Lyons, Paul. American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
"This book critiques the massive senses in which, in U.S. cultural production about Oceania, both the responsibility to understand and learn and the willingness to imagine U.S. history as bound-together with Oceanian history in a way that is "managed from both ends" have been rudely abrogated. Even when the aim is a critique of imperialism, U.S. artists and scholars narrating stories of intercultural relation in Oceania have for the most part misperceived, misrepresented, disrespected, or ignored Oceanian institutions, perspectives, humor, and ways of knowing (and narrating), attempting to subsume indigenous categories into their own" (2).
Investigate: Toni Morrison 1992, Playing in the Dark. page xi
"My sense is that even fantasmic representations of Oceania -- invented images 'whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention' (Owens 1992: 4) -- are routed through an archive imbricated at the base in material relations" (3).
In particular, work which attempts to destabilize the exceptionalism of "America" "as a category with a rhizomatic approach "paradoxically seem to be transnationalizing American studies by expanding their reach into each point of local conjuncture" (3-4).
"Asia and Asia/Pacific" constructions
Debate: "Within the national narrative, the U.S. disavows having colonies in the sense of overseas territoris that are administered, generally with dual institional systems (legal, educational) that segregate colonizers and colonized" (6) citing Flores 2002, Kiste 1994: 228. Kiste: Tides of History
Chapter 1:
Where 'cannibalism' has been, tourism will be: Forms and funtions of American Pacificism
"Since the days of the early Republic, two fundamental conceptions of Oceania-coterminous, contradictory, synergetic -- have been entwined in the U.S. imagination. On the one hand, 'Pacific' islands are envisioned, economically and geopolitically, not as ends in themselves, but as stepping stones (provisioning and refueling stations, colonial outposts, communication centers, military bases) or passages (shipping lane protectors) toward the wealth of the Orient and the Indies. Such a vision shaped the U.S. relation to Oceania first in the China trade, in which private interests conflated with economic nationalism, and later in colonial ventures framed int erms of geostrategic needs. On the other hand, Pacific islands are imagined as ends-of-the-earth, cultural limit-cases unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity, whose unfamiliar natives are compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans" (24).
writers and regional planners "shared a tendency to recall selectively the scope of nineteenth-century U.S. involvement in Oceania and read it backwards and forwards as legacy of connection and prophecy of possession" (29).
