Securing paradise

•

Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez 

Next Wave New Directions in Women’s Studies

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman 

© 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­ free paper ♾ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Whitman by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­ in-­ Publication Data Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuña, 1973– Securing paradise : tourism and militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines / Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez. pages cm. — (Next wave) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5355-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8223-5370-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tourism—Hawaii. 2. Tourism—Philippines. 3. Militarism—Hawaii. 4. Militarism—Philippines. I. Title. II. Series: Next wave. G155.U6G625 2013 338.4′791599—dc23 2013010097 

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  Military-­Tourism Partnerships
in Hawai‘i and the Philippines  1

Chapter One  Manifest Destinations and the Work
of Tropical Fictions  21

Chapter Two  Scenic Highways, Masculinity,
Modernity, and Mobility  49

Chapter Three Neoliberation and U.S.-­P hilippines
Circuits of Sacrifice and Gratitude  83

Chapter Four Remembering Pearl Harbor,
Reinforcing Vigilance  115

Chapter Five The Machine in the Garden:
Helicopter Airmobilities, Aerial Fields of Vision, and Surrogate Tropics  147

Chapter Six  Playing Soldier and Going Native
in Subic Freeport’s Jungle Tour  181

Conclusion Insecurities, Tourism, and Terror  215

Notes  225 Bibliography  253 Index  271 

Acknowledgments

This book represents a decade of research that was, from the beginning, supported by the intellectual generosity of my mentors and colleagues, the unstinting encouragement of family and friends, and timely funding from a variety of sources. The encouragement, steadfast commitment to this project, and warm companionship I have received have made the labor of this book truly collaborative. During my graduate studies at uc Berkeley, I had the wonderful fortune of having as my intellectual guides Jose Davíd Saldívar, Elaine Kim, and Caren Kaplan. Their patience and incisive questions pushed my dissertation into an entirely new direction long after it was filed. I owe Caren Kaplan special thanks for recommending this manuscript to Duke University Press. She has been a model of rigorous scholarship and feminist teaching whose mentorship has continued to inspire. My first writing group with fellow graduate students Kathy Yep, Jeffrey Ow, Steven Lee, and Mimi Nguyen provided critique, commiseration, and engaged collegiality. Early collaborations with Nerissa Balce and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez gave me insight to the questions in this book and introduced me to the kind of scholarly work that I like doing. Mimi Nguyen, in addition to offering formidable intellectual support, was the most dependable and caring of friends who also earned her godmother title even as her goddaughter Inez was still in utero. Her work continues to serve as a touchstone, and her generosity as a colleague is unsurpassed. 

At my first tenure-­ track position at St. Lawrence University, Margaret Kent-­ Bass was the staunchest of champions, assisting junior faculty with funding and intellectual community formation. In Hawai‘i, which has been home for the last seven years, I have been most fortunate in the form of political and intellectual friendships that have both nurtured and unsettled my thinking in the best of ways. My colleagues in the American Studies department are the best ones I could ask for. In particular, Mari Yoshihara, Theo Gonzalves, Robert Perkinson, and David E. Stannard welcomed me as a fellow instigator from the start. Their humor and warmth helped me through various stages of this project. I especially thank David E. Stannard for coming up with creative ways to give me time to do research and write. I thank Mari Yoshihara and the graduate students from our joint grant-­ writing workshop for comments on my book proposal. I have also had the privilege of working with graduate students who have taught me so much: Mo Wells, Angela Krattiger, Miguel Llora, B. Cheryl Beredo, Eriza Bareng, Kim Compoc, Yu Jung Lee, Ruth Craft, and Sanae Nakatani. I hope to see your work in print soon. My writing hui has changed membership over the years, and I would like to acknowledge the readers who braved their way through the very rough early drafts: Ty Kawika Tengan, Katharina Heyer, Rod Labrador, Lisa Fa‘anofo Uperesa, and Brandy Nālani McDougall. I especially thank a trio of amazing women who helped this book become better in so many ways, especially in the home stretch, when schedules were tight and time was especially precious: Pensri Ho, for asking the right questions even when I wished she wouldn’t, and who, even in the worst of times, would always make the time; Hokulani Aikau for sharing insights that sharpened my thinking, and being a wonderful friend with whom to share childcare, gossip, food, and complaints about sore muscles; and Jonna Eagle, for being such a generous colleague and friend right off the bat, for reading with incredible attention to detail, and for making the best chocolate cake ever. Writing group has never been so much fun with their humor, sustaining support, uncompromising critique, and kind offers to read and reread. I plan someday to be able to repay this debt. I am profoundly grateful (and fortunate) to have readers whose generous and incisive suggestions pushed me to make the book stronger. I am even more glad to be able to thank them by name. Allan Punzalan Isaac and Cynthia Enloe, I owe you dinner and drinks, at the very least, for

Acknowledgments viii 

your careful, encouraging, and critical interventions in this book through various stages. All of your ideas compelled me to make this book better in every way, and I appreciate the time you took for your comments over the entire process. Thanks also goes to Sarita See, for sharing detailed comments on the manuscript and being a supportive colleague from afar, and to Vicente Rafael, whose encouraging words helped when they were needed the most. Over the course of writing this book, I’ve relied upon the expertise and assistance of many people. I am grateful for the administrative assistants in my life, who have eased my way through the bureaucratic maze of academia and who have, on top of that, been stellar human beings and friends: Jahleezah Eskew, Joyce Sheridan, Sandy Enoki, and especially Lori Ann Mina. Jodie Kakazu Mattos has been the librarian whom researchers dream of, and I am particularly indebted to her research assistance above and beyond the call of duty. I also thank Waldette Cueto, who curates the Ateneo de Manila University’s American Historical Collection; the staff at the Hawaiian and Pacific collection at uh Mānoa’s Hamilton Library; and Maria Elena Clariza, who heads the Philippine collection. The research for this book has taken me from the continental United States to Hawai‘i and the Philippines, and I am deeply indebted to the following people who have supported my research, extended their hospitality, and made doing my job truly a privilege: Oscar Campomanes and the Kritika Kultura series at Ateneo de Manila for taking in a visiting scholar and making me feel right at home; Gary Devilles; Erlyn Alcantara, for all her help with Kennon Road fieldwork; F. Sionil José and Teresita José; Dean Alegado and Emmy Alegado; Cynthia Franklin; Laura Lyons; Ruth Hsu; Kath Sands; Karen Kosasa; Bill Chapman; Dennis Ogawa; Dylan Rodriguez; and Setsu Shigematsu. A much earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Touring Military Masculinities: U.S.-­ Philippines Circuits of Sacrifice and Gratitude in Corregidor and Bataan” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (2010), and I would like to thank the University of Minnesota Press, Setsu Shigematsu, and Keith Lujan Camacho for including an earlier version of my work in that volume. The research funding for this book has come from a variety of sources: the Ford Foundation, in the form of a predissertation fellowship; and faculty research grants from St. Lawrence University and the Univer-

Acknowledgments ix 

sity of Hawai‛i at Mānoa Research Council. I would like to thank Harold McArthur for all his help and support with shepherding grant applications through the Research Council. To Ken Wissoker, who from the start has been the most encouraging and sympathetic of editors, I owe special thanks. He took this project under his wing and helped it come to fruition. I also thank the wonderful team at Duke University Press, especially Jade Brooks and Christine Dahlin, for their patience, support, and amazing professionalism; Heather Hensley, for the perfect cover design; and Jessica Ryan, who guided this book through the last stages. You have made the whole process so easy I feel like I want to do this again! Finally, to my family and friends—I can now show them evidence that I have been truly working all this time. My gratitude goes out especially to Jean and Bill Anderson, the most supportive and loving of in-­ laws, and to my parents, Vivian and Ernesto Gonzalez, who have let me forge my own path even when it diverged from theirs. They have spent so much of their well-­deserved retirement caring for my family so I could write. Thank you for providing me with that precious resource and peace of mind. For my daughter, Inez, who has grown up with this book, and who has been the most patient and understanding of children, I promise that the next book is the one we’ll write together. You have been the best of café companions. Thank you for being understanding with your mother even if she is a slow writer. Noah, now I can finally teach you how to read, my dear illiterate son. Now you get lots of bedtime stories. This one’s for Evan, who sticks around and always reminds me of what is truly important and absolutely indispensable in life. Your love and support have made this all possible.

Acknowledgments x 

Introduction
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Military-­Tourism Partnerships in Hawai‘i and the Philippines

“Joe” is an identity that is almost automatically attributed to young white men of a certain age in the Philippines, regardless of whether or not they are American soldiers. The insistent hail “Hey, Joe!”—in city streets, at markets, or at the beach—while a somewhat awkward attempt at intercultural communication, evokes a long history of U.S. military occupation in the islands that established Joe as a regular fixture. Joe’s history militarizes his status as a visitor: his practices of leisure (and by extension, those of civilians) were secured by the labor of his military tours. As symbolic and material evidence of the promise of U.S.-­ Philippine fraternal collaborations, Joe as tourist and soldier embodies the masculinized mobilities of American-­ style modernity. His is the ambassadorship of military protection intertwined with the pleasurable cosmopolitan possibilities of stability and security. Joe’s reception, of course, is uneven: in places where massive military installations dominate the landscape, he is welcomed for the income that base economies bring and resented for the sexual trade and erosion of local sovereignties fostered by his presence. In Mindanao, where the U.S. military has waged a century-­long pacification campaign against Muslims, Joe might be greeted as a savior or reviled as a violent interloper. My own initial encounters with Joe were largely benign. Growing up on 

the Visayan island of Negros, where Spanish hacienda culture and American missionary efforts are dominant cultural influences, I was insulated from the realities of military occupation even as I was its indirect subject. Although Joe was only an occasional presence in my town, the United States had an oversized effect on everyday life in the Cold War Philippines. As Martial Law babies, my friends and I played war games, terrorized each other with stories of nuclear annihilation, and, of course, dared each other to greet the occasional white man at the beach with the requisite “Hey, Joe!” Despite its associations with war and militarization, America was invariably the good guy in these scenarios. To us, America was the stalwart liberator of World War II—exemplified by General Douglas MacArthur, who kept his promise to return. My attitudes and feelings about this abstract America were reinforced by the material largesse of care packages sent by stateside relatives, the lessons taught in church and school (both founded by American missionaries), and a fantasy life fostered by television and the movies. I grew up thinking about the United States as a benevolent and generous presence, the guardian of my playground. Following the family migration trail opened up by Cold War immigration reform and pushed out by a stagnant Philippine economy, my family moved to the United States and settled in upstate New York in 1984. Aside from the traumas of cultural collision, one of my strongest adolescent impressions came from the new experience of traveling for leisure and not solely for family or work obligations. My first experience as a tourist in the United States was a visit to the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, close to where my father’s older sister had settled. My father, a World War II buff, brought the whole family to the rotunda where MacArthur—the archetypal Joe—was buried. This trip was a pilgrimage to a hero held in great esteem by many Filipinos, but also a confirmation of my family’s rise in social status. I still have the photograph of my family posing in front of MacArthur’s 1950 Chrysler Imperial limousine, as if to say, “We have arrived.” The photograph was souvenir proof not merely of a family holiday but also of a middle-­class American leisure practice that was simultaneously an act of identification with militarized U.S.-­Philippine relations. In many ways, this book is an exploration of the enduring childhood memories and feelings about the United States that were generated and deflected by the figure of Joe. How was it that despite the massive scale of violence the U.S. military had carried out in Asia and the Pacific since the turn of the nineteenth century, a child growing up in the Philippines
Introduction 2 

had such positive associations with the United States? What alchemy transforms the terror of imperial violence and American postwar occupation to deeply felt understandings of American rescue, liberation, and benevolence? How are allegiance and love nurtured against and alongside the threat and reality of war and warmongering? While the United States has “formed states and territories, tested weapons, recruited soldiers, exploited resources, induced dependencies, displaced populations, and ruptured cultures,” it has done so with little long-­ lasting damage to its own reputation and with minimal inconvenience to the vast majority of its citizens’ consciences.1 Somehow, the violent aspects of U.S. interventions have been absorbed into an alternative narrative of American benevolence: once-­ rival Japan has been transformed by virtue of nuclear annihilation, occupation, and reconstruction into a cooperative ally; the trauma of the Vietnam War is today rearticulated as an economic victory for capitalism; and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation carries out the neoliberal dictates of Washington, D.C., in the region it comfortably refers to as the site for its “Pacific Century.”2 Against and in tandem with this sustained record of diplomatic, economic, and military intervention in Asia and the Pacific, Securing Paradise highlights imaginative and affective interventions as loci of power. Joe’s doubled subjectivity as tourist and soldier gestures to the effects that naturalize and even obscure systematized acts of violence. As a tourist— insisting on a register of human connection and empathy—he invited hospitality, rather than domination or coercion, blunting the more brutal aspects of his mission. In beginning with Joe and the identifications and emotions he provokes, I emphasize not the authenticity of these attachments, but their manufacture. That the subjective authorizes truth as reliably and convincingly as official policies suggests that rather than working in opposition, their mutual entanglements exemplify the complex interrelationships of power. In other words, this book is interested in understanding regimes of feelings not as examples of false consciousness but as essential elements of a garrison state. Their transmission to juvenile citizens testifies to the appeal of pleasure, love, and identification in contrast to and in collaboration with pain, hate, and alienation. Securing Paradise explores the relationship between tourism and militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines, the “historical and present-­ day tropics” of the United States.3 While other sites host larger American military installations today, Hawai‘i and the Philippines represent the first and
Introduction 3 

most sustained American military occupations in Asia and the Pacific: they remain the linchpins of American domination in the region. This book interrogates how the roots and routes of the U.S. military in these sites are foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations, as well as how the desires and economies of modern tourism are central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific. In my childhood recollections, American militarism is an obvious presence, but tourism—with its structuring ideas and practices of mobility and consumption—is the perfect partner to militarism’s claims to security. The two forces work together to produce gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge that are routinized into everyday life and are crucial to the practices and habits of U.S. imperialism in the region.4 As an American soldier and a sunbathing tourist, Joe is understood to be the product of a modernity to which colonial subjects aspire but inevitably fall short. His masculinized mobilities describe the privileges of imperial governance and desire that positioned me—and Filipinos in general—as his de facto hosts, playing out a familiar and enduring relationship of accommodation.5 As the book’s title suggests, by placing tourism and militarism within the same analytic lens, I seek to elucidate their mutual constitutions and dependencies. This is a particularly urgent project today in light of tourism’s emergence as the savior of developing economies, and the realignment of U.S. military policies in favor of greater flexibility in order to best protect its interests abroad. Tourism and militarism are today interwoven into the everyday and taken-­ for-­ granted routines and logics of local and global life, becoming matter-­of-­fact explanations for themselves and each other. In describing the reach of militarization in the nuclear age, Donna Haraway points to the “incidental” interchangeability of tourism and militarism’s technologies of “ultimate mobility and perfect exchange.”6 Yet this overlap between militarism and tourism is better characterized as a strategic and symbiotic convergence. It is by no means only “incidental” that the technologies of one merge so neatly with the other. In Asia and the Pacific, they constitute two of the most dominant apparatuses by which the United States extends its reach, and their convergent cultures, histories, and gendered logics suggest a more mutually constitutive relationship. Securing Paradise departs from existing studies in tourism and militarism because it foregrounds how tourism and militarism’s mutual work produces the possibilities for American historical and contemporary dominance in the region. The same logics that rationalize the uneven ecoIntroduction 4 

nomic and cultural landscapes resulting from unregulated tourism also justify the continuing presence of the American military in the Pacific: jobs, stability, protection, and foreign exchange. As Cynthia Enloe suggests, “Militarism and tourism . . . may be kin, bound together as cause and effect.”7 Militarism and tourism, and the ways they serve each other, illustrate the sometimes brutal and sometimes supple work of U.S. domination in the region: they demonstrate the manifold and overlapping circuits and modes of administrative control, ideological frameworks, and territorial occupations that are part of an American project of domination. In the title of this book, the concept of securing is meant to invoke multiple and intersecting ideas that are at play: the economic security promised by tourism’s quick exchange and militarism’s infusion and protection of capital; a militarized notion of national security that gained intensity during George W. Bush’s “global war against terror”; the politics of travel security invoked by tourism economies against other nation-­states; the work involved in guaranteeing and assuring outcomes and relationships between actors, institutions, and states; and the act of taking into custody or acquisition, all of which have historical and present-­ day resonance with regard to the relationships of the United States with Hawai‘i and the Philippines. As such, securing is not only a job for the disciplining arm of the military but also an achievement in tandem with and through the pleasures of consumer practices such as tourism. The Cold War era naturalized the massive buildup of the military-­ industrial complex and, just as importantly, blurred the distinctions between military and civilian life and politics, particularly in the United States.8 The ideological frameworks of developmentalism and security that characterized U.S. foreign economic and military policy during the Cold War period merged seamlessly with the booming projects of tourism and militarism in American areas of interest. As a developmental strategy that also began during the Cold War, the promotion by tourism of multiculturalism and its updated message of economic uplift personified “liberalization with a human face,” softening the austere policies dictated by supranational lending organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which exploited and produced neocolonial economies while ventriloquizing postcolonial homilies.9 Even as tourism appears as the “softer” colonial apparatus, as I discuss in the first chapter, its extractive logics and damaging epistemologies are no less hard edged than the kind militarism puts into play. Tourism’s
Introduction 5 

amenability to delivering the values of consumer culture across borders made it an ideal Cold War ambassador.10 It secured, through paternalistic demands for structural adjustments and the exploitation of a feminized service industry, the exploitative conditions and habits of extraterritorial control that serve the New World Order, all the while masking these relations of power through the seductive romance of uplift and development. Indeed, sometimes militarism works best when it has saturated the consumer practices and ideologies of tourism to the point of disappearance, as I discuss in my chapter on helicopter tours. Folded and woven into the fabric of consumer tourist practices, the inextricability of militarism from the consumer culture of capitalism camouflages how it has become a matter-­ of-­ fact part of security. Tourism—with its ties to consumer freedom and unfettered mobility—establishes a certain ideological, political, and cultural order that normalizes the presence of the military, prioritizes its needs, and defends its central role in defining “national security.”11 In its articulations with militarism, tourism is more than “just” a consumer practice: its most enabling conditions—that of mobility and modernity—are guaranteed by, at the very least, a racialized and gendered idea of ­ security. These multiple senses of securing thus also amplify the gendered logics that structure militarism and tourism. Invoking the ideas of domestic, personal, and national safety, and stability guaranteed by masculine labor and sacrifice, securing takes the form of guardianship and assumes a heroic modern state as the protector of weak and feminized territories and peoples. Asymmetrical imperial relations among the United States, Asia, and the Pacific produce and rely on an “invitation to conquest” as the necessary foil for the implied masculine thrust (discovery, pacification, liberation, development) of the United States.12 Both militarism and tourism rely on sedimented notions of colonized land and people (especially women) as passively there for the taking. This sexualized metaphor— what Anne McClintock has called “porno-­ tropics”—does not merely describe the character of broader international relations, or attitudes about the exploitability of land, natural resources, and people; it also represents how these claims are staked out in real-­ life terms.13 For instance, the robust militarized “rest and recreation” industry is both made imaginable through fantasies of the eroticized exotic feminine serving the “needs” of men in uniform and coauthorized by the lopsided fraternal alliances of occupying and occupied states.14 Security, then, is a fiction of masculinized
Introduction 6 

rescue and protection that is belied by the realities of state-­ sanctioned violence against women: the nature of security generated simultaneously by and in the convergences of militarism and tourism is akin to a perverse romance negotiated between masculine heads of state and procured by the currency of women’s bodies and feminized lands.15 While the products of the mutual labors of tourism and militarism are most starkly illuminated by this systematized state-­ level gendered violence, the so-­ called legitimate and self-­ legitimizing forms of tourism and militarism that tend to escape political and academic condemnation are the objects of this study. These tolerated and even desired military-­ tourism assemblages, just as powerfully as their illicit siblings, generate more conventional familial and state romances that critically reinforce the racialized and gendered relations of the New World Order. These romances run the gamut from the pilgrimages of fraternal soldierhood in the transnational itineraries of war memorialization to the insistent radioactive blindness of the Western heterosexual tourist gaze as it encounters bikinis in the Pacific.16 As more legitimate forms of “militourism,” tourist acts such as visiting historic battlefields or even sunbathing on the beach are always already refracted through desires to identify with masculinities that have been mobilized in the service of extraterritorial domination.17 In Asia and the Pacific, these “militourisms” take place on terrains that have long felt the impact of being objects of imperial desire. In articulating securing to paradise, I want to emphasize the generative role played by masculinized and militarized desires for security in America’s broader imperial project. Paradise is not a generic or static term—it specifically refers to an idea of passivity and penetrability engendered by imperialism as an alibi for domination, as Edward Said and others have so ably demonstrated.18 The profoundly gendered and racialized tropics referenced by contemporary tourist usages of paradise— timeless, passive, island spaces with beaches ringed by palm trees, blue waters, warm sun, and welcoming, sensual yet innocent natives—have their roots in European fantasies of the New World.19 Driving colonial desire was the idea of a premodern and pristine paradise—a virgin terrain ripe for economic exploitation and for masculine dreams of discovery and exploration. In her political history of tourism in Cuba and Hawai‘i, Christine Skwiot suggests that for the United States paradise was a racialized political myth born of an intense process of social and economic collaboration and conflicts over power and land.20 In other words, paradise is
Introduction 7 

by no means natural—it is conjured through imaginative labor, sustained by such economic apparatuses as plantation and tourism industries and the hierarchized societies they engender, secured through the threat and reality of violence or the promise of rescue, and continually contested by the people who live there.21 Locating “paradise” in the nexus of American touristic and militaristic designs on Asia and the Pacific makes visible the maneuvers of U.S. imperialism that have profoundly shaped life in the region, particularly in the last century.22 Focusing on the neocolonial spaces of Hawai‘i and the Philippines, and their central roles in the American militarization of Asia and the Pacific, Securing Paradise offers an analysis of tourism’s and militarism’s articulations in the region by examining how they jointly enable overlapping projects of colonialism, developmentalism, and neoliberalism.23 I use neocolonial as an umbrella term here not to connote a break with an officially imperial past, but as a way to capture how colonialism has been “rearticulated, muted, and unmoored through discourses of neoliberalism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and ‘antiterrorism,’” as well as to recognize the enduring and adaptive struggles of Filipino and Native Hawaiian peoples to counter the devastating effects of U.S. interventions in Asia and the Pacific.24 At stake in this project is a refusal to abandon the narrative of American imperial history and desire to the joint fictions of security and paradise that tourism and militarism c ­ oauthorize.
Linked Geographies and Histories of Paradise

Less than two years after we moved to the United States, the People Power Revolution ushered out the Marcos dictatorship. My family watched on television as, a world away, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos took to the streets to protest the irregular and fraudulent results of a snap election. Led by the widow of the assassinated former senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., and backed by the Catholic Church, the revolution teetered on the edge of violence until finally successfully ousting the Marcos regime.25 Apart from the indelible image of Imelda Marcos’s three thousand pairs of shoes, one of the most arresting moments of the revolution materialized when the Marcoses were granted safe passage and escorted from Malacañang Palace by four American helicopters. They were taken to the U.S. Air Force’s Clark Air Base, just eighty-­ three miles north of Manila. Minutes later, at 9:52 p.m. on February 25, 1986, the radio station dzrh announced, “The Marcoses have fled the country.” The helicopters, their flight to Clark,
Introduction 8 

and the base’s extraterritorial status illuminated—for a brief but powerful moment—how U.S. political and military machinations had played an outsized role in the domestic matters of the Philippines. Further, the Marcoses’ escape route—to the American base in the Philippines, then to Guam en route to Hawai‘i—mapped out the tropical cartography of American desire, showing how American militarism and the economies of tourism incorporated far-­ flung places into the same ­ circuits. In Asia and the Pacific, Hawai‘i and the Philippines are pivotal American tropics. As sites of fantastical imaginings and military occupations, they mark the uneasy tensions between America and its others, American republican ideals and the U.S. state’s imperial historical record, and the voyeuristic and violent fantasies of the tourist and the soldier. In contrast to the types of American militarism and tourism that exist elsewhere in the world, such as battleground sites in Europe, U.S. occupations of and with Asia and the Pacific are specifically about the control and occupation of land.26 Today, although Japan has the largest contingent of tourists in the region, it is the peculiarly American strain of Orientalism that Paul Lyons has called “American Pacificism” that has dictated the fate of this region, how it can be imagined, and how it can and should be secured.27 Real estate in the forms of colonial outposts and military bases as well as the promised markets and resources of Asia are the stakes of past and continued American interests in the area. Although it is not a uniquely U.S. invention, this mutual deployment of tourism and militarism has been managed successfully by the United States, which continues to navigate the “complex global/local dialectics of jet mass tourism and U.S. exoticism projected in the Pacific” alongside American military imagination, occupation, and U.S. interstate partnerships that produce the homosocial alliances and heteronormative romances of securing paradise.28 The United States was not the first or only colonial power to assert its hegemony in Hawai‘i and the Philippines. However, its forays into extracontinental empire have enduringly defined these sites primarily as feminized tropics and subjected them to its masculinized modes of security. In contrast to the Philippines, held under Spanish colonial administration from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Hawai‘i was a sovereign kingdom that was undergoing struggles for internal unification and also fighting off external attempts on its autonomy. Massive population declines in Hawai‘i following the arrival of European explorers in the mid-­ 1700s produced conditions for exploitation, dispossession, and cultural
Introduction 9 

adaptation.29 The arrival of American Calvinist missionaries in 1820 accelerated the erosion of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s political autonomy and cultural integrity, criminalizing Hawaiian cultural practices and imposing Western gendered norms of domestic behavior.30 As an extension of this legal hastening of cultural death, the settler elite alienated Native Hawaiians from their land through legislative maneuvers that allowed foreign land ownership in Hawai‘i by midcentury, which destroyed the foundations of Native political and economic self-­ determination.31 Where European empires had failed, an American economic oligarchy, in tandem with the rising American military, would succeed. Under the cover of a two-­ month tropical holiday, two high-­ ranking officers undertook a reconnaissance mission in 1873 that confirmed Hawai‘i’s desirability as a naval port.32 Threatened by the resurgent nationalism of the monarchy and the Hawaiian people, an empowered plantation oligarchy (composed of missionary sons) and the U.S. Navy collaborated to virtually depose the monarchy by forcing the king to sign the 1887 Bayonet Constitution. This was followed swiftly by the revision and renewal of the original 1875 Reciprocity Treaty, which had allowed for the tariff-­ free importation of sugar to the United States. The territorial rights granted to the U.S. military—in what was essentially a land grant to Pearl Harbor—paralleled the political rights that white foreigners claimed for themselves even as the voting rights of Native men were rolled back. Mustering the military interests and muscle of the United States, and tying it to their capitalist interests, the foreign oligarchy styled themselves as men of modern republican rule, in contrast to the royal (and unmanly) excesses of King David Kalākaua. This maneuver was not a historical accident; rather, it was the culmination of decades of American longing for Pacific real estate and its strategic access to the markets of Asia, particularly China.33 Securing American ascendancy in its imperial voyage across the Pacific and Asia, Hawai‘i served as the American military’s first foothold in the Pacific, which would have profound implications for the long-­term sovereignty of both Hawai‘i and the Philippines. While Hawai‘i struggled against the ambitions of its missionary-­ plantation oligarchy and the designs of the U.S. Navy, the Philippines had started on its long road to revolution against its Spanish colonizers. The Catholic Church had taken on the project of converting the indigenous peoples while Spanish colonial rule replaced the existing communal land system with feudal practices of land tenure, creating a land-­ owning elite on whom the majority of the landless rural population was dependent.34
Introduction 10 

By the late 1800s, tensions were at a boiling point in the Spanish colony: led by dispossessed and abused landless masses and an educated native elite, an armed anticolonial revolution had begun.35 Eyeing the decline of the Spanish empire, and fueled by its own expansionist desires, the United States prepared for war against Spain’s far-­flung colonial outposts. Yellow journalism and jingoistic politicking successfully deployed anxieties about American manhood to prime a national public toward military intervention in Cuba.36 The 1898 attack on the USS Maine in Cuba’s Havana Harbor ignited war fever. Soon after, the United States declared war against Spain and sent invading armies to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Effectively effacing the centuries of anti-­Spanish rebellion by Filipino, Cuban, and Puerto Rican peoples, U.S. intervention in these territories ensured the continuation of empire, albeit under a different and more modern administration. By the time the Spanish-­ American War broke out, the penultimate blow against Hawaiian sovereignty had already been struck. The 1893 overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani by a coalition of American business investors was secured by the tacit support of an American warship moored just off the coast of O‘ahu to protect “American interests.” The outbreak of the war sealed the fate of Hawai‘i, which had been resolutely protesting and resisting the “act of war” against its internationally recognized sovereignty.37 As the host of the United States’ main naval outpost in the Pacific, Hawai‘i’s military usefulness in the Pacific theater of what Ambassador John Hay called “a splendid little war” overrode any lingering ethical doubts about the illegality of the overthrow. Once Hawai‘i and the Philippines were pulled into the orbit of the United States, their modern fates became more interdependent. Having taken credit for dispatching the Spanish empire, the United States began its military occupation of the Philippine islands, much to the dismay of Filipino revolutionaries who had declared their independence from Spain prior to the end of hostilities.38 The swift takeover of the Philippines illustrated the young American nation’s political savvy and global ambitions as well as what would be an enduring impulse for unilateralism. Symbolically, the invading American fleet in Manila Bay included the USS Boston, the ship that had been instrumental in the overthrow of Hawai‘i’s monarchy just five years before.39 When the Philippine-­ American War broke out, it also provided the perfect alibi to resolve the constitutionally vexed question of Hawai‘i’s status vis-­ à-­ vis the United States. Despite the conIntroduction 11 

siderable efforts of the Native Hawaiian people to resist both overthrow and annexation, shortly after the United States began hostilities against Spain, the protracted debates over Hawai‘i’s annexation were suspended when the United States annexed the islands without a popular referendum.40 Inextricably tied together through the imperial military and commercial dreams of the United States in the region, Hawai‘i and the Philippines would share linked fates as part of the American chain of islands: Hawai‘i provided the perfect depot for American ships to refuel and take on supplies for what would be a protracted campaign of “pacification” in the Philippines, and the Philippines would send Filipino labor to the plantation economy of Hawai‘i, further reinforcing the legitimacy of the plantation economy as the governing interest in the islands. In this intense drive toward empire, the military was not the only colonial apparatus at work, although perhaps it wielded the most decisive power. Tourism as a cultural apparatus inspired and mobilized a deeply militarized desire for Hawai‘i and the Philippines. Depicting the imperial encounter as the inevitable meeting of civilized people with the barbarians of the world, travelogues contrasted the tropics with the enlightened and industrialized West.41 While these travel narratives ranged from outright racist portrayals to the more nostalgic romanticization of untouched and undiscovered premodern life, as a whole their production of the rest of the world as backward and in need of uplift served to justify the military project that would soon secure these territories as colonial outposts.42 Indeed, the world of the soldier and that of the tourist were often one and the same, illuminating how the routes of travel were mapped out and shared by military and civilian alike. American travelers often doubled as early military reconnaissance. As I discuss in chapter 1, early travelers and embedded journalists often scouted just ahead of or alongside the military, writing about the adventure of being the first to penetrate into the hinterlands. Their early travel narratives and colonial fictions established the literary and visual terms that framed the tropical possessions of the United States as land to be claimed: this early tourist gaze, then, shared the inclination for ownership and control that defined military itineraries.43 The masculine eye of military surveyors and travelers, their technologized mobilities, and their will to penetrate land they viewed as receptive to and in need of being claimed illuminate how the roots of tourism and militarism relied on a belief of the profound governability of the tropics. The 1898 annexation of Hawai‘i, for example, recycled
Introduction 12 

the military argument of protecting U.S. interests and applied it to the broader region through the deployment of these familiar gendered and racialized tropes. Queen Lili‘uokalani fought a public relations and diplomatic struggle against an American press that portrayed her as a recalcitrant queen, a dictator, and a sorceress—especially gendered symbols of the Native Hawaiian people’s incapability of self-­ rule.44 While debates raged in Congress over the colonial status of the Philippines, Hawai‘i was further absorbed into U.S. circuits, and both sites were rapidly militarized. Investing in the development of Pearl Harbor and ceded Hawaiian lands, the United States began to establish a Pacific military garrison, initiating the first step toward the region’s militarization.45 In tandem with the ongoing brutality of the Philippine-­ American War, the Philippines islands were similarly militarized through an executive order that confiscated thousands of acres of land to establish air and naval bases.46 As the influence of the United States grew in the region, it invested heavily in its Pacific military garrison, paving the way for increased military and civilian travel in these secured territories. In the years between World Wars I and II, the United States tripled the numbers of military personnel stationed in Hawai‘i, and it further expanded its territorial and personnel presence in the Philippines.47 This occupation of Hawai‘i put in place a military regime that populated the islands with thousands of young, unattached men “needing” rest and recreation—Joe’s predecessors.48 Just as the United States viewed Hawai‘i and the Philippines as feminized territories needing discipline and protection, so too did its soldiers expect eroticized relations with the people they disciplined and protected. Following the genre of travel narratives, the military enlisted familiar textual/sexual language and visual imagery of tropical paradise to lure soldiers to the perils of island tours of duty: it drew on “a picture straight from a prewar travel brochure,” desires circulated in early twentieth-­century hula tours on the continent, and, later, popular Hollywood films set in the tropics to recruit personnel.49 These early military men, as proto–mass tourists, brought a particularly sexualized vision of the tropics-­ as-­ paradise into the American national consciousness. In Hawai‘i and the Philippines, militarism jump-­ started the first tourist establishments on the islands: catering to military and colonial personnel, zones for rest and recreation cropped up, exploiting fantasies—if not always realities—of the exotic.50 Over the course of Hawai‘i’s Territorial Era (1898–1959), and the U.S.
Introduction 13 

administration of the Philippines (1898–1946), the close relationship between tourism and militarism was established. While the course of colonialism did not always run smoothly, and there were contradictions of vision and policy between the military and the settled white elite oligarchy in Hawai‘i and the wave of civilian reformers that flooded the Philippines, their shared goal of imperialism eyed the benighted populations of the tropics as the ultimate target. Expanding the domestic—in its multiple senses—by exporting it and by enlarging the circle of colonial agents to include women, government administrators, missionaries, medical workers, teachers, engineers, and businesspeople, the colonial project undertook a slate of reform, hygiene, education, and economic projects and constituted the tourists of this early period.51 The military secured the safety of the civilians as they undertook these itineraries of uplift, collaborating to smooth the path of occupation and colonial rule. Likewise, the U.S. military turned to the softer discourses and mechanisms of tourism to help mitigate the historical violence and reality of military occupation in the islands. For example, the military took on projects such as road building to rehabilitate its public relations, exchanging promises of constructive colonialism and mobility for its recent history of brutality and unfreedom. Even as they were increasingly militarized, Hawai‘i and the Philippines were managed in a more “benevolent” fashion, reflecting the Progressive Era politics of the age, as well as a general belief in both the innocence of U.S. imperial motivations and its benign and modern brand of colonialism.52 However, though intertwining commercial and military desires led to the proliferation of military bastions of American-­ defined security in the region, it was not until after World War II and the subsequent Cold War that mass tourism emerged as a global force on par with militarism. Faced with the bold threat of an ambitious Japan and its vision of an Asian co-­ prosperity sphere that excluded Western influence, and spurred by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States entered into a protracted war against a competing imperial power. The war in the region comprised multiple engagements and fronts, animating place-­names such as Pearl Harbor, Nanking, Midway, Bataan, Corregidor, Okinawa, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki with the grisly violence and sentimental power of war. Hawai‘i (as the site of the first foreign attack on U.S. soil) and the Philippines (which hosted a series of spectacular and significant losses to and victories against the Japanese military) represented vital nodes of
Introduction 14 

U.S. military engagement during World War II. In the postwar restructuring and rebuilding of the region, they were also key locations of U.S. military occupation, as well as places where a reinvigorated and remade Japan established its postwar economic credentials as an ostensibly nonmilitary nation in partnership with the United States. The enduring narratives of masculine sacrifice and heroism of World War II constituted the framing narrative of these interstate relations. Following World War II, the Philippines was granted independence, limping on to economic and political autonomy under the shadow of its former colonial master, and was subsequently marginalized from American popular consciousness. Unlike occupied and reconstructed Japan, the Philippines was not a centerpiece for American economic hegemony but was a showcase for official postwar decolonization. However, American bases remained firmly ensconced even after independence, as guaranteed through the 1947 Military Bases Agreement and Military Assistance Pact, and U.S. support for subsequent Filipino administrations remained necessary to political success. In contrast, the Territory of Hawai‘i was named a state in 1959, substantiating a vision of Hawai‘i as a Pacific economic hub and a bastion for American military strength in the 1960s. Signaling a shift in the racial politics of Hawai‘i, a social and political revolution led by Japanese Americans pushed for statehood, further displacing Native Hawaiians from sovereignty in their own lands, and ushering in a long reign of Democratic machine politics.53 Cold War militarization was accompanied by Cold War economic policy, and tourism played a vital part. With hot wars being waged in Korea and Vietnam—and escalating tensions with China—Hawai‘i and the Philippines not only remained strongholds of American military might in the region and strategically important training grounds for Pacific troops, but also began aggressive tourism programs to boost their economies and images. The democratization of travel in the post–World War II era—­ inaugurated, not coincidentally, by the militarization of Asia and the Pacific—deepened the ongoing collaboration between tourism and militarism. This legacy has durability: today, the military continues to be a significant “visitor” in the region. Following World War II, advances in technology, such as jet travel and traveler’s checks, opened what was once mostly in the purview of the wealthy—travel to exotic destinations—to an increasingly middle-­ class clientele.54 The territories of the Pacific, defended by the Allies, were transformed into new exotic frontier destinaIntroduction 15 

tions, its rediscovery staged by the militarized geographies of war. During the Cold War, furnished with airstrips formerly used for refueling and repair and secured by the sacrifices of soldiers, these Pacific islands were poised for a new wave of invaders. Tourism in particular was a key export that displayed the benefits of capitalism and democracy during the Cold War era, a vehicle fit for disciplinary formations of knowledge production that accompanied the geopoliticking and hot wars of the Cold War.55 The images produced by tourism had significant rhetorical influence when coupled with the sentimentality of Pearl Harbor, for instance, when Hawai‘i campaigned for statehood.56 In the context of the tensions in Asia and the Pacific, the Hawai‘i of James Michener’s imagination was a “paradise redeemed in Cold War terms,” as was the Philippines, the newest decolonized nation-­state on the block.57 The Philippines, in turn, continued to be the U.S. military’s “little brown brother,” benefiting from U.S. military expenditures, as well as establishing its own fledgling visitor industry. The body of regulatory knowledge produced by tourism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines helped to disavow colonial and World War II occupations and Cold War military interventions and to discredit the alternatives of active decolonization movements in these and other sites in the region. In everyday terms, both U.S. military personnel and tourists are a familiar sight in both Hawai‘i and the Philippines, and they are valued for the kinds of security they ostensibly symbolize as well as for the ways their mutually embracing forms of logic operate to affirm touristic hegemonies and regional militarization.58 Today, the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, the world’s largest naval command, stands guard over what Noel Kent has described as the new plantation society of tourism, which makes up just over 15–20 percent of Hawai‘i’s economy.59 Likewise, the United States’ 2007–2009 federal defense investment in this colonial outpost averaged $6.5 billion per year, contributing to 10–18 percent of the economy.60 The Philippine economy, meanwhile, has historically struggled, posting slower growth than that of the Asian dragons, and today it shows a gnp barely twice that of Hawai‘i’s. Tourism, long touted as the panacea for developing economies, has lagged in the Philippines, despite efforts on the part of current and recent administrations at boosting the Philippines as a tourist economy.61 Comparable Southeast Asian economies such as Vietnam post greater visitor numbers, yet the Philippines still touts tourism as one of its economic saviors. The U.S. military presence in the Philippines continues through Visiting Forces Agreements despite its official 1992
Introduction 16 

exit from Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Facility, formerly two of the largest military bases in the region. Compared to what the Department of Defense spends in Hawai‘i (as well as on Middle Eastern allies such as Israel and Egypt), official U.S. military aid to the Philippines is modest ($500 million from 2002 to 2012), yet it constitutes a significant military investment in East Asia and the Pacific.62 Even with changes in military policy that call for greater flexibility of forces, the United States continues to oversee the region through a string of military bases: Guam is the most recent site of the kind of military buildup that promises to have massive ramifications for local and regional relations. With China passing Japan’s surprisingly robust military spending (for its “defense” forces) in 2006, and with North Korea’s emergence as a particularly troubling security issue for the United States, Asia and the Pacific have remained key areas for the United States to police.63 Trade, foreign capital, and U.S. “interests” remain the top reasons for such close protection: the region is a significant component of American economic health. Today, Asia-­Pacific Economic (apec) economies account for 60 percent of U.S. exports.64 A military-­ industrial complex that has run rampant is another reason: since 2000, the global budget for military spending has increased 49 percent, an upward trend that benefited from post-­ 9/11 militarization.65 In the last few decades, the U.S. military budget has dwarfed its nearest competitors, constituting between 40–50 percent of global military spending, reaching $663 billion per annum in 2009.66 The Pacific Command, which constitutes one-­ fifth of total U.S. military strength, consistently cites the economic importance of the region, as if to say that the increasingly bloated budget of the United States is necessary to the stability of this economically vital region.67 More specifically, Asia and the Pacific represent key tourist economies that rely on the “protections” of the U.S. armed services. Tourism is a primary economic engine for the region, as well as the dominant gateway through which the region is imagined and understood. While Asia and the Pacific generate 8.4 percent of economic returns from tourism, they are not the standard-­ bearers of the tourism economy at large. However, collectively, Asia and the Pacific brought in international tourism receipts totaling $469 billion in 2011, and the region continues to emerge as a rising star of global tourism, with a projected growth rate of 4.9 percent in a sluggish economy, further illustrating the importance of tourism as a developmental strategy for states in Asia and the Pacific.68 Within the region, apec’s
Introduction 17 

member economies have been urged to use tourism as an instrument for developing countries due to its potential for generating jobs and income.69 In partnership with the increasing visibility of tourism economies and cultures in the post-­ 9/11 era, the region has also been increasingly militarized, though in more flexible ways that respond to the continuing security challenges of the region in an “era of persistent conflict” that “requires a strategy of persistent engagement.”70
The Archives of Paradise Secured

I undertook the research for this project in part as a tourist in highly militarized and “touricized” (for lack of a more elegant term) spaces from 2000 to 2011. While also an ethnography of the everyday negotiations between tourists and hosts and their ramifications for national and international relations, in this inquiry I am more interested in how societies, in the ways they operate, prioritize the different logics and economies of tourism and militarism. I pay attention to the cultural artifacts and practices that are produced within the intersections of militarism and tourism. The archive of this project—ranging from more traditional literary texts, such as novels, poetry, guidebooks, and travel narratives; to visual texts, such as photographs and film; to constructed infrastructures, such as buildings, highways, and military bases; and to social experiences, such as tours, demonstrations, and interviews—attempts to capture the scope of sociocultural forms and meanings produced, sustained, and consumed in the places where militarism and tourism overlap.71 The sociocultural artifacts and practices examined in this book are contemporary. Yet while this is not a historical exploration of militarism-­ tourism assemblages in Hawai‘i and the Philippines, it does attend to how specific historical moments generate different convergent formations of militarism and tourism. The organization of the book roughly follows U.S. war projects in Asia and the Pacific that are sutured to U.S. military-­ tourism practices: paired chapters discuss different sites and practices that deal primarily with the Philippine-­ American War, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Critically juxtaposing rather than comparing, the chapters elaborate upon the specific histories, actors, and apparatuses at work in the construction of military and touristic regimes, and how they are flexible and durable over time and space. This selection of social/cultural texts is by no means comprehensive, but it does illustrate the breadth and depth of collaboration between militarism and tourism.
Introduction 18 

Securing Paradise begins with a critical look at the sustaining gendered and racialized fictions of militarism and tourism within the larger historical context of American colonial domination. Chapter 1 reflects on the literary text as a key site of imperial representation as well as a location where feminist counterhegemonic theorizations about the relationship between tourism and militarism can take place. Opposing the masculine colonial fictions of traveling journalists during the Philippine-­ American War with the critical feminist fictions of Filipina and Native Hawaiian women during the late Cold War era, I highlight the invention of the tropics by the former and its contravention by the latter. Chapter 2 likewise draws connections between the early colonial era’s progressive mission to the Cold War’s programs of development and modernization by examining American road building in the Philippines during the earlier twentieth century and in Hawai‘i during the late twentieth century as they shaped colonial and military modes of mobility, control, and surveillance. Both examples that I focus on here—Kennon Road in the northern region of the Philippines, built to create access to the colonial hill station of Baguio, and the modern h-­3 Interstate, which connects two military bases through the Ko‘olau Mountains on O‘ahu—illustrate how the scenic highway is a modern regulatory apparatus that creates masculinized regimes of mobility and visuality (that is, ways of moving and seeing) in feminized occupied territories. Continuing the exploration of other built texts and the structures of feeling they produce, the next two chapters focus on military bases as primary spaces where tourism and militarism interact. In chapter 3, I tie together Corregidor Island, the Bataan memorials, and the former Clark and Subic Bases in the Philippines in a circuit of military tourism that depends on an evolving notion of American liberation over the course of a century. In their updated incarnations as tourist destinations of World War II history and special economic zones, these sites are squarely positioned within Cold War and post–Cold War collaborations between the two nations, animating new fraternal alliances and relationships that rely on memories of American benevolence and liberation. Chapter 4 examines how the forms of tourism generated by the USS Arizona Memorial and its auxiliary sites produce an insistent narrative of innocence and sacrifice that is crucial to the continued military occupation of Hawai‘i. Intertwined with this military/tourist pedagogy of preparedness and national security, a visit to the USS Arizona and its partner sites carries out a
Introduction 19 

disappearance of historic U.S. military designs on Hawai‘i. Steeped in nostalgic discourses of masculine heroic suffering and sacrifice, these public spaces tell stories of interracial and international military camaraderie in the throes of World War II while suspending histories of overthrow, segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence. In the book’s last two chapters, I look at two different technologies mobilized during the Vietnam War and the kinds of subjectivities and imaginations they enable today. These two chapters illustrate the increasingly slippery translations of military skills and technologies to tourism and back again. Chapter 5 examines the ubiquitous helicopter tours that are one of the most popular ways to take in the island landscape of Kaua‘i. Negotiating the thin line between military violence and tourist pleasures, these helicopter tours enable reenactments of discovery narratives on feminized, indigenized terrains while forging an alternate ending to the masculine trauma of Vietnam. In contrast with the modern technology of helicopters, chapter 6 focuses on how an indigenous skill set was first militarized and then subsequently repackaged for tourists at the Subic Freeport’s “jungle school.” Masculinized notions of soldiering and touring are linked in this particular tour, as tourists play soldier and soldiers play native, shedding light on the ways in which indigenous masculinities are recruited into circuits of militarism and tourism. My conclusion examines both the everyday and spectacular realities that result from how militarism and tourism intimately converge in Hawai‘i and the Philippines, focusing on the assemblages of cultural life in the region after 9/11. While the landscape of the post–Cold War era, the increasing liberalization of the region under the influence of transnational capital, and even the global war on terror lack the drama of war that so deeply shaped the lives of those in Asia and the Pacific, both Hawai‘i and the Philippines continue to have important roles in the constitution of American identity and power. The Philippines—as the first sponsor of Bush’s war against terror in the post-­9/11 era, continues to unofficially host American troops—and Hawai‘i—as the home of the largest naval base in the Pacific—stand guard over this region as bulwarks against “antiterrorism” and the saber rattling of “rogue” states. Today, Hawai‘i and the Philippines continue, with varying degrees of success, to promote themselves as tropical paradises and exemplify what it means to secure paradise in today’s increasingly insecure world.

Introduction 20 

Notes

Introduction

This book uses modern Hawaiian orthography, which uses diacritical marks for Hawaiian-­ language terms: the ‘okina (‘) marks a glottal stop and the kahakō is a macron indicating a long vowel sound. I do not italicize Hawaiian words, as they are not foreign to Hawai‘i. When quoting directly from sources, however, I have preserved the spelling of original sources for historical accuracy. 1. Lyons, American Pacificism, 8. 2. Gerhardt, “America’s Pacific Century?” 3. I borrow the phrase from Isaac, American Tropics, to contrast the constant pull of American imperial desire against a historiographical will to amnesia. 4. Williams, Marxism and Literature, and Berger, Ways of Seeing. 5. On the differential mobilities that make up empire, see Ballantyne and Burton, Moving Subjects. 6. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” 168. 7. Enloe, Maneuvers, 68. 8. Enloe, Globalization and Militarism. 9. “Liberalization with a Human Face,” World Tourism Organization, www.world-­ tourism.org/liberalization/menu.htm (accessed May 9, 2004). The website points out that this program follows the un Millennium Development Goals as well as the Global Code of Ethics on fair trade and poverty alleviation of the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization (unwto). On the uneven economic relations fostered between countries that send tourists, and those less-­ developed economies for whom tourism is a prescription, see Kincaid, A Small Place; Nash, “Tourism as a Form of Imperialism”; Mowforth and Munt, Tourism and Sustainability; and Britton, “The Political Economy of Tourism in the Third World.” 

10. Endy, Cold War Holidays; Klein, Cold War Orientalism. 11. See Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 23–24. See also Bacevich, The New American Militarism, and Giroux, “War on Terror.” 12. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 26. 13. Ibid., 21–26. 14. See, e.g., Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases; Enloe, Maneuvers; Sturdevant, Let the Good Times Roll; Moon, Sex among Allies; Sakai, “On Romantic Love and Military Violence”; Barstow, War’s Dirty Secret; Tanaka and Brownmiller, Japan’s Comfort Women; and Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally. 15. On the romantic overtones of security, within a discussion of the political-­libidinal economies that frame U.S.-­ Philippine relations, see Tadiar, Fantasy-­Production. 16. G. White, “Remembering Guadalcanal”; White and Lindstrom, The Pacific Theater; Teaiwa, “bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans.” 17. I borrow the term militourism from Teaiwa, “Militarism, Tourism and the Native.” 18. Said, Orientalism, and Culture and Imperialism; Manderson and Jolly, Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure. 19. See Strachan’s genealogy of paradise in Paradise and Plantation; and Cohen’s exploration of nationalism and tourism in Take Me to My Paradise. 20. Skwiot’s The Purposes of Paradise is a detailed study of tourism policy and imaginative power in Cuba and Hawai‘i. 21. Merrill’s Negotiating Paradise examines U.S. tourism in Latin America as a mode of cultural and consumer expansion alongside diplomacy. 22. See, in contrast to my focus on this hegemonic formation, Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands.” 23. The geographical specificity of this project attends to the call for a “critical regionalism” in Wilson, “Towards an ‘Asia/Pacific Cultural Studies.’” While the paradises invoked in this book are limited for the most part to Hawai‘i and the Philippines for reasons of time and expertise, American tropics in the Asia and the Pacific—such as Guam, Okinawa, Vietnam, the Marshall Islands, and American Samoa—and those outside the region—such as Puerto Rico and Cuba—are also key locations of the global American tourist-­ military complex. See also Tripp, “Contentious Divide,” for a specific study of the Korean demilitarized zone. 24. Shigematsu and Camacho, “Introduction,” xviii. I use the term “Native Hawaiian,” or “Kanaka Maoli” to refer to people indigenous to Hawai‘i. Where referring to Native Hawaiians (or other indigenous people), I use the term “Native” with an uppercase “N” to distinguish indigenous people from indigenous things such as native plants or animals. I also use “native” with a lowercase “n” as an adjective or noun to refer to a general population from an area who are not necessarily indigenous to that area. 25. Not to be confused with the recently inaugurated Philippine President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. “Ninoy,” his father, was an outspoken critic of the Marcos regime. 26. See Diller and Scofidio, Back to the Front, which looks at the tourism of war but centralizes European World War II sites as its objects of inquiry. 27. Lyons, American Pacificism.
Notes to Introduction 226 

28. Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific, xi. 29. On population decline in Hawai‘i, see Stannard, Before the Horror. For an early history of Hawai‘i to the 1887 Reciprocity Treaty, see Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui. 30. Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i ; Silva, Aloha Betrayed. 31. The 1848 Māhele legally transformed the Hawaiian system of land tenure from its traditional communal usage to a private property system, pitting Native Hawaiians, who were unfamiliar with private property, against savvy real estate developers. Asian plantation workers, who were imported as labor, were not allowed to own land. See Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires. 32. These reconnaissance missions had started as early as 1840. See Kent, Hawaii, 53–54. 33. U.S. Senator Albert J. Beveridge, Address to the Senate, Congressional Record, Senate, 56th Congress, 1st session, January 9, 1900, 704–12. 34. On early Spanish colonial cultures, particularly the complex dynamics of Catholic conversion and translation in the Philippines, see Rafael, Contracting Colonialism. 35. An economically and geographically overstretched Spanish empire had been undergoing a long, slow slide since the sixteenth century, punctuated by big losses to a revolutionary South America and Central America in the early 1820s. See also Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution. 36. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood. 37. Silva, Aloha Betrayed. 38. Many historians of this period suggest that Spain, in order not to lose face to Filipino insurgents—who were starting to make inroads in their revolutionary war— handed the islands over to a more powerful “enemy.” Pérez Jr., The War of 1898, outlines this fate for Cuba. 39. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire, 27. 40. The Senate passed the Newlands Resolution in lieu of a treaty, which had the same result. See Kent, Hawaii, 67. On the multifaceted methods of Native Hawaiian resistance, see Silva, Aloha Betrayed. 41. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues. 42. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 43. See Urry, The Tourist Gaze. 44. Silva, Aloha Betrayed. 45. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 44. On O‘ahu, Fort Shafter, Fort Ruger, Fort Armstrong, Fort DeRussy, Fort Kamehameha, Fort Weaver, and Schofield Barracks were constructed soon thereafter, as part of a vision to surround the island with “a ring of steel.” See Kajihiro, “The Militarizing of Hawai‘i,” 172. 46. Linn, Guardians of Empire. 47. Feeney, “Aloha and Allegiance,” 221. See also Kajihiro, “The Militarizing of Hawai‘i.” 48. On the sex industry and Hawai‘i militarization, see Bailey and Farber, The First Strange Place. 49. Ibid., 40. On hula tours and its exotic iconography, see Adria Imada, Aloha America. 50. The early sex industry that serviced the military in Hawai‘i actually imported
Notes to Introduction 227 

mostly white women to serve the white soldiers who served in the military due to the warnings from elite, Native Hawaiian, and Asian settler communities. See Bailey and Farber, The First Strange Place. 51. On public health campaigns in the Philippines, see W. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. On the colonial origins of contemporary Filipino/a nursing, see Choy, Empire of Care. See also Edmund, Leprosy and Empire. 52. See Go, “Introduction.” 53. Trask, in “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony,” traces the doubled colonization of Native Hawaiians: first at the hands of European and American business concerns, then by Asian settlers. See also Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawai‘i, which outlines the rise of the Democratic Party in Hawai‘i as led by the labor-­ supported Japanese settlers. 54. See Goldstone on the contribution of American Express traveler’s checks to globalization and “democratization” in Making the World Safe for Tourism. See also Löfgren, On Holiday, and Yano, Airborne Dreams, which traces the cultural history of Pan American Airlines and its early assistance of the U.S. military. Yano identifies the feminized tropics of Hawai‘i and the labor of Japanese-­ speaking Asian American women as flight attendants as key elements in the cosmopolitan training of Japanese tourists. 55. Kim, Ends of Empire. See also Endy, Cold War Holidays, and Klein, Cold War Orientalism. 56. Saranillio, “Seeing Conquest.” 57. Lyons, American Pacificism, 152. 58. Craig Gima, in “Hawai‘i Sixth in Federal Spending,” Star Bulletin, July 23, 2009, tracks 2008 federal spending in Hawai‘i, which comprises mostly military funds, as just behind tourism and real estate at $15 billion. 59. Kent, Hawaii, 180. 60. Hosek, Litovitz, and Resnick, How Much Does Military Spending Add to Hawaii’s Economy? The disparity in numbers depends on whether the funds’ purchasing power is calculated into the indirect jobs, goods, and services produced by the initial federal funds. The total percentage of federal funds spent on defense in Hawai‘i has decreased from 46.2 percent in 1990 to 38.5 percent in 2000, but the total amount of both defense and nondefense spending has increased. In 2009 federal defense spending contributed $12.2 billion while 2010 visitor expenditures contributed $10 billion. 61. Verikios, “Philippines’ Sustainable Growth Benefits Tourism,” Travel Daily News website, June 27, 2007. Its wider economic impact is forecasted at 9.9 percent in 2012: see World Travel and Tourism Council, “Travel and Tourism Economic Impact 2012: Philippines,” 3, www.wttc.org.site_media/uploads/downloads /philippines2012.pdf (accessed December 11, 2012). 62. During President Gloria Macapagal-­ Arroyo’s first three years, her counterinsurgency strategy received 1,500 percent more U.S. military assistance as had the previous administration (for a total of $246 million). See Marina Walker Guevara, “Sustaining an Unpopular Regime,” The Center for Public Integrity, May 31 2007, www.publicintegrity.org/2007/05/31/5763/sustaining-­unpopular-­regime
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(accessed December 11, 2012). For 2012 numbers, see Manuel Mogato, “U.S. Triples Military Aid to Philippines in 2012,” Reuters, May 12, 2012. 63. See, e.g., Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” for the secretary of state’s declaration of Asia as the principal area for U.S. politics in the foreseeable future. 64. Export figure is from Carter, “United States Commits to Strengthening Asia-­Pacific Trade,” America-­ Engaging the World, June 17, 2010, newzealand.usembassy.gov /us_pacific_trade.html (accessed December 11, 2012). In an interesting note, the United States Pacific Command notes that the Asia/Pacific region weighs in with a whopping 35 percent share of U.S. trade—worth $548 billion (compared to 19 percent with the European Union, 20 percent with Canada, and 18 percent with Latin America). Its updated website notes more generally that “the 36 nations that comprise the Asia-­ Pacific region are home to more than 50% of the world’s population, three thousand different languages, several of the world’s largest militaries, and five nations allied with the U.S. through mutual defense treaties. Two of the three largest economies are located in the Asia-­Pacific along with ten of the fourteen smallest, www.pacom.mil (accessed June 20, 2010). 65. Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger; Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? 66. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 55–65; Cohen, “History and the Hyperpower.” Data on the amount of military spending are from Sköns et al., “Military Expenditure.” 67. See the United States Pacific Command website, www.pacom.mil. 68. World Travel and Tourism Council, The Review 2011, www.wttc.org/site_media /uploads/downloads/WTTC_Review_2011.pdf (accessed July 25, 2011); World Tourism Organization, “Asia Rose Again as a Fast Growing Region,” World Tourism Organization, www.unwto.org/regional/south_asia/News/fastgrowing.htm (accessed May 8, 2007). 69. Taleb Rifai, Deputy Secretary-­ General of unwto, as quoted in World Tourism Organization, “Asia Rose Again as a Fast Growing Region.” 70. “Transforming U.S. Army Pacific,” 4. 71. For examples of these sociocultural forms, see Gillem, America Town, and Lutz, Homefront.
1. Manifest Destinations

1. Clifford, Routes, 39. 2. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic. 3. Rosca, State of War, 67. Throughout the rest of this chapter, citations to this work are within parentheses. 4. See Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain on torture, war, and language. 5. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 21. 6. Weeks and Meconis, The Armed Forces of the USA in the Asia-­ Pacific Region, 17. 7. Ibid., 26–27. The Asia-­ Pacific allies were seen as important, even though Europe was the focus of primary tensions during this time. It continues to be a critical region for the buildup of nuclear weapons, development of war scenarios, and hosting of geostrategic military sites. See also Smith, “Shifting Terrain.”
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