Beyond the postcard: a translated Hawaii for tourists

Abstract

The Pacific region has long been described based on its vast geographic and cultural diversity. Therefore, colonial patterns had already been forged during centuries of occupation, thus contributing to define and reinforce the nature of both Pacific islands’ cultural identities and their sociological development/interaction with each other. However, it is clear that Native peoples had had little or no part in the entire process of altering their cultural and social existence. Indeed on their behalf there is the story of an accelerated marginalisation and loss of power over their lands as well as their own culture(s). The profound transformations in Pacific societies had terrible effects on how populations interact with each other and with ecosystems which are still acknowledged and profoundly felt until now. Subsequently, the activist movements against land occupation/dispossession are fundamental to understand the struggle against tourism industry and the exoticised ways in which Native people are portrayed in order to sell the controversial idea of “paradise”. This paper presents an analysis of the way Hawaiian culture is portrayed in tourist guides and colonial photography, how images reiterate stereotypes of beauty and “enchanted paradises” in conjunction with the notion that tourism and land dispossession obliterate/destroy historic and sacred sites. Despite being a source of employment and social mobility for many islanders, the tourism industry also overtly drains and pollutes entire ecosystems, and the most recent activist interventions prove the relevance to protect land and nature alike. While many Native Hawaiians are landless and homeless, U.S military and paramilitary bases and tourist enterprises owned by transnational companies occupy large land masses, consume water and pollute fishing areas depriving Native people from resources, and ultimately the right to govern their own territory. Consequently, it is relevant to rethink the impact of tourism and its licentious approaches to Native lands and peoples. Hence, those practices have long been protected by military and paramilitary forces reiterating a renewed colonial and imperialist bond. Moreover, it will be problematised the political impact of tourism and the way female bodies are objectified and commercialized as exotic “objects”. Yet it may also be possible to question how the colonial legacy through material and visual representations of the “exotic other” allowed crucial insights into issues of ethnicity, gender, and identity.