I have been wrestling with this problem for a while and this is the my progress so far. It is not a literary analysis as I am accustomed to writing, but it is an analysis none the less. It is different than anything I have every submitted to a literature class but, this is a literature class unlike any I have had before.
The term colony does not indicate a place but a condition. To say that some place is a colony, (French, British, German, English, Dutch, American, etc) is a syntactic deception. The place is always itself, the colony is only an orientation others take towards it. This is akin to calling a running person a runner. They are not a runner, they have the condition of running--they are a person. In this way Hawaii is not, nor ever was, a colony, but has the property of being colonized, which is the property of being approached by specific people for specific purposes in a specific way. Hawaii’s Story cannot be a post-colonial document because Hawaii was never a colony. It was always Hawaii, it is still Hawaii, and it still is exploited in the same way. It is a Hawaiian document recording continual colonial forces. In this way Liliuokalani’s story is actually Hawaii’s story, it is the story of non-Hawaiian forces, both coercive and brutally physical, exploiting a person for colonial purposes. Hawaii is in what resists, is in Liliuokalani’s resistance.
Furthermore, to call something post-colonial is to define it by negation. Every text can be defined as the response to something else, but we do not call continental american literature post-european. It embodies the time before it and its present, so that it is not thought of as being “post”, for the past is rich in it. It, in fact, would not be possible without the past continued in it.
When a person refers to the state Hawaii they are signifying something other than what I consider Hawaii. This double signification is not merely something I have created, or else the redundancy in the term “Native Hawaiian” would be obvious. A Hawaiian is someone native to Hawaii--if otherwise is possible than the word Hawaii must have more than one meaning. The second meaning is the contemporary equivalent to "Colony". Calling the state of being subjected to the United States "Hawaii" is metonymy, the subjection is merely "next" to Hawaii. This is not to say that a Hawaiian exploited or inundated into another culture is no longer a Hawaiian, this is to say that their condition is more than Hawaiian. People are more than the conditions they are currently subject to, their pasts live in them. Likewise, they adopt more self as they grow. There is more in them that is more than their being subjected to some condition or circumstance than their past. We are creators of ourselves.
Joseph Watkins
Joseph -
ReplyDeleteYou're emerging as the class' semiotic strongman - excellent work. I thoroughly enjoyed the read.
- Trey
I think understand what you're asserting (after some furious thumbing through my Merriam-Webster), but I'm wondering why giving a colony a geographic location is a false-hood? Does the same follow for a campsite? That it is really a patch of land I am camping on, and therefore doesn't deserve the term "campsite" simply because it was something before I decided to camp on it?
ReplyDelete(If my assumption is way off then you can stop reading here, because I'm continuing upon that assumption...)
To follow that reasoning, then wouldn't Hawaii not belong to the Hawaiians? Rather, wouldn't it belong to whatever creature first began dwelling on the mountains after they rose from the sea? (to continue with the above example, is said campsite really a wolf-den, because I years ago the wolves were chased away by the coming of man?)
I think a part of your post was intended to re-assert the right to ownership that the "Native Hawaiian" people have to their land... But I feel like if we redefine the ways in which we deal with terms regarding identity and ownership, then all it will serve to do is prove that there isn't truly any inherited ownership that we, as creatures arriving so late to this planets development, have over any single patch of land or sea.
If I completely misinterpreted this then please let me know, and I'm sorry for ranting under completely false premises...
And I also promise for the multiple typos.
ReplyDelete"Promise"!?
ReplyDelete**Apologize.
Jeez, I am blowing it.
Thank you for your comments. I have a reply, I hope it allows for mutuality.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say something is a campsite because you are camping there, you are referring to it as it suits your individual purpose. A campsite is an orientation towards a place. As an indice to locality, it is that locality as it suits your purpose. Hawaii is the same, an orientation, and to say Hawaii is not what the Hawaiians say, is to refuse their will to self determination. This is tantamount to me telling you your campsite is actually a plot of dirt (to use your example). Hawaii is not a plot of dirt, nor is it a topographical location, it is a construct belonging to a certain people. Your construct "campsite" is just as valid, as is the plot of dirt orientation, or the colony, the disparate orientations are not inherently exclusive of each other (I can call apples jimjims and think of jimjims as a composting agent while you think of apples as apples which are food, and our thoughts don't fight for apples, we do). They are merely orientations towards what existed before either perspective was developed, as you noted. They are not, however, the same orientation. The place can be subject to multiple orientations, this is the idea that my argument hinges on. To say, however, that what you call a campsite is actually only a plot of dirt, is to assert the ascendancy/superiority/arrogance of one perspective over the other. Furhter, to appropriate your term "miesueur's campsite" (just imagining that is what you call it) to mean the place I conceptualize as a plot of dirt, is to do a small violence against you. If I went to your campsite and started using it as, say, a bathroom (just, you know, because mere plot of dirt doesn't have a use specified the same way colony does. I don't know, it was the first thing that came to mind when I started thinking of uses for plots of dirt), and started calling my bathroom Miesueur's Campsite, that would be something semiotically akin to calling Hawaii the 50th state.
Okay, I think I fully grasp what you're saying, now. Since the only examples in your original post were both Hawaii and the word "Colony," I assumed that you were trying to assert that Hawaii was "special" in some case when it came to the identity that has been robbed with the "reassigning" of their lands. Looking back, you never implied anything to this end, so I must have projected that on to the post while I read it (sorry about that).
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm still having trouble finding what has been making Hawaii such a different and notable case for colonialism (the only real changes I've noticed have been the LACK of brutality and exploitation from the invading parties-- at least compared to more classic examples [Africa, the Native Americans, etc.]).
Back to the point: I was assuming (incorrectly, so again, I apologize) that you were saying something along the lines of "When you think about it, colonialism isn't fair because we're assigning an identity to a people that already have one, so it's really messed up that we did that to the Hawaiian's specifically..." (I understand that is a gross simplification and undressing of what was actually stated). So the issue I was taking was how your assertions apply to Hawaii, but nowhere else, since the content of the post was directed specifically towards Hawaii.
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
Thinking in terms of relative atrocity can be a way to play down suffering by comparing it to the perceived intensity of other instances. It can be kind of like telling a person who lost a leg that they aren't special because someone else lost both. Any situation can be approached as notable merely because it is, or was, made by real people with specific struggles, joys, ideas, stories, from which we can learn and become more than our current selves. That said, yeah I'm kind of struggling to find something I can latch onto and analyze the hell out of as well (that is what I do, I suppose it may not be what you do, but the problem is the same in the respect of, what to write about? maybe you could write about the "softer" forms of undermining, debasing and overthrowing a people? I mean, if that is what you notice as being different, maybe that is what makes it notable?)
ReplyDeleteThe only thoughts that keep surfacing when I try to reflect on the individuality of Hawaii's "situation," are loosely related to how the world powers of the time were methodically, and knowingly manipulating Hawaii away from the hands of the Hawaiians without the use of force. It seems as if we were "grooming" the Hawaiians for annexation for quite a while.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this was one of the earlier forms of nearly entirely political colonialism? I'm not familiar with the time-line of colonialism (couldn't say if Costa Rica started being taken over before Hawaii or vice versa), so I can't speculate on anything that is backed up by facts... But it seems like maybe this was one of the beginning instances of a vaster power using the tools at its disposal (other than brute strength) to absorb a land and its peoples.
I guess the significance of that would be that it helped back up the possibility that the world was starting to turn towards a type 1 civilization, where an evasion of blame, or ambiguity of guilt, is starting to become harder to attain...?
But still, all of that has to do with how larger nations interact under the scrutiny of the world view, not on the Hawaiian people and their sufferings (which seems to be what the class is more aimed towards), so I still feel at a loss.
The Police. Every time a Hawaiian is evicted or arrested for breaking a united states law we are talking about brute force.
ReplyDeleteHere is also an alternate approach, the threat of brute force is a use of brute force. The armed forces, the navy for example, exists partially as a potentiality for violence. The potential for this is an essential part of its being a navy. If force were not invested in them, they would not be effective--especially in situations where the brute force is not expressed in its totality, like the Bayonet Constitution.
I'd like to get to some other issues here but I don't have time right now. Soon. I appreciate your parle.
Many struggles which the Hawaiians faced and face are directly related to how the "larger nations" have dealt and deal with them. These dealings were/are justified by conceptions of the Pacific people. The re-imagining of a nation (say, in blue hawaii, or that movie we saw clips of on wednesday) is partly an obfuscation of the "guilt" that you talked about type 1 civilizations being unable to evade, and its misrepresentation of the "Islanders" is something that contemporary local writers regularly show to be inaccurate and harmful. The evolution of literature generated in and/or about Hawaii is shown in the first article of the reader, and discursively details the evolution of this literary dialectic. There is something to write about which especially pertains to literature.
ReplyDeleteIt is a shame that Hawaii seems to be one of the last nations that "sneaked in" under the old world methods of colonialism, before world view was expanded through the media.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there were large scale riots or protests immediately following annexation, or soon thereafter? Because the only instances I recall hearing about are from the 1960's and on. The two questions I would have from there are (and I'm not asking you in particular, they're largely rhetorical, and meant only for contemplation-- I understand you don't have a degree in Hawaiian studies):
One, does this mean that the Hawaiian people were simply content with reaping the near sighted benefits of having a tourist driven nation? But once the disadvantages (crowding, real estate prices, importing of large corporations, etc.), that's when the nativism movement really picked up steam?
If not, then,
Two, were there protests in the "early days," and there just wasn't a media outlet large enough to attract global interest, and THEN the people grew complacent under the wing of the US, until recently?
It seems pretty clear that many people disagree with the annexation of Hawaii, but it seems like the reasons, motivations, and actions of those people are scattered, which makes this situation even the more likely to not become resolved. I feel like there is no clear "We're ALL unhappy, and we've been unhappy since the very beginning!" among the Hawaiians.... Maybe that is why I am having difficulty relating to their cause specifically?
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ReplyDeleteIf someone punched me in the face and I didn't punch them back until they also kicked me in the shins, does this make my punch somehow less worthy, less notable, a self defense? And I'm not saying that this metaphor accurately represents what happened, I'm just saying, is it somehow less legitimate or more legitimate whether they starting protesting right away or some eighty years later?
ReplyDelete"Relating to their cause" is not the same as understanding (to some degree) the various conditions from which emerge the various causes that frame and contextualize various literatures--the latter allows specificity and analysis, the former reduces dynamic amalgamation to conveniently broad generalization.
And: I wanted to point out that my bathroom v. camp analogy was just a simplification in order to make the relationships between categories more salient. This is a regular tool for solving logic puzzles (as the apples and jimjims example attests to). Neither is colonialism a type of defecation nor Hawaiian ethnicity a type of camping, just as Colonialism is not Jimjims and Hawaiian ethnicity not apples. These are categories which operate within the functions of logic according to specific rules, they are analogous to each other in how the rules apply to them. Just, you know, so people don't get the wrong idea, or if they do, that I can point them to this paragraph.
That said, categories, as Deleuze points out, do not rely on sameness but difference. This is "the rub". In fact, there is no unified orientation toward anything. The life of a symbol is always made up of disparate and commingling concepts, fragments, memories, habits, traditions, etc, that make up contiguities without stable or exclusive borders, yet persever in and by their utility. Which returns us to my idea about a diversity of causes and conditions being a more accurate depiction of any protest than a description of it as a unity.