After reading both Rob’s article
and Franklin and Lyon’s article Remixing
Hybridity, I found myself questioning this curious statement. Now to be clear, Franklin and Lyon’s state
that his definition of “culture,” which they define as a ‘quest for states and
mixtures not of identity but self-transcendence, impurity, outreach,’ only “sometimes
diminishes or erases attention to history” (176). However, do Rob’s examples of Hawaiian postcolonial
works, and thus expressions of modern Hawaiian culture, definitely and/or
constantly deny aspects of Hawaiian history?
Nope:
- Featherston’s 26 Islands not only references
Hawaiian place names, and thus its unadulterated past, but also the leper
colonies on Moloka’i
- Banggo’s 4-evaz, Anna use of “hard-core
pidgin English” and its “underworld” setting ripe with “drugs, sex and
brutalized ecstasy” shows the effects of American intervention in Hawaii as
seen in the present
- Joseph Balaz interact with
Hawaiian history in a similar way, except he uses “expressive humor…wit
and joy” as an expression of the present as opposed to a darker
representation
- Saijo’s experimental
poetry renders Hawaii as part of a more global history as it is “tied into
the larger ecology systems of the planet and the political economy of the
US war machine”
- And so forth…
All of the examples that appear
within Rob’s essay do not “diminish or erase attention to history,” they embrace
aspects/moments/places within Hawaiian history, often as an exploration of how
U.S. colonialism affects the present.
Thus, it seems ludicrous that Franklin and Lyons can say that Rob’s
“mongrel poetics…focuses on style at the expense of history,” when the
postcolonial works that Rob references in Reimagining
the American Pacific explicitly reference Hawaii’s unfortunate past.
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