Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism

Chapter 5 Stories in Place: Dynamics of Translation and Re-Cognition Consider that the world is neither flat nor round. —Joy Harjo Chapter 3 documented the turn-of-the-twentieth-century production of legendary Hawai‘i, one part of the period’s promotional English-language literature about Hawai‘i. Violently disrupting Hawaiian traditions of storytelling—mo‘olelo generally, but wahi pana specifically—to benefit non-Hawaiians primarily and to support ideologically the annexation of Hawai‘i to the United States of America, Thomas Thrum’s and William Westervelt’s legendary Hawai‘i worked to delegitimize Native Hawaiian narratives at the same time that it popularized ‘‘legends’’ as representative of a colonized ‘‘Hawaiian culture.’’ Translation—of language, of genre, of epistemology, and of style—enabled this rupture; photography presented the resulting vision of a legendary Hawai‘i that would appeal to tourists and potential settlers. Chapter 4 documented a complex autoethnographic instance of resistance to this development. Challenging its protocols, Emma Nakuina’s English-language collection of mo‘olelo refused to represent Hawai‘i as devoid of its people and their histories. Though not reprinted to this day, with other historical and contemporary Hawaiian counternarratives it invites us to unmake legendary Hawai‘i by re-visioning and restoring it as an indigenous ‘‘storied place.’’ While the core of this study is a period-specific cultural production, my synchronic approach necessarily raises questions about what preceded the construction of legendary Hawai‘i and what has become of it today. Had, for example, the tradition of ha‘i mo‘olelo (telling stories, recounting histories) been essentially unchanged by Western contact before then? Since tradition, far from being static or simply conserva- 138 Chapter 5 tive, is always a changing social and cultural construction, dynamically responding to present need and future responsibilities, the answer to such questions is obviously ‘‘no.’’ But what in this case does ‘‘no’’ mean? What do we know about mo‘olelo traditions at the turn of the twentieth century? And how had they changed during the nineteenth century? As a major force of change in Hawai‘i, print almost certainly would have had an effect. And how did the twentieth century—with statehood in 1959, the injection of a rainbow multiculturalism into Hawai‘i’s ‘‘destination image’’ for tourist consumption, and the emergence of a Native Hawaiian renaissance and sovereignty movement—carry, transform, or challenge these legendary traditions? Though the will to hegemony of legendary Hawai‘i remains strong in English translation and in the mainstream popular imaginary, Hawaiians have sustained disrupted but not destroyed mo‘olelo traditions—most visibly through hula, the narrative performance of their (hi)stories and poetry. And yet new stories have gripped the popular imagination and even been collected and published as representative of Hawai‘i’s ‘‘supernatural’’ tradition. How then to evaluate the legacy of legendary Hawai‘i today? This final chapter has two main objectives: to limn the difference between the violent disruption that annexation-related politics brought about in Hawaiian narrative traditions, and previous changes inflecting mo‘olelo in the ‘‘contact zone’’ of the nineteenth century; and to critique current multicultural approaches to ‘‘tales of the supernatural’’ or ‘‘contemporary legends’’ circulating in Hawai‘i today, as another unacknowledged , and often unconscious, strategy for perpetuating the effects of that earlier disruption. As I said at the start, this is not a book about Hawaiian mo‘olelo. Others have the qualifications that I don’t possess to conduct in-depth studies of Hawaiian-language narrative traditions. I ground my observations about nineteenth-century mo‘olelo in what I have learned from their work; my experience with collaborative research and teaching also figures prominently in the following discussion. My overall intention is to insist on a re-cognition of Hawai‘i’s stories in and of translation that attends to and respects indigenous senses of place, genre, and history. Both translation studies and indigenous studies have in their own ways moved me to advocate such a ‘‘reorientation’’ (Wood) and re-view. Regardless of whether a specific translated text domesticates, defamiliarizes , or does both, the cultural practice of translation always requires some inscription of naturalized expectations and interests even as it makes its utopian reach toward alterity. In this paradox lies translation’s impossibility and its everyday powerful influence. The tensions and challenges are linguistic, epistemological, cultural, ethical, and political, for translating and reading translations both pull what’s foreign closer to [150.230.61.141] Project MUSE (2024-11-29 23:52 GMT) Stories in...