A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

American terms. Recalling a rhetoric that posited Hawai’i as the logical strategic meeting
place at the disposal of those in charge, Robert M. Kamins writes in Malamalama:
From its early days the University was envisioned as an institution of higher
learning that would connect America with Asia. Hawaii’s intercontinental
position and its multiethnic environment, in which scholars from Asia could find
languages, cuisines, and religions familiar to them among the exotica of America-
in-Polynesia, argued for developing here a university to span the Pacific. 212
From early visions of such bridging ground through Cold War policies of the
Americanization of Asians to the perceived necessity of connections with emergent
‘Tiger’ economies, American interests have rarely been altruistic or committed to plain
learning. The Department of Oriental Studies began with classes on Chinese and Japanese
language and history, growing slowly and with disruptions caused by World War II and
monetary constraints. One milestone in the realization of the meeting place idea was the
creation of the East-West Center, initiated right after the passing of Hawaii’s statehood
bill as a “Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange between East and West.” 213 While
the Department of State envisioned the Center as a place to instruct Asians in advanced
American technologies and promote the ‘American Way,’ Manoa supporters of the idea
focused on cultural interchange and mutual interaction. The East-West Center and the
adjacent John F. Kennedy Theatre were part of the University’s expansion in the 1960s,
and in spite of conflicting objectives, the Center has fostered the establishment of
graduate programs and the recruiting and retaining of scholars specializing in Pacific and
Asian Studies, all justified by the increased number of incoming grantees, many of them
seeking advanced degrees.
Naturally, all these areas of study engendered extensive library collections,
resulting in vast research repositories available today. Also, scholars in these fields have
published a host of books of their own to add to this locally consolidated treasure of
knowledge. The University of Hawai’i Press has been instrumental in publishing and
212 Kamins/Potter 1998: 148.
213 Ibid.: 77. Charlene Gima quotes Noel Kent more cynically calling the center “a weapon in the cold war
rivalry between the United States and the so-called Eastern bloc for influence in Asia and the Pacific”
(Charlene Setsue Gima, Writing the Pacific: Imagining Communities of Difference in the Fiction of Jessica
Hagedorn, Keri Hulme, Rodney Morales, and Gary Pak, Cornell University 1997: 67). She sees this as an
exemplary proof that “far from being peripheral to global conflicts between imagined communities, Hawai’i
is instead uncomfortably close to more than one center of production” (ibid.). Periphery, or remoteness, is
relative, and might at least since WWII be nothing more than the imagination of security.
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