ABSTRACT
Since the days of the early Republic, two fundamental conceptions of Oceania – coterminous, contradictory, synergetic – have been entwined in the U.S. imagination. On the one hand, “Pacific” islands are envisioned, economically and geopolitically, not as ends in themselves, but as stepping stones (provisioning and refueling stations, colonial outposts, communication centers, military bases) or passages (shipping lane protectors) toward the wealth of the Orient and the Indies. Such a vision shaped the U.S. relation to Oceania first in the China trade, in which private interests conflated with economic nationalism, and later in colonial ventures framed in terms of geostrategic needs. On the other hand, Pacific islands are imagined as ends-of-the-earth, cultural limit-cases unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity, whose unfamiliar natives are compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans. In the stepping-stones narrative, versions of which have prevailed in U.S. policy in Oceania for over two hundred years, the islands are remote dots in the vastest of watery expanses, valued primarily for the quality and location of their harbors (Pearl, Apra, Pago Pago) and natural resources (sandalwood, guano, bêche-de-mer, pearl and pearl shell, copra) to be traded in Asia. At the same time, the islands function as places for scientific discovery, soul-saving
and civilizing missions, manhood-testing adventure, nuclear testing, and eroticized furloughs between maritime work or warfare, all activities linked to U.S. subject formation and performance of national identity in gendered terms.1
