Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia

William A. Callahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415368995
• eBook ISBN: 9781134203666
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This textexamines the politics of culture and the culture of politics in Pacific Asia through case studies on the South Pacific, China, South Korea, Thailand and Southeast Asia. The contexts and cultures of the chapters are wide-ranging and Callahan skilfully ties them together with the objective of analyzing the relation between the state's cultural governance and resistance to it.

The themes covered include:

• governmentality and cultural production
• popular culture and resistance
• East/West relations
• gender, identity and democracy
• civil society, social movements and democracy
• national and transnational identity production.

Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia addresses the dynamics between Asian studies and cultural studies, and the overlap between comparative politics and international relations, and as such will appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies, cultural studies, comparative politics, sociology and anthropology alike.

1 Culture, the military and the “South Pacific” ¹

While we characteristically understand the military in terms of the power of its destructive force, and study hardware that kills people and destroys environments, this chapter will reframe military power into a productive force that generates civilian identity in the context of problems and solutions that perpetuate the militarization of political life. Traditionally, the military has been the main beneficiary of the state’s deployment of technologies of power, either in the form of centralized military hardware or centralized television networks. But cultural production can also be a source of empowerment in resistance to the state. Since the 1980s new information technologies have provided many channels for resistance to the state’s cultural governance: cassette tapes of Ayatollah Khomeini’s sermons were key in mobilizing resistance to the Shah in Iran (1979), faxes were instrumental in spreading the word about the People Power revolution in the Philippines (1986) and the Tian’anmen democracy movement in China (1989), mobile phones were crucial for the Thai democracy movement (1992), and now text messages and the internet are key technologies of resistance around the world.²

In addition to examining how technology produces and distributes artifacts of power and resistance, this chapter will consider the broader politics of the dynamic relationship between technology and culture. It will deconstruct how technology itself is a cultural artifact that is produced and circulated through symbolic politics. Using the concept of cultural governance, the chapter will shift from examining how the state uses technologies to restrict the flow of information, to consider how cultural technologies produce a range of hegemonic images and thus produce discursive power. For example, although the Chinese party-state is notorious for censoring independent voices, the People’s Liberation Army ( PLA) is one of the largest employers of artists in China, if not the world. The PLA’s cultural activities go far beyond military bands that perform at solemn ceremonies, or picture books that justify the crackdown on the 1989 Tian’anmen demonstrations.³ The PLA also runs a fine arts academy in Beijing, and regularly sponsors national television programs that headline uniformed officers belting out patriotic songs as show tunes.⁴

This chapter will explore the politics of the culture/technology dynamic through an examination of how the US Army exerts its power not just with guns on the battlefield, but also through the productive use of symbolic power. This symbolic power is not just for entertainment or for the success of specific missions—such as the Iraq War and its aftermath. The army’s cultural governance works more generally to reproduce the context of a set of problems and solutions that justify the necessity of maintaining a strong military regardless of any particular threat. The army’s discursive arsenal produces meaning to make sure that the army’s mission is accomplished, and also to suppress, control and manage resistant voices and political alternatives. Through a close analysis of the US Army’s cultural representations, this chapter will show how the army frames policy statements to guide the discourse to questions that will legitimate its actions, and, perhaps more importantly, guide the discourse away from questions that might serve to problematize its policies.

To illustrate the intimate relation of knowledge/power and culture/ technology in the policy process, the chapter analyzes the plan the US Army developed in 1990 to transport chemical weapons from Europe to Johnston Island for incineration and disposal at the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System ( JACADS) facility despite protests from a number of local, national and international groups. JACADS is an important example because it shows how cultural theory and public policy analysis can aid each other: to understand the public policy of “chemical demilitarization,” it is important to understand the discourse of the “South Pacific.”

Although JACADS is certainly an example of the secretive nature of militaries around the world, it should be clear that this chapter is not concerned with conspiracy theories, secret information, or the private motives of individual leaders and officers. Rather, it aims to show how the army manages resistance to its policies through the discourse of public representations to civil society. In other words, I did not have to dig through documents released through the Freedom of Information Act; I am on the army’s mailing list.⁵

However, just because I use the army’s public information materials does not mean that the research is limited by military propaganda. There are many meanings contesting each other in these seemingly straightforward public information documents. In shaping this discursive event the army concentrated on the “Why” questions, arguing that chemical weapons disposal is part of a noble narrative of disarmament, and on certain “How” questions, assuring the public through a narrative of technical expertise that the process is safe. In this way, the army is deploying what Kathy Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull call the double-narrative of naturalization and reassurance, whose “interbreeding” frames military policy with “a tone of inevitability; what is, is good and in any case cannot be changed.”⁶

This tactic was demonstrated most clearly at a public meeting when the commander of the JACADS facility slipped into “Why” questions when the “How” questions of public safety were asked too loudly. His response was, “Wouldn’t the world be a better place without these chemical weapons?” In this chapter, I follow Hawaiian activist Poka Laenui’s response to this question: “Yes, but why are you destroying weapons made in America and deployed in Europe in the Pacific?” Indeed, we cannot let the thrill of disarmament blind us from seeing how it is carried out, and who bears the costs—especially when this “disarmament” was actually an upgrading for a “new generation” of chemical weapons.⁷

The narrative of reassurance and safety can be politicized by shifting the military’s line of inquiry from “What ( JACADS is)” and “Why (it needs to be done)” to the questions “Who (is making the decisions),” “Where,” and “When (these decisions are carried out).” While “What” and “Why” questions are more metaphysical and tend to naturalize the discourse, the “Who,” “Where,” and “When” queries provide discursive openings where environmental and human rights questions can be raised. All of these political questions are wrapped up in the issue of “How” the discourse was produced. In short, while the army directs our gaze to the technology of the JACADS incinerators, this chapter focuses on the technology of the “chemical weapons disposal” discourse. In this way, technology is reframed from being about material mechanisms into technology as “a positing, ordering, and placing of all beings.”⁸ Although poststructuralist analysis is often criticized for depoliticizing issues, this chapter will end with a set of policy proposals that appeal to a broader notion of civil society that includes peoples beyond the boundaries of any particular nation-state.

Geography and representations

Geography is central in both the positioning of JACADS in the “empty” Pacific and Pacific Islanders’ resistance to it. Yet, is this a physical geography or a symbolic geography? The answer to this question is “yes,” and to see how symbolic and physical geographies are intertwined, we need to go to South Pacific, if not to the South Pacific itself.

The film South Pacific is an entertaining example of the production, circulation and management of signs that directs our understanding of the region.⁹ This film, which was produced in Hollywood and is one of the few links connecting the mainland American audience with the “Pacific Islands,” is thus both a product and a producer of the myth of the “South Pacific.” The film is also helpful in explaining how the US Army and recent presidents have formed their policies: considering his World War II military service as a pilot in the Pacific War, George H.W. Bush could very well have been a character in South Pacific. Jimmy Carter, himself a former submarine captain, blurred the material and symbolic even more when he sent James A. Michener, author of Tales of the South Pacific on which the film is based, to be the US representative at Vanuatu’s independence declaration in 1980. Although Michener is well known for his adventure novels, in 1942 he was the navy’s historical officer for the South Pacific Command where his mission was to “to start compiling a history of the Navy . . . in these waters.”¹⁰

How is the “South Pacific” produced in this film? Though the title of the film tells us it is about “the Pacific,” the story is more about Americans and Europeans—like the most recent Pacific narrative about chemical weapons formerly stored in Germany. The Pacific setting appeals mostly to its exotic, scenic environmental background. When the “natives” do appear in this film, they are not (clearly) Pacific Islanders. In both the film and Michener’s book the sacred island of Bali- h’ai has Tonganese/ Tonkinese living on it, reproducing a blurring of race and place in Pacific Asia that follows imperial history: the French brought laborers from their other colonies in Indochina ( Tonkin) to work on Pacific plantations. Bloody Mary is Tongan, yet her daughter Liat is clearly Tonkinese. The actress playing Liat is herself a blurring of Asia and Europe in both parentage and naming: France Nuyen. Moreover, the film’s scenes contain a scattered mixture of romanticized representations from all over the Pacific and Asia: although Vanuatu is in Melanesia, the film credits list a group of actors under the heading “the Polynesians.” In short, the film is a pastiche of various exotic cultures that serve to build the myth of “South Pacific Paradise”—even though the film was shot in the North Pacific space of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘ i, not to mention the Hollywood sets in California.

George H.W. Bush reproduced this romanticized representation of the Pacific in the closing remarks of the “United States–Pacific Island Nations Summit,” which was held in October 1990 to address the Pacific Island leaders’ concerns about JACADS:

The Pacific Islands have a special place in the minds and hearts of the American people. And on my own visits, starting almost fifty years ago, I’ve witnessed the natural charm of the Island peoples and the natural beauty of the Islands. Their reputation is well deserved.¹¹

These natural charms and beauties are technically constructed in South Pacific through an obvious manipulation of colors as signs. Film producer Buddy Adler states in the film’s promotional brochure that: “We hope we have captured the magic of the ‘South Pacific’.” Just after this natural description, however, Adler recounts the technical marvels of this magic: “Cinematographer Leon Shamroy introduced revolutionary ideas to create the imaginative mood lighting which subtly accentuates the romance of a moment or a melody’s enchantment.”¹² Apparently, the South Pacific itself is neither charming nor romantic enough; red and blue filters are used not so “subtly” to manage colors to evoke the passion of the paradise of Bali-h’ai. Yellow, orange and pink are deployed for the toast of two lovers on “Some Enchanted Evening.” The whole sequence of scenes on Bali- h’ai is shrouded in a soft colorized focus. This management of color is hard to read at first; with the signifying power of music and song, it sweeps you away like a breeze through mists of dried ice. The technical power of signification is manifest once the coloration is removed and the characters are back to “normal.”

Indeed, there are so many shifts in color that it is difficult to gauge what is real—are the nights really so royally blue in the South Pacific? Although Michener underlines the truth claims of this story as “a report of what life was actually like on a Pacific backwater,”¹³ a semiotic analysis questions this reality effect. The story is a complex of representations; it is a multi-layered myth far removed from any nameable time or place. Indeed, the film itself is hard to pin down since it comes at the end of a chain of representations: it is based on a Broadway play, originally produced by Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Leland Hayward and Joshua Logan, which in turn is based on James A. Michener’s war stories in Tales of the South Pacific.

Moreover, no one can locate the elusive Bali- h’ai on a map. Many have speculated about Bali- h’ai’s location and origin.¹⁴ Michener was stationed in Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides) on Espiritu Santo and said that Bali-ha’i was a neighboring island. Yet, there is no island in the location that he charts for us. Indeed, Bali- ha’i might have some relation to the Indonesian island of Bali; because of its beaches, coral and surf, Bali was an elite tourist destination in the Pacific before World War II.¹⁵ Yet, now the symbolic/physical geography has shifted. During World War II, a new geographical entity, “Southeast Asia,” was created as a war theater to include islands such as Bali.¹⁶ The Pacific now starts in the snowcapped mountains that divide Indonesia from Papua New Guinea. Thus, “Bali-h’ai” and the “South Pacific” are both unstable concepts. Michener later revealed that the name Bali- ha’i is taken from “one of the most miserable Melanesian villages” located on Mono Island in the Solomon Islands.¹⁷ Although this instability adds to the power of the mystery and the magic, the image still needs to be managed: “Bali- ha’i” is an empty sign that needs to be filled up to produce meaning. In short, South Pacific is not a simple reflection of a pre-existing place; the film was directed to produce a new space.

To a large extent, this representation is directed by the powerful relationship between the military and the “South Pacific”: recall that in 1942 Michener was writing not a history of the Pacific, but a “history of the [US] Navy . . . in these waters.”¹⁸ In the opening sequence of the film, the following statement is superimposed on a “tropical beach scene” with swaying palms at sunset: “The Producers thank the Department of Defense, the Navy Department, the United States Pacific Fleet, and the Fleet Marine of the Pacific for their assistance in bringing this motion picture to the screen.” “South Pacific,” then, is an example of the construction of meaning through a management of signs that is guided by military policy as well as aesthetic values.¹⁹ It is not a place in relation to the physical geography of the equator (i.e. South) and a large body of water (i.e. the Pacific), so much as a production in the symbolic geography of power relations. The following sections will examine the army’s more sophisticated telling of the narratives of naturalization and reassurance through the topics of technology and disarmament. This narrative constructs the JACADS project as part of its latest cultural production of the “South Pacific”—even though Johnston Island and Hawai‘ i are both in the North Pacific. Like Bali- ha’i, the Pacific is constructed in the popular and military imagination as an empty place, a sign that not only needs to be filled with exotic meaning, but oft...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Culture, the military and the “South Pacific”1
• 2 Beauty queens, national identity and transnational politics
• 3 Gender, democracy andrevolutionary photo albums
• 4 Popular politics, civil societyand social movements
• 5 Corruption, political reformand the deferral of democracy
• 6 Cosmopolitanism,nationalism and diasporic politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography