A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to
hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you
in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write
myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer, the speaking subject and you are now the
4.2 The Old Canon
center of my talk.
bell hooks – “Marginality as Site of Resistance” 217
The career and writings of Arthur Grove Day (1904-1994) are not only indicative of the
(neo)colonial function of an American university in a multi-ethnic environment, they also
serve as examples both of the powerful position a single hegemonic figure can occupy
and of the Orientalist conflation of touristic and scholarly modes of writing. It is no
coincidence that Day “arrived in Hawai’i in 1944 with an interest in discovery narratives
and primitive art.” 218 His ‘moment’ was “coterminous with the drive to statehood in
Hawaii and the rise to dominance of the tourist industry.” 219 His friend and later co-editor
Carl Stroven had designed a Pacific literature class which he had taught since 1936. This
class covered mainly the literary discoverers and travelers whose texts the two also
showcased in their best-selling anthologies The Spell of the Pacific (1949), A Hawaiian
Reader (1959), and The Spell of Hawaii (1968). Apart from acting as Chair of the English
Department from 1948 to 1953, Day was dedicated to editing ‘Pacific’ texts, thus
establishing and authorizing an ‘outsider’ canon for Hawai’i and the larger ‘South Seas.’
Such a literary history is informed by an imposed teleology: “Once Hawai’i officially
becomes American soil, its history is, retroactively, American, and has always been
American history in the making.” 220 Championing Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson,
and Jack London as ‘Hawaiian’ writers, he saw annexation as the (manifest) “destiny of
the Hawaiian islands.” 221
217 bell hooks, “Marginality as Site of Resistance,” in Ferguson et al. 1990, 341-3, here 343.
218 Paul Lyons, “Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove
Day,” in boundary 2 24 No. 2 (1997): 47-78, here 55.
219 Lyons 1997: 54.
220 Ibid.: 68. For an extensive study of the outsider perspective on the region, see Bernard Smith, European
Vision and the South Pacific, rev. ed. Boston: Yale UP 1985, or, with a pictorial art history angle, Bernard
Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, Boston: Yale UP 1992.
221 Quoted in Lyons 1997: 68.
69