A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Michener’s claim that “these Orientals did not produce a literature of their own.” 270
Together with Arnold Hiura, he compiled a bibliography of “over seven hundred works
by Asian Americans written between the early nineteenth century and the 1970s,” 271
which was proudly presented at the “Talk Story Big Island Conference” in 1979. He went
on to write a dissertation on traditions and models for Hawaii’s writers, positing a
pastoral and a heroic mode as their main templates. This dissertation was later revised
and extended to become And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i,
the first book-length study of an insider perspective, a Local literature. 272 Bolstered by
more than ten years of intense research, Sumida opened his work on a bold and confident
note:
This book is intended as a catalyst. I hope it will cause readers to take a fresh look
at the vivid and various patterns within Hawaii’s pastoral and heroic literary
traditions. As a literary history, the book covers two centuries of Hawaii’s culture
since Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778. The approach is multicultural, ranging
through and relating together the spectrum of native Hawaiian, colonial, tourist,
and polyethnic local literatures. 273
However, the first paragraph also includes the arguable point in his otherwise highly
valuable work: Sumida supposes a normative development from simple to complex
pastoral works and criticizes the lack of heroic works by Local authors, taking such
succession for granted. In his review of And the View from the Shore, Rob Wilson
contends that this is the canonical pattern of the Western imagination, and goes on to ask:
Resisting such a teleological use of generic categories, however, why should
Hawaii’s writers aspire to achieve works of ‘the heroic,’ that most Eurocentric,
male-based and even imperialist of forms as these literary prototypes come down
‘from da mainland’ through Homer, Milton, and Whitman to these Polynesian
shores? 274
270 From the introduction to Day/Stroven 1959: 12.
271 Lyons 1997: 69. See Arnold Hiura and Steven Sumida (eds.), Asian American Literature of Hawaii: An
Annotated Bibliography, Honolulu 1979.
272 The dissertation had been the aforementioned Our Whole Voice: The Pastoral and the Heroic in
Hawaii’s Literature, Ann Arbor 1982.
273 Sumida 1991: ix.
274 Rob Wilson, “Breaking Local Ground: Stephen H. Sumida and the View from the Shores,” in Bamboo
Ridge 57 (Winter 1993): 117-24, here 121.
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