Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production
368
Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production
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Overview
From New Zealand to Japan, Taiwan to Hawaii, this innovative volume presents essays, poems, and memoirs by prominent Asia/Pacific writers that resist appropriation by transnational capitalism through the articulation of autonomous local identities and counter-histories of place and community. In addition, cultural critics spanning several locations and disciplines deconstruct representations—particularly those on film and in novels—that perpetuate Asia/Pacific as a realm of EuroAmerican fantasy.
This collection, a much expanded edition of boundary 2, offers a new perception of the Asia/Pacific region by presenting the Pacific not as a paradise or vast emptiness, but as a place where living, struggling peoples have constructed contemporary identities out of a long history of hegemony and resistance. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production will prove stimulating to readers with an interest in the Asia/Pacific region, and to scholars in the fields of Asian, American, Pacific, postcolonial, and cultural studies.
Contributors. Joseph P. Balaz, Chris Bongie, William A. Callahan, Thomas Carmichael, Leo Ching, Chiu Yen Liang (Fred), Chungmoo Choi, Christopher L. Connery, Arif Dirlik, John Fielder, Miriam Fuchs, Epeli Hau'ofa, Lawson Fusao Inada, M. Consuelo León W., Katharyne Mitchell, Masao Miyoshi, Steve Olive, Theophil Saret Reuney, Peter Schwenger, Subramani, Terese Svoboda, Jeffrey Tobin, Haunani-Kay Trask, John Whittier Treat, Tsushima Yuko, Albert Wendt, Rob Wilson
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822396116 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/23/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 928 KB |
About the Author
Rob Wilson is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of Reimagining the American Pacific.
Arif Dirlik is Professor of History at Duke University and the editor of What Is in a Rim?
Read an Excerpt
Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production
By Rob Wilson, Arif Dirlik
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1995 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9611-6
CHAPTER 1
Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific
M. Consuelo León W.
In recent decades, specialists and scholars have agreed that the study of perceptions and popular images can offer new insights into the history of international affairs. In this sense, the images held by Americans about the Pacific Ocean can explain much about American policies over the past two centuries.
The consolidation of the Pacific image in American minds has been a long process, the beginnings of which may be traced to the information about Asia that reached Europe in the thirteenth century. The process continued with the subconscious accumulation of knowledge transferred to Americans through British culture. By the 1820s, the Pacific image was crystalized through the efforts of traders, explorers, and politicians. This essay will attempt to substantiate the fact that in early nineteenth-century America's image of the Pacific, the area was neither a copy nor a continuation of its British heritage. Rather, this early image resulted from a progressive perception built on America's unique geography, on European tradition, and on its own economic and intellectual history.
The Literary Background
The American perception of the Pacific Rim was shaped in large part by accounts of travelers' experiences, published in different countries over several centuries. These books became popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The accounts that European missionaries sent to the Mongolian court in the early thirteenth century and Marco Polo's voyage to the Orient in 1271 were cornerstones of the American image of the Pacific region and perpetuated an idea of a paradise "[that was] very rich in gold and [that] produce[d] all kinds of jewels." Also influential were the accurate descriptions of Jesuit missionaries in China, Japan, and California sent to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Richard Ruggles says that Englishmen lacked curiosity about any region of the world "beyond those in which they [had] immediate contact"; however, in the sixteenth century, attempts to establish control in the Pacific revealed a British perception of the Pacific as an area for settlement and commerce.
John Dee, Richard Eden, and the Hakluyts developed and popularized knowledge in England about the Pacific, and their enthusiasm, in turn, created a climate of opinion that encouraged further voyages and colonization. These geographers helped Drake plan his expedition that proclaimed English sovereignty over New Albion. William Dampier's books, published in the last years of the seventeenth century, were also considered "spectacular literary successes." His influence can be noted in the publication and translation of several treatises of Pacific geography and in the creation of a national plan for the occupation of the South Seas.
The 1743 publication of George Anson's Voyage Round the World and his capture of the legendary galleon of Manila, a historical objective of English navigators of the Pacific Ocean, perpetuated the myth of Pacific richness. In the late eighteenth century, the search for the geographical chimeres, such as Terra Australis and the Northwest Passage to China, led the British government to endorse a series of voyages to the Pacific, the most famous of which was led by James Cook. According to Sinclair Hitchings, Cook's voyages "stirred intense popular interest." Through his account, the friendly Pacific paradise, full of beautiful, accessible women and economic possibilities, became well known in Europe and Anglo-America. The establishment of a colony in Australia and the migration of missionaries to some island groups were the result of the consolidation of the British image of the Pacific.
In 1783, John Ledyard, an American who sailed in Cook's third expedition, published The Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean in the Quest of a North West Passage, which was "very popular at the time." Ledyard emphasized the possibilities of fur trade between China and the Northwest Coast of America, and he would later convince Thomas Jefferson of the importance of the West Coast to the United States.
During the early nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans were fond of reading about exotic adventures. The London edition of La Perouse's Voyage Round the World (1798) explained the importance of the American Northwest Coast for Louis XVI's court and would come to have a profound impact on Jefferson's behavior later.
Among the best-known books in America were George Vancouver's A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean (1793), which contributed to the geographical knowledge of the Columbia River Basin and its vicinity, and Alexander Humboldt's Political Essay of the Kingdom of the New Spain, published in New York in 1811, which had an enormous impact on Jefferson and on the American intellectual community. Also popular were the detailed accounts of the British Northwest Company man, Alexander MacKenzie, whose Voyage from Montreal through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean in 1789 and 1793 was published in 1801, and the New Englander Robert Shaler's Journal of Voyage between China and the North West Coast of America in the Year 1804, which popularized the possibilities of American trans-Pacific commerce.
Books used for teaching purposes within the United States established another category of literature that had permanent repercussions for Americans. For example, Reverend Jedidiah Morse's children's texts, Geography Made Easy (1784) and Elements of Geography (1895), greatly influenced the young generations' perceptions of the West and the Pacific seacoast.
The Cartographical Background
The analysis of published maps divulges not only the development of geographical knowledge and international rivalries among the powers but also the beliefs and assumptions of their mapmakers and owners. At the same time, maps influenced subsequent explorations, war, and commerce.
America's cartographical background is primarily the product of Western cartographical knowledge accumulated over the centuries. Examples of the fifteenth-century contributions are Francesco Berlingheri's 1482 Geographia, one of the earliest printed Ptolomaic maps of the world, and the celebrated Nüremberg Chronicle, in which appear the images of non-Europeans as they were perceived at the time.
During the sixteenth century, the great voyages of discovery hastened the development of cartography. Gerardus Mercatus, and his forty-seven editions of Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditiones de Fabrica Mundi, had a formidable impact on his contemporaries and future generations, as did Ortelius, whose 1586 Typis Orbis Terrarum and 1590 Maris Pacifici were good barometers of late sixteenth-century cartographical knowledge. The Pacific remained full of maritime monsters and demonstrated a mythical Southern Continent, but it had no exact dimensions. The 1587 Hakluyt map and the 1596 Balgrave map showed the early British concern and knowledge for the Pacific at that time.
Despite some specialists' suggestions that the seventeenth century was a period of great geographical development, the Pacific, as a region, did not receive much attention. Some areas, such as Japan, however, were mapped thoroughly by Jesuit cartographers. In the next century, the search for new markets produced accurate maps of specific parts of China, but the graphic image of Japan remained static. Because of Japan's isolationism, cartographers merely copied and reproduced earlier images. The image of parts of the Pacific Basin was inaccurate and incomplete at the end of the eighteenth century, even though the ocean had been sailed by Cook a decade earlier.
Cartographic images of the Pacific prepared by the same country, and even by the same family of cartographers, did not necessarily become more accurate over time. Such is the case of the De L'Isle family, whose Hemisphere of 1724 was more accurate than those produced forty or fifty years later.
British cartography of the Pacific Ocean, especially that of Faden-Jefferys and Arrowsmith, showed an increasing British concern for the Pacific and Australia, then named New Holland. The Arrowsmith family, through its connections with commercial companies, greatly collaborated in the description of the Pacific Basin.
By 1791, S. Whittemore Boggs argues, American geographical knowledge of the Pacific was "fragmentary," but there was a deep interest in the area. America's firsthand knowledge of the Pacific increased with the fur trade with China and, especially after 1792, with the activities of whalers and sandalwood traders across the ocean.
The American perception of the Pacific was also documented in charts, plans, and maps published in America around 1800. Assuming that quantity and subject matter denote the preference of Americans, of the 915 published maps, forty-one were of Asia (especially China), and twenty were of South America's Pacific shore. There were forty-three maps of the world, of which ten depicted Cook's voyages, and nine were of the latest discoveries in the South Pacific. The Pacific region held geopolitical interest for Americans, and the increasing number of maps of the area drawn in the last two decades of the eighteenth century substantiates this.
The American domestic reproduction and elaboration of maps increased in the early nineteenth century. In 1802, Nathaniel Bowitch published his famous The New American Practical Navigator, but sailing the Pacific Ocean still continued to be difficult because of numerous geographical features not mentioned in the nautical maps. The American government was committed to obtaining geographical knowledge about the access to the ocean through the American continent and about the Pacific Ocean itself. A good example of such governmental commitments are the 1818 Rector and Roberdeau's "Sketches," which show how quickly the results of the Lewis and Clark expedition were transferred to mapmaking and contributed to the American idea of the Pacific shore. In his 1825 Address to the Congress, President John Quincy Adams recommended sending a scientific expedition to map the Pacific. The congressional and popular support for his initiative was obtained, in great part, because of Jeremiah N. Reynolds, who traveled extensively throughout the nation demanding that official expeditions be sent to the Pacific and to the Antarctic.
In the early nineteenth century, the United States had a certain image of the Pacific area based on literary and cartographical backgrounds. This image was neither completely accurate nor balanced. Asia attracted attention, especially China and Japan, because of its perceived wealth. Latin America obtained limited attention, while the islands, especially those of the South Pacific, were considered idyllic paradises. This image would crystallize because of both the international situation and the interests of the ruling elites.
International Affairs
The international rivalries among European powers certainly influenced the American image of the Pacific. Moreover, America had inherited from the English its interest in trade, some of its sailors, and the belief in the necessity of controlling the seas. In 1783, John Ledyard, a former member of Cook's expedition, was the first person to attempt to persuade American merchants to finance trading ventures between the Northwest Coast and China. Robert Morris, Robert Gray, and John Kenrick were pioneers of trans-Pacific commerce, and between 1794 and 1814, ninety American ships arrived at the Northwest Pacific Coast, while only a dozen of British origin did so.
After the Nootka Sound Controversy, an agreement established British navigational rights and also allowed settlements on the Northwest Coast in places not already occupied by either power. Later, the United States and Spain signed an important treaty in 1819 that revealed the strength of the Pacific image in American decision-makers' minds. In accordance with that agreement, America obtained a title to transcontinental domain. Secretary of State Adams recognized, "The acknowledgment of a definite line of boundary to the South Seas forms a great epoch in our history."
In the 1800s, America grew concerned that France might regain control of Louisiana as the first step to reestablishing the French Empire in America. When President Jefferson received the information that Napoleon sought to sell the Louisiana territory in 1803, he seized the opportunity to consolidate America's rights to the West and to the Pacific Coast. With the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis-Clark expedition, Jefferson commenced a new era that continued to build the American image of the Pacific. In the period from 1803 to 1819, the Pacific Coast gained recognition as an integral part of American territory. The popularization of these sentiments would occur in the 1840s with the California gold rush and the rise of San Francisco as the most important port of the West Coast.
The Russians' expedition to Northeast Asia in 1785, their victories against Napoleonic armies, and their expansion and settlement along the Northwest Coast concerned both the British and the Americans. In 1821, an imperial ukase declared the North Pacific from the Bering Straits to the 51st parallel closed to trade and navigation by vessels of any power other than Russia. The American response was clear with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, and the Russians did not challenge this.
British interest in the West was sustained by two national economic institutions—the Hudson Bay and Northwest Companies—who were engaged in a fierce struggle for the control of Northwest trade. During the War of 1812, English Canadians succeeded in dominating the area, and, with the capture and later purchase of Fort Astoria, the British Northwest Company was "in virtual control of the whole Rocky Mountains as far south as it chose to go." According to William Goetzmann, however, they were "merely fur traders" and were not yet looking for a place to settle permanently. Trade and international rivalries exposed the real value America placed on the Northwest Coast and the trans-Pacific commerce, and they undoubtedly encouraged pursuit of American hegemony in the area.
Thomas Jefferson and His Policies
By the time of Thomas Jefferson's 1801 presidential inauguration, the American idea of the Pacific was nearing crystallization. America simply needed leaders who could understand the feelings Americans had about the Pacific and who would encourage the integration of the Pacific into daily life through well-defined policies. Jefferson, whose vast geographical knowledge was augmented by political pragmatism, fostered a metamorphosis of the American perception of the Pacific from a rich, but vague, notion to one that demanded concrete governmental policies that protected American interests.
During his stay in Paris as ambassador, Jefferson met John Ledyard, who informed him of the possibilities of the trans-Pacific fur trade. Jefferson bought "a pretty full collection of English, French, and Spanish authors, on the subject of Louisiana," and these books would later become useful to him. Charles Sanford appropriately asserts that Jefferson's libraries were important because of their "influence upon Jefferson's thought and life and, through him, upon American history." A listing of his collection of works on American geography and exploration occupies 197 pages in Millicent Sowerby's Annotated Catalog, an accurate barometer of the president's interest therein. Some of these books would help him prepare memorandums for Congress and provide him with historical arguments for later international controversies.
According to Merril Peterson, Jefferson's ideas about the Pacific Coast were formed "about the time of the American revolution." Therefore, it is not surprising that he sponsored the 1793 Andre Michaux transcontinental expedition to the Pacific Ocean, and when the presidency was his, he personally prepared another transcontinental expedition. He selected Meriwether Lewis, his personal secretary, to be chief of the exploration, and William Clark of the United States Army to be the second-in-command, and he carefully studied all the maps available to him, even the most recent by Soutard, MacKay, and Evans.
Jefferson obtained money from Congress to, in the Spanish ambassador's words, "discover the way by which the Americans may someday extend their population and their interest up the coast of the South Sea." In 1804, when Lewis and Clark left St. Louis, they were traversing American territory because the Purchase of Louisiana had become a reality. They were also the vanguard for thousands of settlers who, in the mid-nineteenth century, would create an American empire stretching to the Pacific.
After his presidential years, Jefferson continued to be concerned about the West and the Pacific. In 1811, he encouraged John Astor, the New York fur magnate, to send expeditions to the mouth of the Columbia River with the purpose of establishing a permanent American outpost in the Northwest and developing the trans-Pacific fur trade with Canton.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production by Rob Wilson, Arif Dirlik. Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production / Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik 1Mappings
Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific / M. Consuelo León 17
Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years / Christopher L. Connery 30
Chemical Weapons Discourse in the "South Pacific" / William A. Callahan and Steve Olive 57
Shrinking the Pacific / Lawson Fusao Inada 80
Memory / Lawson Fusao Inada 82
Turning It Over / Lawson Fusao Inada 84
Our Sea of Islands / Epeli Hau'ofa 86
Movements
Sacred Sites and the City: Urban Aboriginality, Ambivalence, and Modernity / John Fielder 101
From the Politics of Identity to an Alternative Cultural Politics: On Taiwan Primoridal Inhabitants' A-systemic Movement / Chiu Yen Liang (Fred) 120
Pasts and Futures
Cultural Construction and Native Nationalism: Report from the Hawaiin Front / Jeffrey Tobin 147
Hawai'i / Haunani-Kay Trask 170
Da Mainland to Me / Joseph P. Balaz 175
Childhood as Fiction / Subramani 177
Three Poems for Kenzaburo Oe / Albert Wendt 204
Reading toward the Indigenous Pacific: Patricia Grace's Potiki, a Case Study / Miriam Fuchs 206
The Last Frontier: Memories of the Postcolonial Future in Keri Hulme's the bone people / Chris Bongie 226
The 747 Poem / Terese Svoboda 250
The Little Grass Shack / Terese Svoboda 251
Flows
The Possibility of Imagination in These Islands / Tsushima Yuko (Translated by Geraldine Harcourt; Introduction by Masao Miyoshi) 255
Imaginings in the Empires of the Sun: Japanese Mass Culture in Asia / Leo Ching 262
The Hong Kong Immigrant and the Urban Landscape: Shaping the Transnational Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital / Katharyne Mitchell 284
Postmodernism and American Cultural Difference: Dispatches, Mystery Train, and The Art of Japanese Management / Thomas Carmichael 311
America's Hiroshima, Hiroshima's America / Peter Schwenger and John Whittier Treat 324
The Pulling of Olap's Canoe / Theophil Saret Rueney, translator 345
Contributors 351
Index 355