2002
MLA
Globalization and the Image I: Imagining the Global
Juniper Ellis
Loyola College
World Environments: Mapping a Post-Natural Geography
Do not cite
without permission of the author.
Two key points
in examining differing forms of globalization in Oceania (the preferred
term for the islands that form the heart of the world's largest ocean,
the Pacific): first, Oceania is not an exceptional place that is before
language and beyond price. Rather, gift economies and other non-monetary
economies exist alongside global finances in Oceania, as in most of the
world. Second, the ocean is both natural and cultural. More than 40,000
years ago, people began traversing this region, first Pacific Islander
settlers and travelers, then beginning in the sixteenth century European
and, later, U.S. sailors. Water becomes Oceania, is navigated using star
charts, wind compasses, patterns of phosphorescence and ocean swell, and
maps of it are passed down orally from one navigator-priest to another.
For one hundred years European and U.S. powers prohibited Islanders from
seafaring in Oceania (Lepowsky 52, Howard 131), drawing boundaries across
Linnaean maps to create colonial groupings and then nations. Contemporary
Oceanic navigators, writers, and artists recover views of the ocean as
bridge rather than barrier.
Oceania's geography has thus been shaped by Pacific Islander settlers,
navigators, and travelers, by colonialism, by imperialism, and by decolonization.
Marked by human intervention and understanding, in all of these overlapping
eras Oceania is as much cultural as it is natural.
Elsewhere I investigate the way gift economies and global finances coexist
in the Pacific; here let us note that the Pacific economies that proceed
alongside world movements of capital arise from particular configurations
of the region's geography and, more broadly, revise ideas about the role
geography plays in globalization. Begin by noting that Oceania is and
has long been both regional and global, and that Oceania continues to
expand in economic and cultural forms not accounted for in current globalization
or development studies. Further, Oceania comes into being as differing
peoples create distinct maps of the region. That leads to the important
if basic observation that there is no completely natural geography, much
as there is no completely natural Oceania. Both geography and Oceania
arise from culture and nature, created by people marked by their ethos
as much as by the land and sea they observe in descrying the earth's contours
or a particular region therein.
Even an indigenous globalization, such as that expressed by Epeli Hau'ofa
in his poetic manifesto "Our Sea of Islands" (1993), moves toward
seeing the world as post-natural, the world's environments shaped in relation
to the human beings who apprehend them. More, geography, which derives
from the Greek geographein and means to describe [literally, to scratch
or write] the world's surface, plays a key role in this Oceanic globalization
as in all other forms of globalization. As I shall suggest, geography's
persistent importance overturns one of the tenets central to many theories
of globalization. In Oceania's post-natural geographies, the indigenous
and the global are not opposing terms, the one relying on roots sunk deep
in native ground, the other on routes far-flung across the globe. The
peoples of Oceania's continuing movement and expansion, represented in
Hau'ofa's work, represents an on-going process of globalizing the indigenous.
That leads us to another feature of contemporary Oceania, the concomitant
process of indigenizing globalization.
To first examine the ways in which people in Oceania are globalizing the
indigenous, Hau'ofa's essay "Our Sea of Islands" focuses upon
the vast and expanding region of Oceania. In his analysis the Pacific,
which spans one-fifth of the world, contains deep currents of history,
culture, and exchange that by extension revise many current theories of
globalization. Hau'ofa counters long-standing U.S. and European images
of the islands as bits of land adrift in an isolating sea with even longer-standing
Pacific Islander images of the islands as connected by the waters that
form seaways of travel and trade. The shift in imagery reveals dramatic
and previously inconceivable concepts and practices: far from conventional
economic and cultural wisdom, the islands are not inevitable dependents
of the global powers. Instead, just as the islands and ocean are always
connected, so too the peoples who live in Oceania have long been interdependent.
"There are no bounded economies in the region" ("South
Pacific" 11), notes Hau'ofa, and the oceanic islands are not tiny.
"Oceania is not small," he declares, "it is huge and growing
bigger every day" ("Sea" 6).
Hau'ofa documents the process he terms "world enlargement,"
wherein Pacific Islanders continue to move between "home" islands
and the largest "Pacific Island cities" in the world, including
Auckland and Los Angeles. (Hau'ofa's own biography exemplifies similar
travel, between his birth land Papua New Guinea, his ethnic homeland Tonga,
and his adopted home Fiji, where he has been a fiction-writer, anthropologist,
professor of development, and is currently director of the Oceania Centre
for Arts and Culture.) Islanders continue traditional practices of navigating
the region to practice gift economies and reciprocity (activities that
comprises almost eighty percent of the region's economies). People travel
within and across the Pacific to bring, for example, the Pacific root,
kava, and art, tatau, to other parts of the ever-expanding Oceania. Here,
Oceania itself is and has been for ages both regional and global. More,
this Oceania anticipates and substantiates Arjun Appadurai's recent call,
in Globalization (2001), for studies of "grassroots globalization"
or "globalization from below." What Hau'ofa documents are the
ways that people in Oceania are globalizing the indigenous.
The concomitant Oceanic move to indigenize globalization is perhaps most
evident in Albert Wendt's novel Black Rainbow (1992). The novel opens
in a futuristic New Zealand, an ostensible utopia in which the processes
of globalization are complete. The world is governed by Joseph Starr Linn
and twelve other presidents who own and control the major multi-national
corporations. The presidents eliminate war, death, and poverty, but also
ban history, metaphysics, privacy and any news that is not good news.
As the President's name indicates with its implicit references to Joseph
Stalin and Ringo Starr (and perhaps even the mid-twentieth-century exotic
dancer Blaze Starr), this global power is both tyrannical and media-driven,
almost pornographic in the performances it demands of its citizens.
At the novel's opening, the main character and narrator has just spent
twelve years relinquishing his personal history to a Tribunal that prescribes
the official process of Dehistorying. Having completed this process, the
appropriately unnamed narrator becomes an Ideal Citizen, but must search
for his family, whom the Tribunal has hidden from him. All the while he
must elude murderous pursuers and follow directions that read like a Monopoly
game writ large across New Zealand ("[C]ollect $1000," "You
have finally passed GO. The chase is on" [37, 42]). The Atlantic
City boardwalk, superimposed upon Pacific New Zealand's landscape, becomes
what the Tribunal terms the Game of Life. Late in the novel the narrator
learns that his Quest, his Game, has been broadcast the whole while as
a hit television show the entire world is watching. "Surveillance
was total" (229), the narrator states, identifying the panoptical
basis of the Tribunal's power.
Just as all geography is made by people describing the earth's surface,
and the geography exists rather in the description than the earth itself,
so too all environments in this book are post-natural, altered and created
by people. The narrator drives through "rolling man-made pine forests";
in the Tribunal's central twenty-seven sky-scrapers, all of which are
ninety-nine stories high, "No live vegetation was allowed in the
complex. All of it was art"; the Puzzle Palace, the Tribunal's central
building of power, named after the title of James Bamford's exposé
of the U.S. National Security Agency, contains suites "named after
indigenous trees, many now extinct"; nature and manufacture become
inseparable in such geographic features as "the forest of cloned
apartments" and "mountains and cliffs and canyons of buildings"
(38, 69, 177, 79, 264). This depiction is related to the idea that culture
has become a second nature, as Fredric Jameson suggests on the opening
page of Postmodernism (1991) when he declares that "nature is gone
for good," and that "'culture' has become a veritable 'second
nature'" (ix). In Jameson's work as in the Frankfurt School theorists'
considerations of "second nature," culture becomes a second-order
nature, for instance in the form of Walter Benjamin's Parisian Arcades,
antecedents of shopping malls, where images and buying are naturalized.
For Benjamin there are still places outside the Arcade, where something
other than culture's second nature might be; Jameson takes this idea one
step further, suggesting that nature is gone, and that we are left with
only culture. (The phrase "second nature," in both the Frankfurt
School and in Jameson, suggests implicitly that there is or was a first-order
nature; in Jameson that is the nature that is gone for good.)
What Wendt's portrayal of culture and nature enables us to discern, I
shall argue, is distinct from Jameson's idea. Culture and nature reciprocally
shape one another, and that mutual interaction creates the closest we
can get to a first-order environment. Wendt emphasizes that culture shapes
the way we see and experience nature, and thus (as the Frankfurt School
and Jameson suggest) culture is naturalized and becomes second nature.
But Wendt's focus upon indigenous geographies adds a new component to
the global utopia and to theories of second nature. Sometimes we see nature
through or within the cultures of globalization, sometimes through or
within other, here indigenous, cultures. If nature can be see in tandem
with another culture, then nature becomes a second culture; even more
importantly, nature becomes a second nature. Rather than naturalizing
culture, the effect is de-naturalize what were assumed to be primary or
dominant associations of nature and culture and re-constitute other, residual
or emergent associations of nature and culture. I will return to this
point later.
The novel juxtaposes indigenous and global geographies in three primary
ways that overlap and reinforce one another, revealing the place of the
indigenous in globalization. First, in the course of his travels the narrator
confronts his own place in New Zealand's geography and manages to identify
his own race and ethnicity in a process that reveals the world utopia
as a dystopia. Second, the novel's title, Black Rainbow, and one of the
novel's central images and sources of insight into the earth's shapes
comes from a lithograph of the same name created by Maori artist Ralph
Hotere to protest French nuclear testing in the early 1990s in Oceania.
Third, Wendt's novel invokes and transforms a welter of other sources,
including both indigenous and international geographies, as he presents
his narrator learning that his skin is brown, that history contains a
goodly amount of bad news, and that geography creates not one way of seeing
the earth but many.
The status of distance--and therefore of geography--is one of the concepts
central to globalization studies, which focus on three hallmarks: the
"abolition of trade barriers and liberalization of markets,"
the "standardization and homogenization" of goods and cultures,
and the "abolition of distance and time" (Hobsbawm 64, 66, 62).
Along these lines, globalization has been credited with freeing the flow
of capital (Barber 13, Held, et al, 165-67), promulgating a monoculture
(Friedman 102, 196, Schiller quoted in Buell 1), erasing distance and
ending history (Carey 2, Held, et al. 28, Robertson 6). Two of these three
claims are contested: some scholars question how free capital is, suggesting
that the "the free market is a construction of state power"
(Gray 7, 211), and others argue that "globalization is not the story
of cultural homogenization" (Appadurai "Modernity," 11),
but the assertion that distance and time are abolished are usually not
re-considered. Even more measured formulations of what happens to distance
in globalization speak of "time-space compression" or "action
at a distance," (Harvey 147, Giddens 4). That might be true for the
digital information or capital that travels the world in electronic seven-league
boots. But even the "transnational capitalist class" that Leslie
Sklair identifies as central to global power do not fit those boots. The
process of globalizing indigeneity that Hau'ofa describes (recall the
Oceanians who travel and trade around the world) and the process of indigenizing
globalization that Wendt portrays both rely upon the differing forms of
distance and of geography that continue to shape the world and the global.
One of the ways in which Wendt indigenizes globalization lies in his re-defining
of the indigenous. If any sources are privileged in this book, the indigenous
geographies are, as a way to challenge the utopia's monopoly of the entire
globe. Still, Wendt transforms even these geographies, presenting his
indigenous characters as a cultural and racial mix created historically
from the ranks of native Maori, immigrant Pacific Islanders, and settler-descended
whites who have resisted the global power of the utopia. This presentation
of indigeneity reflects Wendt's current position as a Western Samoan living
in Auckland, where he holds a chair in Pacific Literature and has formed
alliances with Maori and whites who work to decolonize the country. Tangata
Moni, the term he uses in the book for the people who resist the global
utopia, bears analogous linguistic mixtures. Though Wendt provides only
a literal English translation of the phrase and nowhere indicates his
linguistic sources, as indicated above, Tangata is Maori for people, literally,
the ones. Moni is Samoan for true, real. The only people who oppose the
Tribunal are the true ones. He combines Maori, New Zealand's indigenous
language, with Samoan, his own native language. In the process, he places
New Zealand firmly in Oceania, as a Pacific nation rather than a distant
outpost of Anglo-Celtic centers. He also provides an expansive definition
of that which is indigenous, making light of cultural purists who try
to fix or freeze indigenous cultures in a static past (and thereby, perhaps
unintentionally, deny these cultures a present or future). His use of
native Pacific languages represents another form of indigenization, here
making the global novel form carry concepts known to people familiar with
Oceania's languages. Here the indigenous is both rooted and routed; it
is no less local, but it is also already regional and, as we shall see,
global. As Teresia Teaiwa suggests, following in the Pacific paths made
by Paul Gilroy and James Clifford elsewhere, "to search for roots
is to find routes" (ix).
The utopia the Tangata Moni resist is ruled by "otherworlders,"
an English compound Wendt forms by translating and combining the Maori
and Samoan words for whites or Europeans. He provides no linguistic gloss
regarding this term, but as we noted previously the Maori word Pakeha
means strangers, or others, (distinct from Tangata, or the ones, as the
Maori referred to themselves); the Samoan word Papalagi means literally
skybreakers, referring to those who broke through the sky's horizon from
worlds then quite other to Oceania. (The terms Pakeha and Papalagi form
part of the lingua franca known to all residents of New Zealand, Australia,
and the South Pacific.) The Tangata Moni history is that when the thirteen
presidents, "who owned and controlled the major multinational corporations,
established the present international system of otherworlder control through
Tribunals and reodinarination centres, the erasure of the Tangata Moni
and anyone else who challenged the system was almost total" (158).
The narrator, as he learns about himself, is astonished to find that he
is a Tangata Moni who has been twice reordinarinised (that is, made ordinary
in a process that completely changes a person's identity). He is born
Patimaori Jones, and joins the notorious Black Mana gang (Pati is Wendt's
first name in Samoan--so the name Patimaori again combines Samoan and
Maori languages and identities; Black Mana means Black Power, fusing black
U.S. sovereignty struggles with Pacific ones); he lives his second life
as Supremo Jones, surveillance specialist for the president until he "reverts"
to savagery when he begins to enjoy deconstructing (Wendt's word) the
president's enemies, and then Eric Mailei Foster, "a bank clerk,"
yet "another character out of fiction rooted in one of Franz Kafka's
faceless nightmares" (229). The narrator's increasing knowledge of
his original Tangata Moni identity and the programming of his other identities
allows him to grapple with his history in relation to the utopia's. The
Tribunal's otherworlders--even in the linguistic roots of their very name--are
defined in relation to the Tangata Moni they wiped out in creating the
utopia.
The knowledge the Tangata Moni characters give the narrator allow him
to read the utopia differently: "to know our past was to know that
our 'utopia' was a lie, an evil" (255). The basis of that knowledge
is maps, a different way of seeing the geography of the city, the country,
the world. "'A city is layers and layers of maps and geographies,
layers of them, centuries of it,'" a Tangata Moni character Manu
declares, "'We were the first, our ancestors, no matter what lies
the Tribunal says. So our maps are at the bottom of the blood heap. They're
still they're though the bloody otherworlders have tried to fucking well
erase them. As long as we survive…'" (134, ellipses in original).
The declaration connects space and time, maps and histories: even though
some maps attempt to spatialize time, maps still tell a story in time,
representing both synchronic and diachronic descriptions of the earth.
The ancestral maps present a geography alternative to the Tribunal's,
which cannot be erased or subsumed into the official maps.
Wendt does not glorify these prior maps or assert that it is possible
to gain easy access to them. His paragraph begins with a bold catalogue
of alternative corridors, and a statement of defiance. It ends, however,
on a conditional note that indicates survival is not taken for granted.
Tangata Moni geographies are threatened, but they exist at the foundations
and interstices of the Tribunal's absolute conceptions of space; as such
they contradict assertions that the only time that exists is now. The
geographies of globalization, by extension, exist in relation (but not
in binary relation) to indigenous geographies. The interstitial and overlaying
geographies central to globalizing the indigenous and indigenizing globalization
rely upon conceptions and qualities of both depth and surface, the local
and global, that which is territorialized and deterritorialized. (We lose
the certainty of aligning the indigenous with depth, the local, the territory,
but gain a recognition of the way the indigenous acts within and alongside
global circuits.)
Wendt's global utopia is colorblind; it completely erases race and awareness
of race, much as it obliterates memory. The narrator recovers his ethnic
and racial identity as he recovers his life story. He recalls his first
meetings with his wife, when he says, "I noticed for the first time
that she was brown. And so was I" (193). The recovered memory suggests
the impossibility of banning history, something hinted at even in the
beginning of the novel when the narrator completes the process of relinquishing
his own history. Telling the past makes it present even as it is relinquished,
one possible reason why for some citizens the process of Dehistorying
never ends. Erasing race, like erasing the past, is part of the way the
utopia denies identity. Even after Wendt's character realizes that his
skin is brown, he says, "we were different from the others. Just
in skin. For we were of them in every other way" (193). The Tribunal's
philosophy of Ordinaryness makes citizens so indistinguishable from one
another that virtually no difference is allowed, and no identity permitted.
Just as the narrator's wife triggers his initial realization of his own
skin color, so too in the first two chapters, the only ones in which she
appears as herself, she hints at other ways in which history is present.
On an early morning walk to the summit of Maungakiekie, the bare volcanic
cone known in English as One Tree Hill (a prominent geographical feature
of Auckland rendered tribute by U2 in a song of the same title), the narrator's
wife declares, "They are still here, aren't they? The Pakeha have
changed even the vegetation, but they're still here." When the narrator
pretends not to understand, and asks who she is talking about, she spells
it out: "The original people….[T]hey'll always be here"
(12). One Tree Hill is so named because it features a lone pine tree that
spires against the sky in Auckland; the pine tree is non-native to New
Zealand, brought by the white settlers to whom the wife refers; before
Pakeha settlers displaced them, Maungakiekie held the largest, most populous
Maori settlement in the area. On One Tree Hill, Pakeha changed the vegetation
from forests into the grassy plain of the cone and into the city Auckland.
The narrator, a vegetarian, understands his wife's point, and that day
tells the Tribunal, "You even turned Maungakiekie into pasture and
therefore into meat" (16). Forests become grass to feed the sheep
that the Pakeha eat, changing not only vegetation but also the geography,
the forms of land ownership, and the very economy.
The next day the wife reinforces her point, carrying the Ralph Hotere
lithograph, Black Rainbow/ Moruroa, with them to the top of Maungakiekie:
"'As she circled the Memorial [an obelisk dedicated to the Maori]
she held the lithograph out in front of her, like an icon….[S]he
held the lithograph above her head, with the Black Rainbow pointed at
the sun. As the sun rose the lithograph's clock of doom recorded its rising.
Then in an ancient language I'd not heard before, she sang to those who'd
been there before us" (18). The scene connects the Black Rainbow
lithograph with both the original inhabitants and their geography, and
foretells the most important part of the narrator's Quest. The lithograph
features a "thick black arch" as the rainbow, with "numbers,
1 to 14, on either side of the upsurging cloud" forming what the
narrator calls the clock of doom (10). The numbers serve as a countdown
to the narrator's realization that indigenous people were trampled to
achieve the global utopia. In a reading very much related, the numbers
could also stand for the stations of the cross (pertinent to Hotere's
Catholic background), and therefore for a crucified people who will rise
again. (In line with this latter reading, Wendt notes a double meaning
regarding the lithograph's presentation of black, which stands for destructive
uses of power, yet bears "a double meaning: in Maori and Polynesian
cultures, pouliuli or the colour black is a fertile colour, a fecund darkness"
[Ellis 87]).
Early on, the narrator himself makes the connection between land and people
even stronger, first when he has just memorized the map that directs the
first stage of his journey to find his family (although the directions
also contain what the narrator describes as "the usual truth,"
the declaration, "THE TRIBUNAL IS YOUR FAMILY" [35, caps in
original]) he works in his garden with a spade: "Black water seeped
out of each cut like blood. I remembered the Polynesian word for earth
and blood was the same: eleele" (35). Wendt uses the Samoan word
for earth and blood to reinforce the connection between land and people,
especially the original people; remember that Maori term themselves Tangata
Whenua or People of the Land. The first part of his journey makes it clear
that the global utopia has spilled much of these people's blood upon the
land. "Again the Hotere clock ticked in my unwilling ears, bringing
with it chapters of the history of the Waikato tribes. Like the people
of Maungakiekie, the Waikato tribes had been turned into grass and meat.
History is madness, the Tribunal has prescribed. So I silenced the Hotere
clock, pushed down on the accelerator, and sped away from history"
(36-37). The ticking of the Hotere clock indicates time passing, and therefore
gestures to history's continued existence. So too does the very geography
of sheep paddocks the narrator observes. The Waikato Valley contains a
good deal of banned history: it was home of the Maori King Movement or
the Kingitanga in the nineteenth century, represents an important area
of resistance during the New Zealand Wars (fought from 1845-1872). The
Hotere clock ticks in relation to the land and its changed geography,
indicating the way the land--in both surface and depth--attests to history.
Three times at central points in the novel, the narrator climbs volcanic
cones by himself at sunrise; two of those times are associated with the
Black Rainbow lithograph explicitly, and all three mark stages of recognizing
the indigenous people and their geographies of the land. The first time
immediately follows his wife's invocation of the Black Rainbow lithograph
and the original landscape and people, when the narrator remembers the
ritualistic image that will guide his journey. The second time, he has
just recovered his life's memory late in the book and again feels a strong
connection to the land and the original people, asking himself whether
the pre-otherworlder Tangata Maori would have seen themselves as separate
from their natural surroundings. The question stands, but allows him to
recognize the continued presence of Maori atua or spirits and to recognize
himself and all others as "walking in their footsteps" everywhere
on this land.
He follows prior inhabitants, in a process that can never end. Even at
this site of closest contact, the origin recedes. The narrator's recognition
of these atua is crucial, however, for it places all citizens of the futuristic
New Zealand in relation to Maori precedents. The recognition also guides
his return to a volcanic summit when in the book's final chapters he buries
the Black Rainbow lithograph in the earth at the top of Maungakiekie just
as the sun rises; he smears the earth on his face and waits to be captured
by the authorities, because in showing the indigenous foundations of the
world utopia, he threatens the utopia's existence. (The passage interweaves
Maori, Samoan, and Tongan words with English to create a bravura invocation
of the Tangata Moni).
The Black Rainbow lithograph presents a powerful image throughout the
novel, both in its own right and in the ways the narrator and his wife
use the lithograph to invoke indigenous geographies and atua. The Black
Rainbow and the novel's depiction of the Black Rainbow present an image
of death and life together, of global destruction of the indigenous and
indigenous creation of a differing global. The Black Rainbow image bears
out the suggestion that "The image, the imagined, the imaginary-these
are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural
process: the imagination as a social practice" (Appadurai quoted
in Gikandi 639; italics in original). The Black Rainbow answers Simon
Gikandi's concern that images in globalization do not take into account
material constraints--the image or the imagined that is contradicted by
poverty, by death. Some images, those presented in advertisements, for
one, may of course sell a fantasy. But globalization also works through
images that are material and that have material and social effects; more,
here images work within and beyond globalization, indigenizing the forces
that would make Oceania into a nuclear testing ground for the world.
Culture, we have seen, is intimately related to these images and geographies,
and Wendt examines culture explicitly as creating ways of seeing the land:
"the hills were straight out of an early Colin McCahon painting.
Strange how we see reality through art and the other cultural baggage
we carry" (65). The welter of sources Wendt invokes and transforms
stem not only from the U.S. popular and mass cultures that are often deemed
one of the fatal causes or effects of globalization. He uses detective
fiction, thrillers, science fiction, the social realism of much New Zealand
literature, Pacific Islands anthropology and history, and images central
to Maori literature, Hollywood movies, U.S. spy agency exposés,
as well as the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Japanese art of Ukiyo-e
or pictures of the floating world, and the architectural marvels of the
Altar of Heaven in Beijing.
This list is far from complete; the point is that Wendt plunders cultures
from around the world, and suggests that it is possible to indigenize
them. His narrator comes face to face with Big Nurse from Ken Kesey's
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sister Honey from Janet Frame's
Faces in the Water (1961), both of whom torment the narrator sexually
and criticize their authors for misrepresenting them. The Robert Zemeckis
film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), in which human actors playing human
characters and animated animal characters interact in the same narrative
worlds, becomes a metaphor for the novel's intermingling of one created
world and another (the "real" is of course yet another representation).
A character from a Borges story shows up for a knife duel with the narrator,
but the narrator and his opponent change the ending of the story. The
novel is a storehouse of sources, making the narrative global and identifying
the book's own participation in globalization. Literature of course participates
in globalization even as it critiques and makes indigenous the varying
world sources.
In fact, one of the primary ways in which Wendt indigenizes these various
world cultures is by his narrator's learning to read the global utopia,
to see it as based on attempts to obliterate other geographies. In joining
the Tangata Moni, he recognizes, he joins "a centuries-old genealogy,
in literature and film, of persecuted groups and minorities going underground
to survive" (156). Wendt makes the genealogy literal: the Maori writer
Patricia Grace becomes his narrator's biological mother in slightly renamed
form, "Patricia Manaia Graceous" (one meaning of the Maori word
Manaia is spirit, suggesting the form of descent Wendt claims from Grace
and her work). The President tried to re-fashion the narrator's first
identity, Patimaori Jones, by teaching him to read: taming him with the
written word was a large part of making him become Supremo Jones. The
written word incorporates Supremo Jones into the brave new world utopia,
again indicating the complicity of writing with globalization. And in
a particularly self-reflexive presentation of that idea, Wendt's President
says, right before the narrator kills him, that one of his favorite novels
is Black Rainbow.
But what Eric Mailei Foster discovers is a vast genealogy of writers that
work against the utopia. Ralph Ellison, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Hone Tuwhare
are just some of the writers he names. Donna Awatere, the author of Maori
Sovereignty (1984), makes explicit the genealogy that shapes the narrator
and allows him to read the utopia differently. He quotes from her work,
suggesting that the Tangata Maori writers especially "gave me a voice
and a gafa: 'Who I am and my relationship to everyone else depends upon
my whakapapa, on my lineage, on those from I am descended. One needs one's
ancestors therefore to define one's present'" (244). Gafa, Samoan
for genealogy, mirrors the Maori word whakapapa which means the same thing,
and which Awatere translates contextually as lineage. What is most notable
here is that the narrator has recovered his genealogy and therefore his
family: he can now understand fully that the Tribunal is not his family,
despite their proclamations at beginning and end of the novel. If it is
not possible to get outside the utopia, it is possible to trace indigenous
genealogies and geographies of the global.
The narrator thus achieves a quest, but not the one intended by the Tribunal.
He finds his wife in the Tribunal's power-center, the Puzzle Palace, only
to learn that she and their children have been reordinarinised. They now
embody the Tribunal's philosophy of Ordinariness, and are indistinguishable
from other members of the Tribunal group. The narrator's family of Tangata
Moni help him to resist the utopia so well that he is convicted of treason,
not loving his ordinary family, and sexism. Given his choice of sentence,
he rejects the utopia's ability to control identity by reprogramming people
or reincarnating those who die. He chooses permanent death. Wendt adds
a brief epilogue, in a chapter titled "Endings/Beginnings,"
the same title Keri Hulme uses to open and close of her Booker-Prize-winning
novel The Bone People (1983). As does Hulme, Wendt thereby alludes to
a kind of spiral narrative, one in which endings and beginnings touch
and then begin or end again. The narrator and the narrative thus evade
the closure demanded by Democrambo, whose name embodies a democracy as
subtle as the action-hero Rambo, and who appropriately enough speaks for
the Tribunal in announcing the sentence. The utopia's democracy works
through violence, using Rambo's methods and film depictions that glorify
the same, Wendt suggests, but it is possible to read the methods and the
films against the grain. His narrator and his Tangata Moni characters
choose stories--beginnings and endings--that the utopia has not anticipated.
The president, for instance, suggests right before he dies that the narrator
has been programmed to kill him, that the president wanted to die at the
hands of someone he had formerly considered his son. In other words, the
narrator would be not resisting but fulfilling the Tribunal's desires,
and obeying or repealing the world utopia's mandates might mean patricide.
Whether such endings are determined or over-determined, Wendt suggests
that making the world indigenous and making room for indigenous worlds
reveals differing narratives, specifically Tangata Moni ones. Endings
and beginnings again meet.
The closeness of beginnings and endings bring us back to Hau'ofa, whose
representation of Oceania and of globalization relies upon images of a
sea of islands connected by the island-ocean people who travel the waters
from land to land. Indeed, in some conceptions of sea and land, the islands
themselves seem as mobile as the waters. Using the idea of etak or moving
islands in the Caroline Islands, travelers figure their location by calculating
"the rate at which one's island of departure moves away from the
traveling canoe and the rate at which a second reference island moves
along another prescribed star course….[T]he highest point of an island
can shift from treetops to mountaintops to particular cloud formations,
continuing upward to a range of constellations, depending on one's distance
from that island" (Diaz and Kauanui 317). In other words, the canoe
stays in one place while the points of reckoning--the islands themselves--move.
By contrast early U.S. sailors deplored their own maps, and accused Pacific
Islands of moving right off of them, petitioning Congress for more than
thirty years in the early nineteenth century to fund a mapping expedition
to fix the islands' locations. In Oceania distance becomes a powerful
and relational quality, difficult to calculate due to the horizon that
moves for both travelers and those who remain at home. Roots and routes
exist in relation to one another, much as do nature and culture.
Let us consider again the idea that culture has become second nature.
For Jameson as for the Frankfurt School theorists, discussions of second
nature contain an implicit nostalgia for a time when nature contained
more of the sublime power attributed to it by the Romantic movement, able
to overwhelm and engulf human subjectivity. That time is the implicit
first nature that precedes the second nature they discuss. For Benjamin,
though, culture becomes naturalized (as a function of ideology, but also
one that attests to history and provides something of a genealogy of the
"natural" present in the Arcade); and it is possible that something
outside the Arcade does still exist. For Jameson, nature is gone, and
only the second-order nature of culture remains. In Wendt's novel, where
not culture but nature itself is second nature, the nostalgia is gone.
Even indigenous formulations of nature are just that, formulations, geographies
of other scales and times. The presence of other cultures and natures
means not that it is possible to return to a first-order, or essential,
version of the indigenous or the global, the natural or the cultural.
These other geographies mean that all indigenous and global natures and
cultures interact and constitute one another. Oceania is global, and globalization
is Oceanic.
Raymond Williams on nature is helpful here: Williams notes that the Latin
source word, natura, means "the essential construction of the world"
(68). Where considerations of nature usually emphasize the essential in
essential construction, the constructed nature of nature (to make a point)
is coterminous with nature's association with essence. Rather than being
able to identify nature's "proper meaning," we are left with
"a definition of a quality which becomes, through real usage, based
on certain assumptions, a description of the world" (68). That backs
his observation that "the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed,
an extraordinary amount of human history" (67). Mapping nature, Williams
suggests, much as do Hau'ofa and Wendt, brings us to both history and
geography, brings us to that which is simultaneously indigenous and global.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. Globalization. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
---. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1996.
Barber, Benjamin R. McWorld vs. Jihad. 1995. New York: Ballantine Books,
1996.
Buell, Frederick. National Culture and the New Global System. Baltimore
and London:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society.
Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Diaz, Vicente M. and Kauanuia, J. Kehaulani. "Native Pacific Cultural
Studies on the Edge." The Contemporary Pacific 13.2 (2001): 315-42.
Ellis, Juniper. "'The Techniques of Storytelling': An Interview with
Albert Wendt." Ariel 28.3 (1997): 79-94.
Feinberg, Richard, ed. Seafaring in the Contemporary Pacific Islands.
DeKalb:
Northern Illinois UP, 1995.
Friedman, Jonathan. Cultural Identity and Global Process. London and Thousand
Oaks
CA: Sage Publications 1994.
Giddens, Anthony. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics.
Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1994.
Gikandi, Simon. "Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality."
South Atlantic
Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 627-58.
Gray, John. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. New York:
The New
Press, 1998.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1989.
Hau'ofa, Epeli. "The New Pacific: Integration and Independence."
Class and Culture in the South Pacific. Eds. Antony Hooper, et al. Auckland:
Centre for Pacific Studies, U of Auckland; Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific
Studies, U of the South Pacific, 1987. 1-12.
---. "Our Sea of Islands." A New Oceania: Discovering Our Sea
of Islands.
Eds. Eric Waddell, et al. Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development,
U of the South Pacific, 1993. 2-16. Reprinted in The Contemporary Pacific
6.1 (1994): 147-61.
Held, David, et al. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.
Hobsbawm, Eric in conversation with Antonio Pollito. On the Edge of the
New Century.
1999. Trans. Allan Cameron. New York: The New Press, 2000.
Howard, Alan. "Rotuman Seafaring in Historical Perspective."
Feinberg 114-43.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Lepowsky, Maria. "Voyaging in the Louisiade Archipelago." Feinberg
34-54.
Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London
and
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1992.
Sklair, Leslie. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
2001.
Teaiwa, Teresia Kieuea. Searching for Nei Nim'anoa. Suva, Fiji: Mana Publications,
1995.
Wendt, Albert. Black Rainbow. 1992. University of Hawaii P, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. "Ideas of Nature." Problems in Materialism
and Culture. London:
Verso, 1980. 67-85.