Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific

Discourses of Encounter

Michelle Keown, Andrew Taylor, Mandy Treagus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135016692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This interdisciplinary collection explores the confluence of American and British (neo)imperalism in the Pacific, as represented in various forms of Pacific discourse including literature, ethnography, film, painting, autobiography, journalism, and environmental discourse. It investigates the alliances and rivalries between these two colonial powers during the crucial transition period of the early-to-mid twentieth century, also exploring indigenous Pacific responses to Anglo-American imperialism during and beyond the decolonization period of the late twentieth century. While the relationship between Britain and the US has been analyzed through prominent forms of economic and cultural exchange between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, there is to date no sustained study of the relationship between British and US colonial expansion into the Pacific, which became central to ideas of developing 'European' modernity in the late eighteenth century and has played a pivotal in the history of Anglo-American colonialism, from the establishment of plantation economies and settler colonies in the nineteenth century to various forms of military imperialism during and beyond the twentieth century. The wide range of discursive and expressive modes explored in this collection makes for a rich and multifaceted analysis of representations of, and responses to, Anglo-American imperialism, and is in keeping with the current interdisciplinary turn in postcolonial studies.

Part I

Military, Religious and Cultural Imperialism in Pacific Literature

1 War and Redemption

Militarism, Religion and Anti-Colonialism in Pacific Literature

Michelle Keown

Anglo-American religious and military forces have played a pivotal role in imperial and decolonizing agendas in the Pacific. In exploring the nexus between these institutions, this more extended initial chapter (which offers an overview of key issues explored in more detail in subsequent chapters) begins with a brief overview of the complex relationships between missionaries and capitalists in the nineteenth-century Pacific, tracing the ways in which official published accounts of missionary successes in the Pacific were challenged in the work of influential Anglo-American literary figures such as Herman Melville, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, all of whom criticized the worldly leanings of evangelists imbricated in colonial economic exploitation. This is followed by an investigation of the confluence of religion and militarism in various anticolonial movements that developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and within US discourse surrounding the era of nuclear testing in the Pacific. Later sections of the chapter analyze antinuclear literature by indigenous Pacific writers, taking the work of Marshallese performance poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner as a case study. As I will demonstrate, where US atomic discourse occluded the destructive power of the nuclear bomb by positing nuclear testing as a natural, divinely sanctioned process enabling the establishment of world peace, the work of Jetnil-Kijiner and other indigenous Pacific authors exposes the immense environmental and corporeal damage caused by irradiation, revealing what eco-critic Rob Nixon terms the ‘slow violence’ that disproportionately affects peoples subjected to Western (neo)colonial hegemony.

Missionary Enterprises in the Nineteenth-Century Pacific

Following the arrival of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Tahiti in 1797, Christianity was to become a bastion of Anglo-American imperialism in the Pacific, and its legacy is manifest in the fact that the Pacific Islands remain one of the most intensively Christianized regions in the world (Teaiwa 2000b; Wendt 1976). Yet the relationship between Christianity and imperialism in the Pacific is complex and multifaceted. In many respects, missionaries supported the ‘civilising mission’ that provided an ostensibly moral basis for British and US imperial expansion, seeking to eradicate putatively ‘barbaric’ customs such as sexual promiscuity, tattooing, ritual warfare and infanticide, and to instill in islanders the Christian values that undergirded British and American imperial culture (Edmond 1997; Keown 2007). Yet, many missionaries also opposed the capitalist values that motivated colonial expansion, attempting to mitigate what they viewed as the deleterious influence of traders, beachcombers and other forces of Westernization and commercialization (such as prostitution) over Pacific Islanders (see Fischer 2002, 107).

Some missionaries, however, were closely imbricated in capitalist enterprises in the Pacific. Evangelists from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (which established a presence in Hawai‘i in 1820) played an instrumental role in persuading King Kamehameha III to lease native Hawaiian land to the American sugar company Ladd & Co. in 1835, and in 1851, two Board missionaries, Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke, themselves founded one of the ‘Big Five’ sugar companies that came to dominate the plantation era economy in Hawai‘i (Hitch 1992, 50, 90). Although the founding of Castle & Cooke resulted largely from the Board withdrawing funding from its Hawai‘i mission in 1849 (having decided that it should become self-supporting), by then the more worldly leanings of Hawaiian Board missionaries had already become the target for satire in mid-nineteenth-century texts such as Herman Melville’s Typee (1846), a blend of ethnography, autobiography and fiction emerging from Melville’s experiences in the Typee Valley after jumping ship in the Marquesas in 1842. At the end of a chapter reflecting (inter alia) upon the physical and social ills brought to Pacific peoples as a result of contact with Westerners, the narrator Tommo (a fictionalized version of Melville) claims that funds donated to the Sandwich Islands mission are spent not on the ‘conversion’ of the Hawaiians but rather are diverted into creating luxurious living conditions for the missionaries while ‘the miserable natives are committing all sorts of immoralities around them’ (190). Over half a century later, similar views were expressed in Jack London’s 1911 short story ‘Good-By, Jack,’ where the narrator archly observes that while the nineteenth-century missionaries and traders in Hawai‘i appeared to be ‘mortal enemies’ with conflicting interests and values, ‘their children made it up by inter-marrying and dividing the islands between them’ (1989, 112). This unholy alliance between missionizing and mercantilism is comparably linked with British imperialism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s fin-de-siècle novel The Ebb-Tide (1894), where an upper-class English entrepreneur named Attwater establishes a monopoly over the pearl-fishing trade on a little-known Pacific island by subduing the locals through a combination of old-testament Christianity and calculated brutality. (See Mandy Treagus’s essay in this volume for further discussion of Christianity and missionaries in the Pacific.)

Though the published works of many nineteenth-century missionaries and fiction writers established a stereotypical conquest narrative that posited ‘childlike’ (albeit often ‘devious’ and ‘savage’) Pacific Islanders abandoning their local religions in response to the labors of indomitable Anglo-American evangelists,¹ in reality conversion was a more complex and attenuated process. The private correspondence of LMS and other Anglo-American missionaries reveals a widespread anxiety that conversions were superficial and readily reversed, and rather than constituting a categorical abandonment of traditional cultural practices, they were often prompted by local strategic considerations such as the desire for enhancement of prestige and political power, or the accumulation of wealth and material goods (Edmond 1997, 121; Linnekin 1997, 21–22; Thomas 2010a, 115–16). Revisionist historiography produced from the 1960s onward has made use of such evidence to replace earlier ‘fatal impact’ models of colonization in the Pacific (which posited Islanders as ‘hapless victims of Western political and technical superiority,’ as Jocelyn Linnekin puts it) with paradigms emphasizing indigenous agency and pragmatism (Linnekin 1997, 24).² This shift in perspective has shed new light on the role of indigenous converts in the spread of Christianity: in 1968, for example, Pākehā (white) New Zealand historian Ron Crocombe and his Cook Islander wife Marjorie published The Works of Ta‘unga, an English translation of the writings of an early nineteenth-century Cook Island Māori missionary who produced some of the earliest ethnographic accounts of New Caledonians.

This new phase of revisionist historical scholarship coincided with the decolonization era in the Pacific (with Western Samoa the first to gain independence in 1962) and also witnessed the emergence of a generation of indigenous creative writers who began to assess the legacies of Christianity in the Pacific. In his 1976 essay ‘Towards a New Oceania,’ influential Samoan writer and critic Albert Wendt cites ni-Vanuatu writer Albert Leomala’s lyric poem ‘Kros’—in which he charges Christian missionaries with annihilating Pacific lifeways—as one of the most vehement early denunciations of Christianity as the evangelizing arm of colonialism in the Pacific. Western-educated characters in the work of Wendt’s younger compatriot Sia Figiel trace contemporary constraints upon Samoan female sexuality back to the teachings of nineteenth-century LMS missionaries, while Wendt himself has denounced missionary attempts to eradicate Pacific religions and cultural practices such as tattooing and carving (Figiel 1996, 10–11; Wendt 1976 and 1996). Yet Wendt does not go so far as to suggest that Christianity has simply suppressed and supplanted Indigenous Pacific religions: instead, and in keeping with the revisionist historiography mentioned above, his fiction points toward the ways in which Pacific peoples have indigenized Christianity, adapting it to existing structures of belief, social exchange and political power. One of his most recent articulations of this paradigm appears in The Adventures of Vela (2009), an epic novel-in-verse that traces Samoan history from creation to the present day and features among its large cast of characters the Samoan war goddess Nafanua, who (according to legend) prophesied the coming of Christianity to Samoa (where the first LMS missionaries arrived in 1830). One of Nafanua’s priests, Auva‘a, pragmatically observes that politico-religious systems rise and fall depending on the mana (charisma and authority) of their proponents, and argues that given the ascendancy of Christianity, ‘To survive It we must join It and conquer It from within’ (Wendt 2009, 272). The end of the narrative bears out Auva‘a‘s judgement, as the narrator travels with Vela to present-day Samoa and learns that a descendant of Nafanua has been appointed as Cardinal of the Catholic Church. Such a scenario resonates with the interpretation of conversion as political expediency expressed in the private correspondence of the nineteenth-century missionaries, while elsewhere in his work, Wendt explores the ways in which precolonial Samoan rituals involving public gift exchange have inflected contemporary Samoan practices surrounding donations to the church and clergy. Often this gives Wendt occasion for satirical observations on the corrupt methods of worldly members of the Samoan clergy who exploit their parishioners’ generosity (Wendt 1979, 1987; see also Keown 2005, 28–30). Similar dynamics are evident in the satiri-comic fiction of Epeli Hau‘ofa (born in Papua New Guinea to Tongan missionary parents), who published a range of short stories featuring biblical parody and ecclesiastical corruption in his 1983 collection Tales of the Tikongs. As Rob Wilson notes, Hau‘ofa’s work can be understood in the context not just of biblical parody but of indigenous counter-conversion: his fictional characters transform ‘the Protestant work ethic into a Pacific regime of play, relaxation, mockery, transgression, and escape’ (2009, 131). In a similarly counter-discursive context, Hau‘ofa’s influential essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’ (1990) describes his own ‘road to Damascus’ in which he resolves to eschew (neo)colonial representations of the Pacific as a constellation of tiny ‘islands in a far sea’ dependent on Western products and aid, and instead embrace a new regional ‘Oceanic’ politico-ideological identity grounded in centuries of interdependent exchange between Pacific Island peoples (Hau‘ofa 2008, 30, 31).

Other indigenous Pacific writers have explored the ways in which Christianity has been turned to explicitly anticolonial purposes, adding a further layer of complexity to the overlapping strands of missionary and colonial enterprise in the Pacific. In his revisionist historical novels The Matriarch (1986) and The Dream Swimmer (1997), New Zealand Māori author Witi Ihimaera illuminates the ways in which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century millennialist leaders such as Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and Rua Kenana posited colonized Māori as equivalent to the enslaved Israelites in Egypt, representing the Pākehā (British) settlers as comparable to the oppressive ‘Pharaoh’ who should be ‘driven into the sea’ to allow Māori to return to their own ‘promised land’ (see also Keown 2005). In the Western Pacific, Papua New Guinean authors Kama Kerpi and Earnest Mararunga have written of the anticolonial millennialist movements that developed in Melanesia during World War II, when contact with American troops (who brought material wealth and new technologies which they shared generously with Melanesians) prompted islanders to question the authority of their British and Australian colonial administrators (see Wendt 1980). These syncretic religious movements, popularly known as ‘cargo cults,’ sprang up as traditional aspirations for material reward; dissatisfaction with colonial rule; and introduced Christian doctrines of prophecy and deliverance combined to generate new faiths based on the belief that performing certain rituals would compel ancestors to bring Western material goods and deliverance from colonial forces (see Keown 2007, 83–87 and also the Introduction to this volume).

World War II and the Dawn of US Nuclear Imperialism

By the time the US responded to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, American imperialism had been galvanized for more than a century by the notion of Manifest Destiny, a belief that the westward territorial expansion of the US was both inexorable and sanctioned by God. While US motivations for incursion into the Pacific were manifold (as discussed in the Introduction), its operations in the Pacific during and beyond World War II witnessed an intensified confluence between Christian discourse and another bastion of American imperial culture: militarism.

Through the twentieth century, as Sasha Davis notes, America’s Pacific Island colonies became ‘critical nodes in the global projection of American military power,’ used to establish ‘global reach’ for American bombers, bases to protect trade areas, to test missile defense systems and to provide training grounds for soldiers garrisoned overseas (Davis 2015, 46). Manifest Destiny in the Pacific was undergirded by military might as well as notions of Divine providence, from the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy in 1893 to the dawning (and aftermath) of the nuclear era. In his 2015 monograph The Empire’s Edge, Davis explores the legacies of US imperialism in heavily militarized islands such as Guam, Hawai‘i, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands, noting that the main reason why many American territories in the Pacific have continued to be denied full independence is due to their strategic value (46–47; see also Firth 1987, 50–52 and the Introduction). Like the work of the various contributors to this volume, Davis’s book is distinctive in eschewing entrenched Anglo-centric representations of the Pacific, instead giving due consideration to indigenous epistemologies and various forms of discursive and material resistance to colonial hegemony. His motivations are twofold: not only to explore what he terms Pacific ‘affinity geopolitics’ (a model of inter-pelagic political mobilization comparable to Epeli Hau‘ofa’s interconnected ‘sea of islands’ paradigm), but also, as an ethically attuned Anglo scholar, to counter the ‘purposeful omission and outright discursive erasure of the lives of people who live on these islands’ within colonial discourse and to ‘enhance the political possibilities’ that indigenous discourse can create (Davis 2015, 2, 51). I aim to follow a similar trajectory in exploring Indigenous literary responses to one particular context of US military imperialism: nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands.

I have selected the Marshall Islands as a case study partly because early US atomic discourse, and particularly rhetoric surrounding the nuclear program in Micronesia, was permeated with Christian allusions that elided the destructive power of the bomb in favor of foregrounding its putatively redemptive potential as a vehicle for world peace. Further, within the substantial body of antinuclear literature and art produced by Pacific Islanders, until recently comparatively less attention has been focused on US testing in comparison to French nuclear experiments in the Pacific. This is partly because at the time at which indigenous Pacific literature in English began to gather momentum in the 1960s, American nuclear testing in Oceania had all but ended: the Marshall Islands tests (discussed in more detail further below) took place between 1946 and 1958, and there was a final series of tests at Johnston Atoll and Christmas Island (the latter a testing site shared with the UK) between 1958 and 1962. (All subsequent American tests have taken place within the continental US.) French testing, on the other hand, was conducted between 1966 and 1996 in French Polynesia (on Moruroa and Fangataufa in the Tuamotu Island group), and France garnered glo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Making and Unmaking the Anglo-American Pacific
• Introduction
• PART I Military, Religious and Cultural Imperialism in Pacific Literature
• PART II Transatlantic Trajectories in Pacific Film, Photography and the Visual Arts
• PART III Cross-Cultural Alliances and Tensions in Pacific Discourse
• Afterword: In Memoriam Teresia Teaiwa (1968–2017)
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index