ABSTRACT
If a discourse of fear underwrites the construction of founding “seens” in the American Pacific archive, generating lines of fright and exacerbating tensions on the beach, accounts and attestations of friendships between Euroamericans and Oceanians hold out the promise of a powerfully regenerative and countering moment. Where fear inaugurates chains of misperception and distrust, friendship promises opportunities for fresh perception and a widened syntax of being. The discourse of friendship that develops in the archive and takes on a life of its own thus accumulates power to inform affective response, experience, and alter the course of bound-together history. If fear intensifies the visitor’s need to perform “civilized” differences from “primitive” hosts and their practices, or to be compulsively concerned with making an impression and fashioning an image, intercultural friendships in Oceania offer alternatives to what Gayatri Spivak calls an “abject script” (Spivak 1990: 62). What Greg Dening argues of intercultural study, that it is often “the vitality as much as the fatality that needs to be explained and described” (Dening 1992: 4), seems well explored through a consideration of forms U.S. citizens and Oceanians adapted for being together intimately, or seeming to be. Representations of friendships perform – with varying degrees of self-consciousness, or empty rhetoric, or erotically charged and veiled language – a commentary on the vitality, risks, poetics, erotics, politics, and material conditions of relation among Islanders and Euroamericans.
