Next Wave. Durham: Duke University Press. 2013. x, 284 pp. (Figures.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5370-6.
This work explores connections among many things, but especially between the United States military and tourism in Hawai’i and the Philippines. While most of the author’s overarching arguments are sound, I am not convinced she has made them as well as she might have. That is, I wonder if Professor Gonzalez’s approach is likely to convince readers who are not already sympathetic to the points she espouses. And I think it important that it should—there is much of value here.
I found myself responding viscerally at the outset, when I encountered her portrayal of an archetypal GI as “an American soldier and a sunbathing tourist” (4). It evoked a lingering memory from my early childhood, not long after the end of World War Two, when my father told me a story from his days serving in the highlands of Burma. Idly leafing through an armed forces publication, he came upon a spread about recreational opportunities in Hawai’i. The centrepiece was a sailor sunbathing on the beach at Waikiki: it was his brother, a navy electrician at Pearl Harbor. Any querulousness I might have had about this book’s linkage of the military and tourism utterly vanished in that flash of recollection.
But a few pages further along I was stopped by a second image, the notion that “the United States viewed Hawai’i and the Philippines as feminized territories needing discipline and protection” (13). I have no trouble understanding analyses that lead to such sweeping conclusions, and appreciate the perspectives they provide us. But there is rhetorical overkill here, and it exemplifies what I experience as the underlying problem with this book: it substitutes all-encompassing polemics and critiques for
nuanced, searching analysis. Like all peoples, Americans possess widely contrasting views and pursue competing goals. And like most views and goals, these are contradictory and inconsistent. Any generalization about how Americans conceptualize Hawai’i that overlooks erupting volcanoes with rivulets of molten lava streaming down their sides or white, foaming spray flying off the pounding surf is missing something. And many American males, probably most, compete with one another, striving to dominate their rivals, as much as they seek to control females. I repeat: I understand and appreciate the theoretical approach Gonzalez employs here, but she needs to dig more deeply.
There are parts of Securing Paradise that ring brightly. When Gonzalez leads us through a visit to the historical park at the Corregidor fortress in the Philippines, for instance, she replaces rhetoric with acute observation and description in ways that are vastly more satisfying. She captures the multiplicity of ways in which the park’s designers seek to shape historical understanding. Drawing lines that link World War Two and the Vietnam War, she recounts the opening ceremonies at the Pacific War Memorial there in 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam conflict, allowing the reader space to reflect on Ferdinand Marcos’s dedicatory speech honouring those who “fought to make peace, if not possible, an enduring condition of human life,” and she resists the temptation to cudgel us with remarks about the irony resonating in this scene (101).
But on the whole, war and the military and all that they entail call for a look at something more than just that which lies on the surface. I respect what she’s trying to get at when she says “The soldiers are young for most part, just boys far away from home” (103), and it reminds me of how I came to the Pacific (including Hawai’i and the Philippines) to fight the war in Vietnam when I was still a teenager. I was sent on to Australia to help commemorate the battle of the Coral Sea, from the previous war, and fell in love with the Pacific islands I encountered along the way. But there’s more to it than that. I was in spirit, if not chronology, a weary old man by that time, so disillusioned with what I had been ordered to do that I then devoted most of my career to resisting American colonialism in the Pacific islands. It is precisely because my love of the Pacific was begotten by the war that I so deeply appreciate the attention she draws to these linkages. But the conclusions she insists upon quite ignore all the other possible ways in which these emotions can play themselves out.
Again and again, Gonzalez draws attention to telling ironies, including the popularity of Pearl Harbor as a tourist destination, the use of helicopters to view Kauai, and the repurposing of a jungle training camp at what used to be the Philippines Subic Bay naval base as a recreational attraction. She has an extraordinary eye for these sorts of juxtapositions. As long as she is reporting she holds my attention, but repeatedly she resorts to posturing in place of analyzing, and then I begin to drift. If she wants to have an impact outside the cultural studies community, and I think she ought to, she would do well to hold her own abilities, as well as those of the readers, in higher regard. She doesn’t need to hammer her points home so bluntly—in fact, doing so seems to detract from her message. And she could perhaps benefit from considering a notion that Isaiah Berlin often cited: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” In connecting the dots, Gonzalez might strive for a little more nuance, subtlety and complexity: the lines she draws seem just a little too straight, at least to this reader.
Glenn Petersen
City University of New York, New York, USA
pp. 896-898