The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture

Abstract

In recent decades, the cultural turn in history has produced the probing ideas of Edward Said and Michel Foucault, among others. Few studies, however, have used the insights of the Frankfurt School, a group of neo-Marxist scholars in prewar Germany who fused cultural analysis to the Marxist focus on economic matters. John R. Eperjesi attempts this in The Imperialist Imaginary, using Marxist insights along with many others to inform his argument about the formation of the Pacific region in the American mind. Eperjesi argues the Pacific did not exist in the Western mind before the American age of imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Rather, the Pacific was undefined by Western geographers because they focused on continents, not on oceans and islands. The Pacific as a coherent region was created out of the American desire to expand trade to Asia and thus escape the bedeviling contradictions of the American economy in the nineteenth century, when the United States experienced cycles of boom and bust created by overproduction and other instabilities. The Pacific offered a solution to overproduction, especially in the huge market of China. Eperjesi notes that the China market was an ideological creation that did not match the reality of minimal prewar China trade. The Pacific was made whole by Americans who saw it as an extension of American continental expansion in the nineteenth century. Eperjesi uses Pacific islanders' perspectives to counter this American-centered vision of the Pacific. Epeli Hau'ofa, a Fijian sociologist, argues that before the United States came to dominate the Pacific in the twentieth century, the Pacific was a zone of human interaction unhindered by boundaries created by imperialists. Queen Liliuokalani, who has become a focus of the sovereignty movement in Hawai'i, contended that Americans did not liberate Hawai'i through annexation but conquered it.