Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Susan Schultz
Subject: haoles
I’m glad to hear from a "former haole," Eric–though isn’t that in a sense part of
the problem; can you imagine being a former African American or former
Asian American? I’m not sure that the kind of discourse that I quote by
Haunani Trask leads necessarily to ethnic cleansing, though it certainly bears
resemblance with the rhetoric of ethnic cleansing. And that’s part of the
problem teaching the material; do you opt with those who suggest that rhetoric
is powerful but, paradoxically, not a call to real action? Or do you take it as a
call to arms that is intended to include you? If there’s a more moderate position
to take on the question, which I suspect there might be (being a foolish
optimist), will anyone in the heat of the moment actually listen?
I just attended a lecture by David Lloyd on "nationalisms against the state." He
talked about the current Irish situation, in which the Irish (whoever they are)
are perhaps trading cultural power for economic colonization by the new
Europe. The upside of Hawaiian nationalism, so far, has been the reemergence
of Hawaiian culture outside the province of the tourist industry, which has
"preserved" that culture by presenting it as a self-parody for the consumption of
outsiders. Trask wants Hawaiian hotel workers to start trashing the hotels;
doesn’t she face, then, the increasing poverty of her people for the benefit of recreating
an ethnic and cultural (in this case the same, I guess) identity? She
wants and expects culture to do political work, which Lloyd is suggesting may
not be possible in the face of GATT and NAFTA. Lloyd suggests that local
resistance is possible without the ultimate goal being that of creating a new
state on the example of the old, as he claims happened in Ireland in the 1920s.
Trask agreed with him on this, which suggests (I hope) that "ethnic cleansing"
may not be the result of resistance. The violence may come, instead, from
above–as is happening in Russia? I don’t know.
Some afterthoughts on teaching: in some sense our horror at Gingrich’s being
an academic seems beside the point. At the University of Hawaii one simply is
the representative of the state, the nation, some sort of American canon. This
implicates you in all sorts of things, no matter how liberal you are. Trask is
right on this one. One can (as I and many of my colleagues do) cede authority
in the classroom, present oneself honestly as a "professor from the mainland
with such and such degrees), and then find that in that absence name-calling
begins. I don’t know, it’s a confusing situation to be in. I suppose in the case of