Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Hawaii and Cold War National Identity: Travel and Immigration in the Asia-Pacific Borderland"
Christina Klein
MIT, Literature Faculty
cklein@mit.edu
This paper investigates the question, how was America's postwar assertion of global power imagined during the early years of the Cold War, and what did ideas about travel and immigration have to do with it? It uses James Michener's 1959 novel Hawaii and his magazine travel writing about the islands to explore the crucial role that ideas about race and Hawaii played in constructing a new national identity for the US as a global power.
America's postwar expansion of political, military, and economic power into Asia led to a crisis in national identity. Many Americans did not feel an authentic bond with Asia that legitimated the US presence there: because of the relative lack of immigrant ties, they knew and cared little about Asia. At the same time, many Asian intellectual and political leaders accused the US of imperialism, and of seeking to restore the Western domination from which they were in the process of liberating themselves. They bolstered their charges of imperialism by pointing to American racism at home -- the segregation, lynchings, and disenfranchisement of African Americans -- as evidence of the nation's commitment to white supremacy.
This paper explores how travel emerged as one of the grounds on which a new national identity for the US was forged. It begins by exploring how travel became a politicized activity during the Cold War, with the State Department, President Eisenhower, and many political observers promoting international tourism as a way for ordinary Americans to become involved in foreign affairs. They figured travel as a process of educational and economic exchange: as Americans dispersed US dollars around the world through a form of private foreign aid, they would both learn about the countries their government was committed to defending from Communism, and teach others around the world about American democratic values.
From there, the paper looks at Michener's Hawaii as a case study in postwar travel writing, and explores how Michener uses Hawaii to construct an identity for America as a non-imperial and non-racist world power. It investigates how Michener blends the literary genres of travel and immigrant narratives to construct Hawaii as a borderlands space, a gateway through which Americans could extend their reach out into Asia and through which Asians could immigrate into the US and become Americans.
As a travel narrative, Hawaii encouraged ordinary Americans to participate in the larger flow of American power and influence out into Asia, and to learn about Asia as the place where America's political future would be determined. By making the traveler the paradigmatic figure of the American in Asia, Michener deflects attention away from the exercise of unequal political and military power. At the same time, Michener employs the familiar tropes and figures of the white ethnic immigrant narrative to demonstrate American racial inclusiveness. He presents the Japanese -- and Chinese -- Americans of Hawaii as classic immigrants who are being fully integrated into American political and economic life. Overall, Michener constructs Hawaii as a democratic racial paradise, a place where Asians and whites can live together in harmony -- and a model that the rest of the nation should emulate as it steps out onto the world stage.
Christina Klein
MIT, Literature Faculty,
Bldg. 14N-412,
Cambridge, MA 02139.
(617) 253-4450
cklein@mit.edu
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