Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (review)

Abstract

That Rob Wilson's magisterial survey of Hawai'i's literature and culture is at once revolutionary and out-of-date is testimony to the volatility and strength of contemporary literature in this state. At the center of Wilson's book is a sympathetic history of the Bamboo Ridge group of writers, foremost among them Eric Chock and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. He argues that their brand of "local" literature resists the economic and cultural globalization so evident to anyone setting foot in Waikiki or Taipei (Wilson's other Pacific "center"). Wilson's theoretical imagining posits a "mongrel" poetics that unifies writers in Hawai'i against the outside forces of American imperialism, especially the US military. Where "regionalism" has often been considered a limitation in literature, Wilson points to the way in which Hawai'i regionalism is one that resists the larger forces that impinge on it, in literary and economic terms. That he puts himself in the mix, as a poet and critic, especially in his poetic chapter, "Postmodern X: Honolulu Traces," means that this book is as much autobiography as it is theory or history. This is the autobiography of a white critic's conversion into the local, if not his full acceptance into it. The book also partakes of fantasy; Wilson consciously imagines a world that is not local or global, but glocal (his neologism). Wilson's imagined community (echo of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities) does not exist, but [End Page 219] it aims to put pressure on communities that do exist to blur their boundaries, if not into a melting pot, then into what Wing Tek Lum refers to as a cultural soup. Or, as Wilson writes: "Adhering to the nexus of locality at Bamboo Ridge [a place before it was a local literary journal] posits a way of reimagining relationship among region, nation, and globe in which difference is not negated nor reified but constructed, negotiated, and affirmed. In effect, the local has materialized into alternative narratives and counterclaims on the 'American Pacific'" (179).