A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

accumulation of several aspects in most texts. Offering a separate chapter on each
category, equivalent to the aforementioned markers of literature from Hawai’i, enables
me to classify, analyze, and portray topics and topoi in a comprehensible way. As I survey
a great amount of literature in these chapters, the result can hardly avoid becoming
enumerative at times. In a concluding chapter, my portrayal will lead to the synthesizing
idea of a common Local identity, which is offered in turn as a tool or model for further
study and the future refinement of Hawaii’s literary map.
For a good many years after annexation in 1897, Hawaii was able to resist further Americanization
because of its remoteness. But as this remoteness has broken down since World War II, and particularly
since statehood, Hawaii has been plunged with increasing velocity into a process aimed at incorporating
this independent region by suppressing its most characteristic features. For in no other area of the United
States do such diverse and vigorous linguistic and cultural elements coexist in the complexion of every
5.1 History
level of social, political, and artistic life.
Frank Stewart – Introduction to Poetry Hawaii 289
Although the ‘post’ in postcolonial literatures is definitely not a mere temporal marker,
time as history, as narrated time, is a prominent fact in all of them. The islands of the
Pacific have often been construed as ‘out of time’ by explorers and ethnographers alike.
Written histories have usually posited Western categories of linearity and teleology to
contain conquest and colonization, while indigenous cultures have been described in a
natural history fashion as static and in need of superior Western/Christian values. This is
all true for Hawai’i. 290 What is as true is that the growing indigenous and/or postcolonial
289 Stewart/Unterecker 1979: xiv. The year of annexation was 1898.
290 A recent controversy such as the Sahlins/Obeyesekere dissent over Captain Cook’s alleged identification
with the Hawaiian god Lono is an illuminating example of non-native scholars interpreting native history
(see Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captian Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific,
Princeton 1992, and Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example, Chicago
1995). The Sri Lankan Obeyesekere situates himself as a fellow ‘native’ and endows Hawaiian reactions to
the arrival of Cook with’common sense’ or ‘universal rationality’ in the Western sense. Sahlins, on the other
hand, goes to great lengths to provide evidence that Hawaiians were culturally conditioned, that is, reacted
according to their specific custom and faith. He states: “In just those situations where empirical perceptions
violate received categories, Polynesians, instead of slipping into a ‘practical rationality,’ invoke the
manifestations and effects of transcendental beings” (Sahlins 1995: 179). Houston Wood evaluates the
dispute as follows: “Despite their seeming differences, then, both continue to embrace a rhetoric of
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