3. The Lesson of Corporeal Politics

Top: The Apotheosis of Captain Cook from a drawing by Webber
Next: Maniere de punir de mort un coupable aux iles Sandwich, Lithograph by Langlame
Next: Hawaiian Eye cast--Robert Conrad, Connie Stevens, Loren Eisley, Ponce Ponce
Bottom: Gilbert Kauhi, aka Zulu, as Kono in Hawaii Five-0

Symbols, Myth & TV in Hawaii

3. The Lesson of Corporeal Politics
Where verbal communications prove inadequate, the language of the body conveys context and subtext in extraordinary ways. The idolatry of apotheosis is problematized for instance by the politics of corporeal violence. Hawaiians were in a state of war when Cook sailed into their waters. The British ships were clearly viewed as vessels of significant military capacity. Cook was clearly a capable if not gifted navigator and leader of men. Oceanic cultures had great respect for those who could navigate the vast waters of the region. My purpose here is not to write a new truth about the Cook saga, but to cast a reasonable doubt over institutionalized interpretations, while suggesting a more proactive role for Hawai`i politicos and intelligentsia. In this way, institutional and commercial culture indebted to the Cook myth for structure and narrative sensibilities, are necessarily called into question for the socio-political assumptions they support, the hierarchies they naturalize, and the mysteries they inevitably resolve.

There is of course a certain historical and ethical accountability that goes into the framing of narrative and images. Ethnographic, archeological and anthropological discourses are tapped to contextualize and substantiate the televisual world, especially when natives, tikis or grass shacks are at hand. For better or worse, the frame is always strictly controlled: this is both an artistic and institutional imperative. The narrative iconicity of White supremacy in Hawai`i is partly rationalized by “official” theories of first contact relations. The pseudo-histories that results depict a tourist-friendly, accessible Hawai`i, where natives drive cabs, serve as doormen, bartenders, helpers and fire-dancers, or occasionally play knuckle-headed muscle. Such activities are generally staged on the narrative periphery of White-on-White conflict and romance, color in this case connoting both an ideal national subject on the one hand, and an ideal subservient position for the local on the other. Hawai`i in this way serves as the exotic threshold of Americanized space.