The Philippines. Securing Paradise: Tourism and militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines By Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. 284. Photographs, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Securing Paradise: Tourism and militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines By VERNADETTE VICUNA GONZALEZ Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. 284. Photographs, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000460 Imperial legacies are often hidden in plain sight, camouflaged by an increasingly globalised world. The residual effects of formal empire lurk among a host of seemingly innocuous and benign structures arranged precisely to erase the processes that produced them. These elusive echoes of imperial rule require scholars to cast a particular kind of analytical light capable of revealing their persistent and adaptable forms. Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez's monograph, Securing Paradise: Tourism and militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines offers this kind of analytical glow. By 'placing tourism and militarism within the same analytical lens' Gonzalez seeks to 'elucidate their mutual constitutions and dependencies' (p. 4). She argues that 'a strategic and symbiotic convergence' of the 'military-tourism complex' creates 'gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge that are routinised into everyday life and are crucial to the practices and habits of U.S. imperialism in the region' (pp. 4, 117). Her ultimate aim is to interrogate this convergence and reveal the 'tourist itineraries and imaginations' that are 'central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific' (p. 4). Gonzalez approaches her study in unanticipated and innovative ways. There are three particular avenues of examination that illustrate her methodologies and conclusions particularly well. The first concerns intersections of access and surveillance. Gonzalez traces the construction and utilisation of highways and road systems in the Philippines and Hawai'i. She focuses specifically on Kennon Road in Luzon and H-3 on Oahu to demonstrate the 'dual technology of touristic voyeurism and militaristic surveillance' (p. 51). This point is profoundly punctuated by a deeply textured chapter on helicopter tours of Kaua'i. Increasingly regarded as the ultimate tourist experience in Hawai'i, Gonzalez explores how these tours have simultaneously rehabilitated the traumatic memories of a helicopter war in tropical Vietnam and offered an alternative vision of an American tropics that 'is not enemy territory but a landscape of pleasure and discovery' (p. 160). Second, Gonzalez examines the seemingly strange confluence of tourist imagination and war memorials. Focusing on Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines and Pearl Harbor in Hawai'i, she traces the ways in which various relics of conflict are presented and oriented into larger narratives of victory and liberation. Perhaps most interesting of all, she observes the processes by which war material, 'meant to cause mass and calculated destruction', is stripped of its violent purposes, '[anesthetizing the deaths of real people' and 'excising the blood and gore of war' (p. 138). These processes, in turn, tend to transforms sites of horrific casualties into 'military playgrounds' where the 'messy reality of death is elided, ironically by focusing on the . …