Consuming “Polynesia”: Visual spectacles of native bodies in Hawaiian tourism

Abstract

Framing “Polynesia” as a touristic commodity needs to be critically tied to the cultures of imperialism that practiced both scientific racism and produced the commodity spectacle as means to rationalize the often-violent project of “civilizing.” In the late 1800s, during the second wave of European and American colonization, the cultural realm mitigated the violence and facilitated the undertaking of empire by the masses as well as providing a space for uneven and heterogeneous responses to colonialism (Pease, 1993). Foremost among these cultural technologies were the advertising industry and the world's fairs. Displaying the technological prowess and progress of American and European civilization alongside the sideshows of “other,” less civilized cultures, the fairs worked to sell the project of expansion to its audience. For Robert Rydell (1987), these world's fairs were an effective tool of “the legitimizing ideology offered to a nation torn by class conflict” as well as racial and gender discord (p. 193). Empire was seen to solve these domestic pressures by offering a unifying national project of Manifest Destiny.

Citation

Gonzalez, V.V. (2009), "Consuming “Polynesia”: Visual spectacles of native bodies in Hawaiian tourism", Denzin, N.K. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 33), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 191-216. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-2396(2009)0000033014