A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the
assumptions of the imperial centre. 59
It is important to note that Hawaii’s authors are not exclusively concerned with writing
back to one defined center, namely the mainland United States. Rather, they are writing to
make up for the varied and pervasive misrepresentations of their islands and its peoples.
Local writing is either geared at the whole world and its clichéd views of paradise, or at
fellow Locals, often requiring some contextual detective work from non-Local readers.
From a location of South Seas romances to a recreational haven for whalers, from
a missionaries’ depraved den of sinners to the 50 th state and a modern tourist paradise,
there exists a host of images of an outsider’s and a visitor’s Hawai’i. This kind of
representation has for a long time worked as colonial discourse does, instilling the
internalization of foreign assumptions by objectifying and ‘othering’ Locals. Its effects
concern both native Hawaiians as well as the descendants of immigrants: The natives
have been cast alternately as lazy and laid back, fierce warriors and regal sportsmen,
heathenish Blacks and children of nature. Immigrants who came as sugar plantation
laborers on indenture contracts, mainly from Asian countries, were at best seen as
working class people who were expected to leave after their contracts expired, each
nationality labeled with stereotypical attributes that tend to crop up even today. Their
sheer number was the main reason that statehood was delayed several times: racist fears
of a possible Chinese ‘pigtailed senator’ coursed through meetings of Congress.
In the late Seventies and early Eighties, colonial discourse theory began to focus
on how modes of perception and representation, encoded in language, have been and are
employed as weapons, both in the hands of the colonizer and the colonized. The work of
Frantz Fanon and Edward Said brought the realization that
empires colonise imaginations […] Overturning colonialism, then, is not just
about handing land back to its dispossessed peoples, returning power to those who
were once ruled by Empire. It is also a process of overturning the dominant ways
of seeing the world, and representing reality in ways which do not replicate
colonialist values. If colonialism involves colonising the mind, then resistance to
59 Bill Ashcroft/Gareth Griffiths/Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-
Colonial Literatures, London 1989: 2.
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