| The propensity up until recently toward the benevolent pathologizing of Hawaiian-American students, the identification of them with learning and emotional disabilities, and their placement in Special Education classrooms in Hawai'i public schools need to be understood in relation to the colonialist discourses, and practices of writing and looking, that have coded Polynesian cultures in infantile and idyllic ways. This study examines the textual production of the idealized and placid Polynesian subject and how this Euro-/Euro-American conception has served specific strategies of discipline and regulation. The idealized and placid native is a surprisingly persistent trope generated in written and visual representations of Polynesia and embedded in specific knowledge/power regimes. It is a figure that is adaptable to different forces and times. This study treats its various articulations in different circuits of representation to account for the subtleties of its deployment as well as its malleability. It argues that the ideological rearticulation of this figure and the key assumptions made to associate with it are not only involved in the production and maintenance of the colonialist pacific imaginary and screen of primitiveness, but also intersects with iterations of race, nation, and gender.;The theoretical approach builds on post-colonial textual reading and cultural analysis. Interdisciplinary in content and method, the study traces the emergence of the figure in eighteenth century voyage accounts and its rearticulation in a variety of contexts. More specifically, through a critical reading of an assortment of texts, that include late nineteenth century teaching aids that portrayed the newly annexed territories as America's possessions, the United States 1920 Survey of Education in Hawaii, Stanley Porteus's and Marjorie Babcock's Temperament and Race, Edward Steichen's advertising photographs for the steamship Matson Line, guidebooks to Hawai'i, and Mattel's Polynesian Barbie, I propose that the idealized and placid native, even in the present time, continues to figure in our writing and looking. |
