A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

grid of interdependence.” 78 Echoes of Rushdie can be perceived in Subramani’s following
assessment:
The Pacific, with all its languages and cultures, is really a polyglot text that will
keep rewriting itself, producing new versions of its history and cultural identities.
The Pacific we are talking about refuses to be homogenized. If we wish to
generalize, we might say there is a Pacific that we carry in our heads, another that
is a site of various daily contestations. 79
Given the above considerations, it is easily conceivable that family histories of (im)
migration (or even a temporary residence on the mainland for college education) have
constituted some of the incentives for contemporary Hawai’i people to start writing
fiction, for anyone “who understands the artificial nature of reality is more or less obliged
to enter the process of making it.” 80 Likewise, native Hawaiians have their own sad story
of displacement and discontinuity to tell.
Regional writers take the cultural material of a place and transform it into a mythology that the people of
the region can identify as their own. Without this mythology the cultural region would not exist. The
historical, economic, and social criteria might be in place, but the region achieves an identity only when it
2.2.3 Regionalism
is identified in art.
William Westfall – “On the Concept of Region in Canadian History and Literature” 81
In the context of the different struggles for Local identities it is useful to work with the
concept of region, or regionalism. 82 Hawai’i as an isolated chain of islands can be defined
78 Subramani, “The Diasporic Imagination,” in Cynthia Franklin/Ruth Hsu/Suzanne Kosanke (eds.),
Navigating Islands and Continents: Conversations in and around the Pacific, Honolulu 2000: 173-86, here
176.
79 Subramani in Franklin et al. 2000: 185.
80 Rushdie 1991: 281.
81 William Westfall, “On the Concept of Region in Canadian History and Literature,” in Journal of
Canadian Studies 15 No. 2 (Summer 1980): 3-15, here 11.
82 “the first constituting a territorial definition of geographic space based on a selection of possible
differentiating criteria […], and the second constituting an interpretation of social interests that give
geographic location priority over such other possible interests as gender, ethnicity, class, age, sexual
orientation, and race” (quoted from Frank Davey, “Toward the Ends of Regionalism,” in Christian
Riegel/Herb Wyile/Karen Overbye/Don Perkins, A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in
Canadian and American Writing, Edmonton 1998: 2).
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