the entire study, however wide-ranging the issues it takes up. It anchors, too, Buck’s optimism–for she concludes with the claim that finally the Hawaiians are dancing neither for the gods, the chiefs, or the tourists, but for themselves. For Hawaiian performers and audiences, hula is simultaneously a cultural link to a distant and glorious past, a signifier of identity, a celebration of the present, and an expressed determination to own at least a part of the cultural future.