Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) - Softcover

Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuņa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822353709 ISBN 13: 9780822353706

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2013

Synopsis

In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuņa Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawai`i and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawai`i and the Philippines, U.S. military modes of mobility, control, and surveillance enable scenic tourist byways. Past and present U.S. military posts, such as the Clark and Subic Bases and the Pearl Harbor complex, have been reincarnated as destinations for tourists interested in World War II. The history of the U.S. military is foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations in such sites. At the same time, U.S. military dominance is reinforced by the logics and practices of mobility and consumption underlying modern tourism. Working in tandem, militarism and tourism produce gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge. These become routinized into everyday life in Hawai`i and the Philippines, inculcating U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.

About this title

About the Author

Vernadette Vicuņa Gonzalez is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Excerpt. Đ Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SECURING PARADISE

Tourism and Militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines

By VERNADETTE VICUŅA GONZALEZ

Duke University Press

Copyright Đ 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5370-6

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
vii
Introduction MILITARY-TOURISM PARTNERSHIPS IN HAWAI'I AND THE PHILIPPINES..
1
Chapter One MANIFEST DESTINATIONS AND THE WORK OF TROPICAL FICTIONS........
21
Chapter Two SCENIC HIGHWAYS, MASCULINITY, MODERNITY, AND MOBILITY..........
49
Chapter Three NEOLIBERATION AND U.S.-PHILIPPINES CIRCUITS OF SACRIFICE AND 
GRATITUDE..................................................................
83
Chapter Four REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR, REINFORCING VIGILANCE...............
115
Chapter Five THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN: HELICOPTER AIRMOBILITIES, AERIAL 
FIELDS OF VISION, AND SURROGATE TROPICS....................................
147
Chapter Six PLAYING SOLDIER AND GOING NATIVE IN SUBIC FREEPORT'S JUNGLE 
TOUR.......................................................................
181
Conclusion INSECURITIES, TOURISM, AND TERROR...............................
215
NOTES......................................................................
225
BIBLIOGRAPHY...............................................................
253
INDEX......................................................................
271

CHAPTER 1

MANIFEST DESTINATIONSAND THE WORK OFTROPICAL FICTIONS

Every society is known by the fictions that it keeps.

—CATHERINE STIMPSON, FOREWORD TO BEDERMAN, Manliness and Civilization, XI

In a graphic torture scene in her successful 1988 novel State ofWar, Ninotchka Rosca conjures up a connection between theupsurge in literary and touristic consumption of the Philippinesin the late twentieth century, and its long and complexhistory of domination by foreign militaries, economic policies,and politics. Set roughly during the Marcos regime in the Philippines(1965–86), which Rosca depicts as the latest episodeof an undeclared and perpetual state of war, the novel weavestogether the stories of three main characters whose genealogiesrepresent the diverse archetypes of contemporary Philippinesociety. State of War unnervingly juxtaposes a dreamily texturedand lushly tropical Philippines with a Philippines wracked bycolonialism, corruption, and violence. Rosca's portrayal ofthe Philippines as a surreal, hazy tropics—bludgeoned andnumbed by years of colonial violence—cannily uses an exploitativerhetoric of tourism to attract First World readers to a ThirdWorld spectacle. She perverts this language even as she deploysit, however, distorting these tropics while and by implicatingthe reader as a participant-consumer in a corrupt economic andpolitical world order. Like James Clifford—who "hang[s] on to'travel' as a term of cultural comparison precisely because of its historical'taintedness,' its associations with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege,specific means of conveyance, beaten paths, agents, frontiers, documents,and the like"—Rosca embraces the taintedness and usefulness of travelas an enabling critical concept and method. She refuses to dismiss thepotency of the orientalizing rhetoric of tourism, infusing it instead with ahistoricity of its genealogy in colonialism: State of War wrestles with thedilemmas produced by the literary possibilities and tourist mobilities ofthe imperial moment and the economies of globalization. It seduces thereader with its invocation of familiar and expected images and, in thesame instance, exposes the terms of that seduction.

Written in verdant, almost lulling prose reminiscent of travelogues,State of War is punctuated with staccato bursts of brutality such as the tortureof Anna Villaverde by the ironically named Colonel Urbano Amor:

He turned her over to two soldiers who stripped her carefully, attachedelectrodes to her nipples, and proceeded to crank a field battery tolife. The current of pain stenciled the meaning of error into her cells.Screaming, arching her back and head in a parody of passion, Annacould see the tiny letters on the canvas sheath of the generator. It wasan important piece of equipment, blue seal as they would say, made inthe U.S.A. A continent half a world away.

Despite this torture, Anna—a young widow of a political activist and oneof the novel's trio of protagonists—refuses to divulge the name of Guevarra,a guerrilla fighter and fellow prisoner who had escaped the politicalprison in which they were both held. Her stint in the prison—whichparallels the wholesale tortures, kidnapping, executions and disappearancesof the Marcos martial law administration—implicates the collusionsbetween the Philippine state and its former colonial master—theUnited States—as one of the root causes of long-standing violence againstthe Filipino people. The dissonance between the novel's surreal tropicalimagery and the matter-of-fact prose in this particular scene calls attentionto the mutual partnerships and collusions at work in the productionand consumption of the Philippines as paradise. Rosca implies that thedreamscape's pleasures could not exist without the discipline of a militarizedstate and, conversely, that the state of war is both alibi and guarantorof the Philippines as a literary-touristic fantasy.

The scene of Anna's torture—and Rosca's novel, in general—walks thethin line of "spectacularizing" historical pain for aesthetic pleasure and ofreifying a sexualized and racialized victimhood for the reader's discomfortand gratification: it is both bearing witness and pornographic. Whilethe act of rape and torture haunts her novel, becoming the symbolic fulcrumupon which rebellion and revenge turn, embedding the presentationof those acts in a fictive tropical fantasy captures the dilemmas of thepostcolonial writer whose work circulates mostly in the center of empire.Rosca's strategic narration of the savage tropics—using yet interruptingtropicalized imagery with explicit scenes of torture that are in themselvesproblematically spectacularized and consumed—performs multipleduties: it strips bare the violent discipline needed to secure paradise; itproposes a way to assemble an archive that at once reflects and critiquesthe conditions of postcolonialism; it advances a way to read this archivewith attention to gender, the state, and power; and it grapples with thecomplicities of writing the tropics.

This chapter examines a double set of literary fictions that demonstratehow society-defining fictions—see the chapter epigraph—offer notso much conclusive evidence or clearly defined perspectives, but insteada set of critical questions about histories, archives, and methodologies.How do these fictions address the history of material and epistemologicalcolonialisms that constitute the conditions of their existence? How dothey, as Jenny Sharpe suggests, use fiction's license "to imagine events asthey might have happened or in a way that history has failed to record"?In what ways do these fictions constitute an archive that can address andilluminate how colonialism and postcolonialism operate? What othercontingent, partial, and contradictory archives do these fictions suggest,and what modes of reading do they theorize for these provisional assemblages?

I use the term manifest destination in the chapter's title to encapsulatetwo kinds of work performed by the two sets of fictions that I havemarshaled in this chapter. The first grouping of fictions this chapter attendsto—those exemplified by Rosca's novel and Haunani-Kay Trask'spoetry—presents a Cold War archive that understands the constructiveimpulse of a modern American global mode of governance to be an updatedextension of mid-nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny. Writingfrom within the spaces brought into the orbit of the American Century,Rosca and Trask elaborate on the process of "manifesting"—that is, establishing—theworld as a series of targets for the United States, both for itsgrowing military power and the exportation of its model of political economy.In Hawai'i and the Philippines, manifesting destinations involveboth the gendered and racialized justification and use of military forceand the productive conversion of the tropics into eroticized commoditiesfor the tourism industry. As the benevolent architect of this constructiveglobal governance, the United States deploys both the carrot and the stick.The spectacular bombing of World War II in Hawai'i virtually guaranteedand justified the regarrisoning of the islands: during World War II andthe Cold War, the U.S. military in Hawai'i expanded its land acquisitions,further eroding Native Hawaiian claims under the banner of security.The year 1947 marked the establishment of the new Pacific Command inHawai'i, as well as the Military Bases Agreement that ensured continuedU.S. occupation of military sites in the Philippines. The post–World War IIera renewed the U.S. commitment to Asia and the Pacific in line withCold War anxieties about Communist containment. In the decades thatfollowed World War II, the region was a primary theater for Cold Warmilitary posturing as well as violence: the Korean War midcentury emphasizedOkinawa's strategic importance in the region, and the Vietnam Warhighlighted the vulnerability of the mightiest military in the world. Withthe invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan topresidential office in the following year, Asia and the Pacific continuedto be important locations for Cold War performances, guaranteeing theircontinued militarization. The concomitant ascendance of the tourism industryand mass "exoticization" of the American tropics, in turn, dictatedthe reception of narratives about the region as well as its commodificationas a leisure destination. Rendering these archipelagos into paradiseswas not new, but a project that reached its apex in the Cold War era withthe advent of jet travel and the general promotion of tourism as a quickfix for struggling economies yearning to breathe the free-trade air of theNew World Order.

The critical fictions of Rosca and Trask work within and against thenarrative constraints of tropicalization (which further legitimates and isfurther legitimated by the economies and cultures of tourism) to deliver aliterary paradise with the jagged edges exposed. Grappling precisely withwhat makes formations of American empire in the Pacific distinct andmodern, Rosca and Trask trace the relations, logics, and practices at playin manifesting Hawai'i and the Philippines as destinations. In contrast toRosca's and Trask's portrayals of compromised tropics, colonial-era journalistsauthored the tropics that we have come to expect as a set of destinations.These colonial fictions demonstrate the imaginative work of earlyfictions—that of making manifest, or obvious—the mission of Americanimperialism to uplift and properly develop the world's waste spaces. Likethe first set of critical fictions, this collection of journalistic narratives addressesthe history, archive, and method of empire but through a radicallydiametric, profoundly masculine perspective that has informed colonialfantasies of the tropics. Reading the second archive of fictions throughthe eyes of the first underscores the collusions of militarism and tourismas fundamental and specific to the manifestation of destinations by theUnited States.

THE ROMANCE OF SECURITY

Aimé Cesaire, theorizing the constructiveness of American empire in theyears after World War II, points out how the drive to build—"The bulldozers!The massive investments of capital! The roads! The ports!"—marksthe modern approach to imperialism that the United States exported tothe world. In erecting and gifting infrastructures of development, Americanimperialism in effect substitutes a narrative of benevolent paternalismfor a history of expansion, dispossession, and genocide, a move akinto what Jodi Kim has described as Cold War projects of "gendered racialrehabilitation." The moral force of American progressivism, which providedideological cover and fuel for American expansion at the turn of thecentury, however, had long been in practice before the dawn of the ColdWar, predating Césaire's predictions about the new nature of Americanimperialism as the "only domination from which one never recovers."Building on the discourses of what Amy Kaplan has called "manifest domesticity"to ameliorate the violent reality of the U.S. colonial project atthe turn of the century, Cold War formations of U.S. imperialism adaptedto new configurations of capitalism, developing technologies, and updatedforms of governance. What Césaire depicts as the built fictionsof modernization, the gift that the United States was holding out to theworld, indicated the new "managerial" mode of governance that subordinatedextraterritorial lands and peoples to American economic interests.

My use of the term manifest destinations, however, not only emphasizesthe constructive and productive facets of U.S. global policy, but also gesturesto how the Cold War's use of death and pain draws from the traditionof Manifest Destiny's generative violence in the Anglo-American marchacross the continent. Rosca and Trask link and juxtapose Cold War Americanpractices of death and pain to the United States' stated policy of life andliberty. While attentive to the ways in which American empire achievesits ends through a summons to modernity and progress, Rosca and Traskalso grapple with its continued adherence to sheer, old-fashioned brutalforce and how the two, in fact, are intimately linked tactics in a flexibleimperial arsenal. Precisely because their critical fictions are traces of theunruly afterlives of long-running U.S. imperial occupations and interventions,Rosca and Trask are able to track the diverse exertions that manifestHawai'i and the Philippines as the destinations of American militaryand economic desire. State of War, published after the Marcos regime wasthrown out of the Philippines and written by a journalist and a humanrights activist during that regime, captures both the Cold War complicitiesbetween U.S. and Philippine political elites, and the colonial historicaltrajectory that naturalizes these complicities. Rosca was a politicalprisoner of the Philippine state and an exile to the United States duringthe U.S.-supported Martial Law era and personifies the displaced postcolonialsubject of these U.S.-Philippine collaborations. Haunani-KayTrask, coming of age as a Native Hawaiian activist in a Hawai'i that hadbeen framed as ineluctably American, faced the daunting tasks of writingagainst an established narrative of inevitable and beneficial Americanbelonging and fighting the everyday and vexed battles championing indigenousrights against a state all too willing to erode Native sovereignty.Published in 2002, her poetry collection Night Is a Sharkskin Drum honesin on the cultural, economic, and political tragedies that were wroughtby overthrow, annexation, and statehood in the islands. Taken together,Rosca's and Trask's narratives comprise an alternative formation of knowledgethat illuminates Césaire's bulldozers, roads, and ports to be violentfictions of empire.

The potential contradictions between the destructive and constructivemethods of manifesting destinations cohere through the romance of security.Relying on the gendered and sexualized romance of security, painand death are transformed into a productive regime of modernization.Rosca's and Trask's feminist critiques track how the romance of securitydeploys gendered and sexualized modes and logics to contain the inconsistenciesof U.S. global governance. Their interventions are twofold andinterrelated. First, they attend to the seductive pull of security as a narrativethat casts the United States as the masculine bestower of the giftof modernity (through apparatuses of technology and mobility such asbulldozers, roads, and ports). In turn, the romance of security-as-gift organizesthe discourses through which the Philippines and Hawai'i havecome to be understood as receptive, feminized tropics waiting to be actedupon and transformed. Attaching the project of manifest destination tothe romance of security through auxiliary fictions of pacification, liberation,multiculturalism, and statehood, the fictions of Rosca and Traskbreak down how, today, it is nearly impossible to imagine these tropics assomething other than destinations of leisure, of capital, or of some kindof humanitarian mission. Second, they contend that the romance of securityis realized not only through the constructive scripts of U.S. Cold Warmodernization, but through the more intimate and often tragic encountersof colonial biopower, such as Anna's rape. Rosca and Trask highlightthe distorted romances of security as the enabling conditions of modernAmerican empire. For them, the manifold meanings of modern securityoperate with overlapping regimes of gendered and sexualized discipline,particularly through militarism and tourism. By naming rape and prostitutionas the metaphors and corporeal materialities that describe themutual circuits of tourism and militarism, Rosca and Trask unmask theromance of security as a sexualized relation of power.

In place of a romantic tropical scene, Rosca provides a rape and arapist—an (ironically named) Amor, whose "love" violates in the nameof security. To create a tropical paradise and make the Philippines safe fortourism—according to the prescriptive formulas imparted by the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), andthe World Bank—the Marcos regime carried out a reign of terror, militarizingPhilippine society and criminalizing political dissent under thebanner of martial law in order to attract foreign investment. Rosca's portrayalof this relationship as rape has manifold dimensions. Col. Amorand his paramilitary thugs are the proxies for that machine that actuallyfuels Anna's sexual torture: the "made in the U.S.A." generator. On onelevel, the generator references the economic engine of American intereststhat drove a foreign policy rampant with intervention. On another level,it is also literal: the generator itself is the stuff of American (military-industrial)production (hence "made in the U.S.A.")—the surplus militaryparaphernalia that the United States shipped to its allies during the ColdWar. As the source of the perverse desire behind the rapist figure of Amor,U.S. economic imperialism and its Cold War avatars of modernization anddevelopment are secured through the proxy war of Marcos's martial lawregime. Held down and raped by Amor's soldiers, Anna-as-Philippinessymbolizes the subordinate position of the Philippines vis-ā-vis its Americanbenefactor, a position established through colonialism and continuedby "made in the U.S.A." debt and dependence.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822353709
• ISBN 13: 9780822353706
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296