Settler Colonial Projections: The Visual Politics of the Interwar Pan-Pacific Movement

Abstract

This article examines the extensive visual archive of lantern slides and dioramas produced by the interwar internationalist organization, the Pan-Pacific Union. Founded in Honolulu in 1917, the Pan-Pacific movement positioned Hawai‘i as the primary locus for a US cultural diplomacy. The Pan-Pacific’s visual projects provided ways of knowing and understanding the Pacific that marked the region as containable and palatable. The Pan-Pacific’s visual projects exemplify settler colonial projection. Building on Dean Itsuji Saranillio’s “settler state theatrics”--the settler state’s dramaturgical acts of authority--settler colonial projection focuses specifically on the primacy and perceived objectivity rooted in the visual. Settler colonial projection offers a theoretical framework that centers the visual within settler projects of dispossession, as well as in Indigenous forms of reclamation and resistance.