Imperial legacies are often hidden in plain sight, camouflaged by an increasingly globalised world. The residual effects of formal empire lurk among a host of seemingly innocuous and benign structures arranged precisely to erase the processes that produced them. These elusive echoes of imperial rule require scholars to cast a particular kind of analytical light capable of revealing their persistent and adaptable forms. Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez's monograph, Securing Paradise: Tourism and militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines offers this kind of analytical glow.
By ‘placing tourism and militarism within the same analytical lens’ Gonzalez seeks to ‘elucidate their mutual constitutions and dependencies’ (p. 4). She argues that ‘a strategic and symbiotic convergence’ of the ‘military–tourism complex’ creates ‘gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge that are routinised into everyday life and are crucial to the practices and habits of U.S. imperialism in the region’ (pp. 4, 117). Her ultimate aim is to interrogate this convergence and reveal the ‘tourist itineraries and imaginations’ that are ‘central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific’ (p. 4).
Gonzalez approaches her study in unanticipated and innovative ways. There are three particular avenues of examination that illustrate her methodologies and conclusions particularly well. The first concerns intersections of access and surveillance. Gonzalez traces the construction and utilisation of highways and road systems in the Philippines and Hawai'i. She focuses specifically on Kennon Road in Luzon and H-3 on Oahu to demonstrate the ‘dual technology of touristic voyeurism and militaristic surveillance’ (p. 51). This point is profoundly punctuated by a deeply textured chapter on helicopter tours of Kaua'i. Increasingly regarded as the ultimate tourist experience in Hawai'i, Gonzalez explores how these tours have simultaneously rehabilitated the traumatic memories of a helicopter war in tropical Vietnam and offered an alternative vision of an American tropics that ‘is not enemy territory but a landscape of pleasure and discovery’ (p. 160).
Second, Gonzalez examines the seemingly strange confluence of tourist imagination and war memorials. Focusing on Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines and Pearl Harbor in Hawai'i, she traces the ways in which various relics of conflict are presented and oriented into larger narratives of victory and liberation. Perhaps most interesting of all, she observes the processes by which war material, ‘meant to cause mass and calculated destruction’, is stripped of its violent purposes, ‘[a]nesthetizing the deaths of real people’ and ‘excising the blood and gore of war’ (p. 138). These processes, in turn, tend to transforms sites of horrific casualties into ‘military playgrounds’ where the ‘messy reality of death is elided, ironically by focusing on the … weaponry as points of tourist interest’ (pp. 142, 138).
Finally, Gonzalez approaches her conclusion with a fascinating chapter on the Jungle Environment and Survival Training (JEST) tourist experience in Luzon. Receiving between 200 and 300 tourists a week, JEST offers the unique opportunity to act out a ‘fantasy of playing Rambo’ in the Philippine jungles (p. 209). Guests are invited to ‘play soldier and go native’ as they are guided through a mysterious tropical landscape by members of the Aeta community, historically considered the Philippines' most ‘authentic’ indigenous group. Tourists are shown how to gather food and water, create fire, make useful gadgets from the forest, and live the rugged life of a genuine native. By exploring the trans-colonial masculinities inherent in the JEST experience, Gonzalez again demonstrates the uncanny ability of the military–tourist complex to de-sensitise its visitors by ‘making the survival skills of mass warfare into harmless tourist entertainment’ (p. 211).
While Securing Paradise compels readers with its unique and inventive approach to a ground-breaking subject, there is one persistent question that hovers over the text: who exactly are these tourists? It should be noted that Gonzalez's study does not purport to provide an examination of postcolonial identities, but as a reader one cannot help but contemplate the staggering array of individuals that pass through and experience these tourist events in incalculable ways. One must assume that ethnic or national identity, gender, age, or socioeconomic location, among other things, would fundamentally alter the tourist experience and instantly problematise any official discourses of power. This prompts further inquiry into the chaotic and shifting multiplicity of identities typically held by a single individual visiting any particular site. For example, expatriates curious about their ‘own’ history while visiting family, scholars or businessmen searching out places of interest on weekends or evenings, foreign dignitaries standing rigidly at sacred sites, journalists, NGO workers, etc., would all likely deny that they are tourists in the traditional sense, or would at the very least confess that they were a different kind of tourist.
Highlighting these questions is not necessarily meant as a direct critique of Gonzalez's work. She does acknowledge the variegated nature of tourists in selected places in the book (p. 98 provides a good example). More importantly, her examination is overwhelmingly oriented toward the medium and the messages of the military–tourist complex and not necessarily the multiple ways these messages are negotiated and received. In this sense, Securing Paradise provides an open invitation for further research in a burgeoning field of postcolonial studies.
