Etherealization in a Racial Regime of Ownership: Marconi in O‘ahu, circa 1900

Tyler Morgenstern

doi:10.1525/001c.23515

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of wireless telegraphy in the Hawaiian Islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centrally, I argue that for an ascendant haole (white settler) planter class, wirelessness proffered potent resources with which to articulate a particular model of scale and connectivity—one in which Hawai‘i’s isolation from the US mainland was recast as the predicate of new, and highly lucrative, forms of intimacy and proximity. These intimacies, I argue, overlapped not just symbolically but materially with the de facto and de jure forms of US colonial governance that took shape in the islands in this period. To make the case, I think through and around one particularly notable wireless transmission complex: the American Marconi Company’s hulking installation at Kahuku, on the North Shore of O‘ahu, and its companion station at Koko Head, some fifty miles south. Recounting the maneuvers by which these sites were drawn into the fold of long-distance wireless signaling, I show that to whatever extent wirelessness animated transcendent visions of scalar extensibility and global connectivity, it did so from within the confines of a colonial economy of land use, elaborated around the enclosure and privatization of Indigenous land and the racially stratified exploitation of migrant labor. By way of conclusion, however, the article also considers how Kānaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians) are today developing new models of wireless connectivity that upend this history of colonial enclosure by articulating wirelessness to projects of Indigenous nation building.

Highlights

It is my final day on the island of O‘ahu, where I have spent much of the last two weeks holed up at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, conducting research for a dissertation chapter focused on the ALOHAnet, an experimental wireless computer network developed at UHM in the late 1960s
In the course of my ALOHAnet research, it has become clear that the figure of Guglielmo Marconi looms large in the history of Hawaiian information communication technology (ICT) development
Surmising that I am a lost tourist, one of the workers approaches my vehicle; I roll down the window to ask him whether I am at Marconi Point, and whether I might take a few photos of the old wireless campus, the crumbling remnants of which rise from the dust about a hundred yards seaward

Summary

MODELING THE PACIFIC OCEAN

I argue that for an ascendant haole (white settler) planter class, wirelessness proffered potent resources with which to articulate a particular model of scale and connectivity—one in which Hawai‘i’s isolation from the US mainland was recast as the predicate of new, and highly lucrative, forms of intimacy and proximity. These intimacies, I argue, overlapped not just symbolically but materially with the de facto and de jure forms of US colonial governance that took shape in the islands in this period. The article considers how Kānaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians) are today developing new models of wireless connectivity that upend this history of colonial enclosure by articulating wirelessness to projects of Indigenous nation building

Marconi Farms

Findings

Making Scale in and through Property Law