THE APOCALYPSE OF PARADISE AND THE SALVATION OF THE WEST: NIGHTMARE VISIONS OF THE FUTURE IN THE PACIFIC EDEN

Abstract

This article examines representations of the Pacific in the film Rapa Nui, in articles from National Geographic, and in the academic debate on cannibalism as epitomized by Marshall Sahlins' and Gananath Obeyesekere's discussion of Cook's fate in Hawaii. While the area is typically the location of an Edenic paradise, in these texts it becomes the locus of apocalypse ending in cannibalism. Furthermore, rather than being radically ‘other’, the Pacific becomes a paradise whose virtues are those of the West as well, but whose very virtues lead to its destruction. The article argues that these texts use the ‘apocalypse of paradise’ as an allegory for the economic history and destiny of the West, such that cannibalism becomes a quintessentially Western practice. But the texts also contain mechanisms for the construction of a critical consciousness centred on Nature which is denied to the islanders themselves, and which serves in classic colonial style to institute a future alterity which will redeem the West from apocalypse. The texts' use and subsequent undermining of the more typical paradise images, many of which can be localized in the post-Second World War era, can finally be read in the light of a late twentieth-century, leftist socioenvironmental critique of the economic, political and environmental legacy of postwar America. However, the texts betray a more postmodernist sense of doubt about the reality of a rational critical consciousness. They raise important issues regarding the liminal space between self and other, threatening as they do to dissolve this distinction. But they all attempt to use cannibalism as a last bulwark for the construction of a privileged, natural discourse which combines environmentalism, colonialism and classical humanism while resisting the full implications and limitations of postmodernism.